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[Dec 27, 2018] Is it possible to wrench control of MSM out of hand on large corporations and intelligence agencies?

Dec 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

RatioDecidend , 4 Jun 2018 01:33

This article is excellent and well overdue. All we need to do now is to wrench control of our mainstream media out of the hands of Corporate (foreign) control. We are being told to vote against ourselves in order for the few corporate elite to accrue massive wealth and power over us.

MEDIA laws need to be very strict with very, very severe financial penalties for bias and propaganda. Certainly remove this concept of self regulation whereby they sit on their own disciplinary boards. Raise the standards of our media and allow us to retrieve some semblance of our democracy.

Without media control, how would corporations be able to manipulate and propagandise the populace with their own vested interests.

That is why governments are doing corporate bidding and getting fascist style surveillance of its people, in order to counteract the ability of the people to gain knowledge through the internet and vote against corporate control of our democracy.... nothing to do with terrorism which was caused mostly by corporate foreign extraction of wealth through weapon sales; resource acquisition, etc.

Oops, got to go, hope that makes sense.

RatioDecidend -> Lawrie Griffith , 4 Jun 2018 00:51
It is back to control of our mainstream media by the very (foreign) corporations that are sucking out our wealth and putting nothing back.

Corporate media ia all powerful. They insidiously permeate the populace with corporate views of Australia's financial and economy; infrastructure and every aspect of social life from birth to euthanasia with racism and religion thrown in for good measure.

Should a politician have the audacity to act against their corporate interests, they do not last long, without exclusions - PMs Whitlam and Rudd being prime examples.

This current mob of gutless underachieving dinosaur neo con nutters in govt, are completely turning over Australia to these Corporate (foreign) parasites and our prospect is not looking good.

Within no time we will be a Corporatocracy (as is the USA) and along with that comes 1% owning 99% of the wealth; third world poverty; crime through the roof; drugs out of control; public health and education a joke; public services non existent; legal system in disarray and entrenched with bias and inequity.

[Dec 22, 2018] Family of Secrets The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years

" This family had a role in the assassination of JFK, 9/11, and other covert operations failures that are nothing less than sinister... "Starting with Prescott Bush's business dealings with the Nazi's, to George H. Bush's association with Lee Harvey Oswald, Saddam Hussein, and others.... all the way to George W. Bush's dealings with Osama Bin Laden long before he became a 'Terrorist'."
This book reveals a system that is broken and deeply corrupt. The old adage is true "things are not as they appear". Don't read this if you don't have the intellectual honesty to admit this.
Notable quotes:
"... The same Crichton whose secret military intelligence unit counted dozens of men who simultaneously held jobs as Dallas police officers? ..."
Dec 22, 2018 | www.amazon.com

Robert P. Morrow 5.0 out of 5 stars Russ Baker thinks CIA George Herbert Walker Bush was involved in the JFK assassination. I agree. February 19, 2011 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

I highly recommend this book. If anything Russ Baker goes very easy on the Bush Crime Family. For example google "Chip Tatum Pegasus" and you will find he is not mentioned in this book. Then there is the case of the 1980's Franklin pedophile ring and GHW Bush's associations with pedophilic pimp Lawrence E. King. Again, that is a whopping Bush family "secret" and it is not in this book.

However, Baker does lay out a pretty google circumstantial case that GHW Bush may very well have been involved in the JFK assassination. May I quote Baker asking GHW Bush:

On the day of the assassination, were you in touch with your friend and Republican running mate Jack Crichton, a military intelligence figure who was connected to figures forcing their way into the pilot car of Kennedy's motorcade? The same Crichton who controlled the man who served as the interpreter between Oswald's wife and police and reframed her words so as to implicate Oswald in Kennedy's shooting? The same Crichton who was working out of a secret underground communications bunker below the streets of Dallas?

The same Crichton whose secret military intelligence unit counted dozens of men who simultaneously held jobs as Dallas police officers? The same Crichton who did secret oil industry intelligence work in the Middle East while you did intelligence related oil industry work via your company, Zapata Offshore?

-Finally, do you know people who consider the events of November 22, 1963 to, in their minds, "reflect the very best of the American spirit?" You say almost nothing, ever, about the Kennedy assassination, even skipping over it in your own memoir, which details much more trivial events of the same year. Why is that? And why then, in your eulogy for former President Ford, a member of the increasingly-discredited Warren Commission, did you go out of your way to oddly praise him for promoting the increasingly-discredited "single bullet theory?" You said:

"After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And the conspiracy theorists can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Jerry Ford put his name on it and Jerry Ford's word was always good."

Why did you, so bizarrely, smile when you uttered those words?

Now, with your Medal of Freedom, given you by a Democratic president who ran as an agent of change, you truly seem to be enjoying the last laugh."

James McDonald 5.0 out of 5 stars MSM is reporting the history of the dead Bush but you won't be told about the State Crimes. December 1, 2018 Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

I've had this publication for several years. It's important to point out I've not read this publication completely but rather I've used it for key search terms. If you don't have access using this kind of information, you are way behind the curve on how this platform can be used for research. It becomes even more vital in today's world of fake news reports as exampled by what we being presented with today. These same electronic e'books can be read on the computer too.

A few example on how you can cut and paste the vital info is presented below:

lone gunman is a much more comforting notion in our democracy than a vast apparatus that can bring down presidents. Give us a simple explanation that easily encapsulates the horrible and then we can retain forever all that we have held to be true. If there was any genius in the Bush administration, it was the understanding that Americans did not want to confront complexities and had a great need of "bad guys" to blame for what had gone wrong.

Baker, Russ. Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years . Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Kindle Edition.

The Iraq War was not, and never had been, about an imminent threat to the safety of America and its allies; even Republicans like former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan were publicly acknowledging that it was mostly about oil.

Baker, Russ. Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (p. 3). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Kindle Edition.

The reason the Bushes are relevant today, even with W.' s exit from the national stage, is that the family and its colleagues and associates represent an elite that has long succeeded in subverting our democratic institutions to their own ends. And they will continue to do so unless their agenda and methods are laid bare to public scrutiny.

Baker, Russ. Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (p. 6). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Kindle Edition.

George William Bush acknowledged under oath -- as part of a deposition in a lawsuit brought by a nonprofit group seeking records on Bush's past -- that he was the junior officer on a three-to four-man watch shift at CIA headquarters between September 1963 and February 1964, which was on duty when Kennedy was shot. 6 "I do not recognize the contents of the memorandum as information furnished to me orally or otherwise during the time I was at the CIA," he said. "In fact, during my time at the CIA, I did not receive any oral communications from any government agency of any nature whatsoever. I did not receive any information relating to the Kennedy assassination during my time at the CIA from the FBI. Based on the above, it is my conclusion that I am not the Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency referred to in the memorandum."

Baker, Russ. Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (p. 11). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Kindle Edition.

Devine's role in setting up Zapata would remain hidden for more than a decade -- until 1965. At that point, as Bush was extricating himself from business to devote his energies to pursuing a congressional seat, Devine's name suddenly surfaced as a member of the board of Bush's spin-off company, Zapata Offshore -- almost as if it was his function to keep the operation running. To be sure, he and Bush remained joined at the hip. As indicated in the 1975 CIA memo, Bush and Devine enjoyed a "close relationship" that continued while Mr. Bush was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations nine years later. In fact, Devine even accompanied then-congressman Bush on a two-week junket to Vietnam, leaving the day after Christmas in 1967, a year before the Republicans would retake the White House. After being "out" of the CIA since 1953, Devine's top-secret security clearance required an update, though what top-secret business a freshman congressman on the Ways and Means Committee could have, requiring two weeks in Vietnam with a "businessman," was not made clear.

Baker, Russ. Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (pp. 13-14). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Kindle Edition.

There's more but I hope my review of this work and the value of it will be apparent.

I most strongly recommend this book for the research in the discovery of State Crimes Against Democracy.

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ReviewerY 5.0 out of 5 stars Tells how the Saudis for decades did dirty work the CIA didn't want to do itself (including ... May 12, 2015 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

Probably a "must read". Tells how the Saudis for decades did dirty work the CIA didn't want to do itself (including Iran Contra), and they did it with the coordination and assistance of Poppy Bush and his companies. Describes "W" Bush as an incompetent who failed at numerous jobs that Daddy got him, and never succeeded at anything (other than marrying Laura and ending his alcohol addiction when she threatened to leave him) until he became Texas governor. Goes into detail about "W"'s draft dodging, and desertion of the Air Force Reserve without being court martialed.

Randall M. 5.0 out of 5 stars If you want to understand what was really happening and how the American citizens have been betrayed and hoodwinked by the Bush's this is a great book. January 29, 2018 Format: Paperback Verified Purchase

From Samuel Bush late 19th century to Bush 43 the book reveals the double life of the Bush family. The connections and associations throughout a century leave little doubt that the Bush family is entwined in many of the most historical and tragic events of wars, politics and covert activities of the USA. If you want to understand what was really happening and how the American citizens have been betrayed and hoodwinked by the Bush's this is a great book.

Bibliophiledw 5.0 out of 5 stars Don't Miss This One! Many skeletons in this Closet! Whew! August 5, 2016 Format: Paperback Verified Purchase

WOW! The closest I can come t o describing this is to say it is a multi-level, generational expose of "incestuous" relationships WITHOUT the sex! How can that be? Read it and learn. If I'd known how pervasive and of such longstanding and widespread these relationships.... I would've started with a 14' x 14' white board and diagrammed a kind of "family" tree and still would have had to write small! - really small. Someone said: "What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive." This is like THE largest can of worms; it was hard to keep track, but Russ Baker did and showed how each player was connected to the next - sometimes it was linear and other times it went sideways, but always came back to the beginning family of Bush. Oh my.

Mayo Quin 5.0 out of 5 stars How the elites affect public policy and the course of history November 15, 2016 Format: Paperback Verified Purchase

The tangential names and places are fully explained in this book. The reality of elite dynasties (Bush, Rockefeller, Kennedy) is undeniable. These people affect our lives, often in ways only they know about. Connections are inherited, my friends. To get your feet wet, visit YouTube and watch one of the video interviews with author Russ Baker.

Hoosier CheeseHead 5.0 out of 5 stars The seamy side of American politics exposed August 7, 2015 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

An outstanding read, chock-full of background info on this dynastic American family.
Not flattering to them, but the allegations are mostly substantiated.
There are some questionable flights of speculation, which taint the book's general objectivity.
I was shocked to learn of the many ways in which the same prominent figures kept popping-up, complicit in the huge events of the past several decades (the Kennedy assassination, Watergate scandal, Nixon's downfall, etc.).
And Geo.H.W. Bush was the "Man Behind the Curtain", swirling in the murky background of every story.
My perception of BOTH Bush presidents has been fundamentally altered.
Fascinating.

TLR 5.0 out of 5 stars Essential hidden history October 5, 2013 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

Besides being an expose of the Bush dynasty, Baker demonstrates the close ties between many different groups that people tend to think of as being separate - Texas oilmen, military intelligence, Wall Street, FBI, CIA, the arms industry, organized crime, etc. It's a big revolving door, a huge network of the Old Boys Club. The elites of the world are interested in power and wealth, not in ideology.

He offers a cautionary note about trusting declassified government documents:

"Allen Dulles once called CIA documents 'hieroglyphics.'...Dulles used to expound on such elements of tradecraft to his fellow Warren Commission members. On one occasion, he told them that no one would be able to grasp an intelligence memo except for those involved in its creation and their colleagues...When Thomas J. Devine, Poppy Bush's business partner and a former CIA agent, coyly suggested to me that the problem with journalists like myself is that 'you believe what you read in government documents,' he was referring to such deeply coded disinformation."

Stephen Courts 5.0 out of 5 stars Bush Family Of Secrdts January 18, 2012 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

A must read book by noted journalist Russ Baker that documents the inherently obvious connections with the bush family and the CIA, oil billionaires, energy giants and many more conflicts of interest, particularly with Ken Lay and Enron. This is a book that reveals the true bush dynastry. For example, I was not aware of Prescott Bush's mentoring of Richard Nixon and his close relationship to President Eisenhower and how Prescott got Ike to put the young inexperienced Nixon on the 1952 presidential ticket. The entire sorid history of the bush's going back to post WW One and their support of the Nazi's in washing money for the 2nd World War. Allen Dulles figures prominantly in this terrific read. Don't be fooled by the gentel George H W Bush. His connections to the CIA go back way farther than he admits, and he figures prominantly in Iran Contra. George H W Bush is the only known individual who cannot account for where he was during the Coup D'Etat in November 1963. The man is a liar and a coward as well as a thief. Baker spends about 75 pages detailing George H W Bush's involvement in Watergate and the downfall of the Nixon administration. Well written and documented. This is a five star book and a must read for truth seekers. Stephen Courts

[Dec 22, 2018] We can be actually confident not just that the journalists in the MSM are on the payroll but that the invoices and accounts for their bribes are carefully preserved.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Craig Murray today publishes accounts from the "Integrity Initiative" showing that journalists in Scotland are receiving retainers of 2500 a month Sterling, plus expenses and payment for actual articles published. ..."
"... We can be actually confident not just that the journalists in the MSM are on the payroll but that the invoices and accounts for their bribes are carefully preserved. ..."
"... What we are witnessing is the complete incompetence of those running the Empire. While malicious, indeed deadly, they simply cannot keep up with the critics of imperialism. Their power rests entirely on their ability to use force, both physical and financial. ..."
Dec 22, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

bevin , Dec 22, 2018 9:33:42 AM | link

The journalism scandals are just beginning.

Craig Murray today publishes accounts from the "Integrity Initiative" showing that journalists in Scotland are receiving retainers of 2500 a month Sterling, plus expenses and payment for actual articles published.

And if this is going on in Scotland we can be quite sure that it is actually happening in North America and Europe, generally, and, of course, in the less prosperous parts of the world where standards of integrity are just as low as they are hereabouts.

We can be actually confident not just that the journalists in the MSM are on the payroll but that the invoices and accounts for their bribes are carefully preserved.

Murray's blog is almost always worth following, just as 'b's is. Yesterday more news about the Skripal case emerged: it seems that the British government was prepared well in advance for the sudden attack on Skripal.

What we are witnessing is the complete incompetence of those running the Empire. While malicious, indeed deadly, they simply cannot keep up with the critics of imperialism. Their power rests entirely on their ability to use force, both physical and financial. Their attempts to use social medias to their advantage are lame and ineffective. It seems clear to me that they will soon be reduced to using their power not just to hobble but to cripple critics- net neutrality is already finished.

[Dec 22, 2018] British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft by Craig Murray

Highly recommended!
Craig Murray is right that "As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier." Collapse of neoliberal ideology and rise of tentions in neoliberal sociarties resulted in unprecedented increase of covert and false flag operations by British intelligence services, especially against Russia, which had been chosen as a convenient scapegoat. With Steele dossier and Skripal affair as two most well known.
New Lady Macbeth (Theresa May) Russophobia is so extreme that her cabinet derailed the election of a Russian to head Interpol.
Looks like neoliberalism cannot be defeated by and faction of the existing elite. Only when shepp oil end mant people will have a chance. The US , GB and EU are part of the wider hegemonic neoliberal system. In fact rejection of neoliberal globalization probably will lead to "national neoliberals" regime which would be a flavor of neo-fascism, no more no less.
Notable quotes:
"... The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. ..."
"... I learnt how highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane just happened to be on holiday in the United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign. ..."
"... It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely unbalanced panel of British military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia. ..."
"... the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it. ..."
"... By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building . It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London. ..."
"... Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence. ..."
"... I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills. ..."
"... I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information. ..."
"... one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media, it would be the biggest story of the day ..."
"... As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier. ..."
"... You can bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy". ..."
Dec 13, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

in Uncategorized by craig

The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. Look up Eldred Pottinger, who for 180 years appears in scores of British history books – right up to and including William Dalrymple's Return of the King – as a British officer who chanced to be passing Herat on holiday when it came under siege from a partly Russian-officered Persian army, and helped to organise the defences. In researching Sikunder Burnes, I discovered and published from the British Library incontrovertible and detailed documentary evidence that Pottinger's entire journey was under the direct instructions of, and reporting to, British spymaster Alexander Burnes. The first historian to publish the untrue "holiday" cover story, Sir John Kaye, knew both Burnes and Pottinger and undoubtedly knew he was publishing lying propaganda. Every other British historian of the First Afghan War (except me and latterly Farrukh Husain) has just followed Kaye's official propaganda.

Some things don't change. I was irresistibly reminded of Eldred Pottinger just passing Herat on holiday, when I learnt how highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane just happened to be on holiday in the United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Recent university graduate Simon Bracey-Lane took it even further. Originally from Wimbledon in London, he was inspired to rejoin the Labour party in September when Corbyn was elected leader. But by that point, he was already in the US on holiday. So he joined the Sanders campaign, and never left.
"I had two weeks left and some money left, so I thought, Fuck it, I'll make some calls for Bernie Sanders," he explains. "I just sort of knew Des Moines was the place, so I just turned up at their HQ, started making phone calls, and then became a fully fledged field organiser."

It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely unbalanced panel of British military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia.

Nor would it seem likely that Bracey-Lane would be involved with the Integrity Initiative. Even the mainstream media has been forced to give a few paragraphs to the outrageous Integrity Initiative, under which the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it.

The mainstream media have tracked down the HQ of the "Institute for Statecraft" to a derelict mill near Auchtermuchty. It is owned by one of the company directors, Daniel Lafayeedney, formerly of D Squadron 23rd SAS Regiment and later of Military Intelligence (and incidentally born the rather more prosaic Daniel Edney).

By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building. It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London.

Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence.

Having been told where the Institute for Statecraft skulk, I tipped off journalist Kit Klarenberg of Sputnik Radio to go and physically check it out. Kit did so and was aggressively ejected by that well-known Corbyn and Sanders supporter, Simon Bracey-Lane. It does seem somewhat strange that our left wing hero is deeply embedded in an organisation that launches troll attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.

I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills.

I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information.

But one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media, it would be the biggest story of the day.

As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier.

You can bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy".

As both Scottish Independence and Jeremy Corbyn are viewed as real threats by the British Establishment, you can anticipate every possible kind of dirty trick in the next couple of years, with increasing frequency and audacity

[Dec 20, 2018] One of the two CrowdStrike executives that had helped push the story to the press was a former department director at the FBI serving under Robert Mueller

Notable quotes:
"... (discovered in 2017 and 2018 but largely ignored by the press), ..."
Dec 20, 2018 | disobedientmedia.com

The CrowdStrike Connection

CrowdStrike is a high-profile cybersecurity firm that worked with the DNC (Democratic National Committee) in 2016 and was called in due to a suspected breach. However, CrowdStrike appears to have first started working with the DNC approximately five weeks prior to this and approximately just five days after John Podesta (Hillary Clinton's campaign manager for the 2016 election) had his Gmail account phished. Nothing was mentioned about this until after the five weeks had passed when the DNC published a press release stating that CrowdStrike had been at the DNC throughout that period to investigate the NGP-VAN issues (that had occurred three months before Podesta was phished).

Upon conclusion of those five weeks, CrowdStrike was immediately called back in to investigate a suspected breach. CrowdStrike's software was already installed on the DNC network when the DNC emails were acquired but CrowdStrike failed to prevent the emails from being acquired and didn't publish logs or incident-specific evidence of the acquisition event either, the latter of which is odd considering what their product's features were advertised to be even if they were just running it in a monitoring capacity .

There are additional questions to be asked about why Guccifer 2.0 went to the effort he did to fabricate Russian-themed evidence (discovered in 2017 and 2018 but largely ignored by the press), bizarrely supporting some of the most significant claims made by CrowdStrike just one day earlier.

If Mueller's attribution of Guccifer 2.0 to the GRU is correct, why would the GRU want to fabricate evidence to support CrowdStrike's allegations against Russia when another one of CrowdStrike's directors conceded they had no hard evidence at the time? This issue has not yet been adequately explained.

All of these oddities are relevant because one of the two CrowdStrike executives that had helped push the story to the press was a former department director at the FBI serving under Robert Mueller , and, judging on the fact they were dining together at an executive retreat after that individual had retired , it would seem that they are friends too.

[Dec 20, 2018] Peak Deep Fake - Nvidia's Scary AI Generates Humans That Look 100% Real

Dec 20, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Jesus Diaz via TomsGuide.com,

Believe it or not, all these faces are fake. They have been synthesized by Nvidia's new AI algorithm, a generative adversarial network capable of automagically creating humans, cats, and even cars.

Credit: Nvidia

The technology works so well that we can expect synthetic image search engines soon - just like Google's, but generating new fake images on the fly that look real. Yes, you know where that is going - and sure, it can be a lot of fun, but also scary . Check out the video. It truly defies belief:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/kSLJriaOumA

Nvidia Generative Adversarial Networks

According to Nvidia, its GAN is built around a concept called "style transfer." Rather than trying to copy and paste elements of different faces into a frankenperson, the system analyzes three basic styles - coarse, middle, and fine styles - and merges them transparently into something completely new.

Coarse styles include parameters such as pose, the face's shape, or the hair style. Middle styles include facial features, like the shape of the nose, cheeks, or mouth. Finally, fine styles affect the color of the face's features like skin and hair.

According to the scientists, the generator is "capable of separating inconsequential variation from high-level attributes" too, in order to eliminate noise that is irrelevant for the new synthetic face.

For example, it can distinguish a hairdo from the actual hair, eliminating the former while applying the latter to the final photo. It can also specify the strength of how styles are applied to obtain more or less subtle effects.

Not only the generative adversarial network is capable of autonomously creating human faces, but it can do the same with animals like cats. It can even create new cars and even bedrooms.

Credit: Nvidia

Nvidia's system is not only capable of generating completely new synthetic faces, but it can also seamlessly modify specific features of real people, like age, the hair or skin colors of any person.

The applications for such a system are amazing. From paradigm-changing synthetic free-to-use image search pages that may be the end of stock photo services to people accurately previewing hair styling changes. And of course, porn.


Ms No , 5 minutes ago link

They sure wish they had that when they created the instantly identified fake hack picture of dead Osama.

It was so bad, plus the pictures they combined to use it were already in the public domain. All the major networks ran the picture.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fake+dead+osama+picture&atb=v111-6__&t=cros&iax=images&ia=images&iai=http%3A%2F%2Fsott.net%2Fimage%2Fs21%2F428708%2Ffull%2FFake_bin_laden.jpg

Terminaldude , 21 minutes ago link

And of course false flags with Non-humans carrying out the terrorist attacks and never captured.

tragus , 21 minutes ago link

Plausible deniability... ?

[Dec 19, 2018] Here's What Newly-Diagnosed Amnesiac James Comey Did Not Recall On Day 2 Of Testimony

Notable quotes:
"... He might call it a "higher loyalty", but it looks to us peons like a true double-standard. Democrats get Wall Street Bankster treatment, while the rabble get tossed in the slammer. ..."
Dec 18, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Former FBI Director James Comey appeared December 17th, 2018, for a second round of questions by a joint House committee oversight probe into the DOJ and FBI conduct during the 2016 presidential election and incoming Trump administration.

The Joint House Committee just released the transcript online (full pdf below).

Director Blue blog's Doug Ross read through most of the septic backflow so you don't need to. You're welcome:

1. Double Standard: Obama vs. Trump

Trey Gowdy grilled Comey on his vastly different handling of comments by Trump and Obama. When Trump asked Comey whether he could see his way clear to easing up on Flynn, Comey memorialized the conversation in a memo and distributed it to his leadership team, including Andrew McCabe and James Baker.

However, when President Obama on 60 Minutes publicly exonerated Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified information -- setting the stage for true obstruction of justice -- Comey did nothing. He never talked to the president about potential obstruction, he never memorialized his observations, and he didn't leak anything to the press. These were all things he did with Trump.

He might call it a "higher loyalty", but it looks to us peons like a true double-standard. Democrats get Wall Street Bankster treatment, while the rabble get tossed in the slammer.

2. According to Comey, Flynn had no right to counsel

This is interesting:

Mr. Gowdy. Did Mr. Flynn have the right to have counsel present during that interview?

Mr. Comey. No.

Oooooooookay.

3. Comey confirmed McCabe called Flynn to initiate "entrapment"; contradicts himself on counsel

And:

Mr. Gowdy. Why not advise General Flynn of the consequences of making false statements to the FBI?

Mr. Comey. ...the Deputy Director [McCabe] called him, told him what the subject matter was, told him he was welcome to have a representative from White House Counsel there...

So Comey is saying that Flynn didn't have the right to counsel (item 2), and then states that he does have the right to a White House counsel attending the meeting.

The lies are getting harder and harder to keep straight with this egregious individual.

4. Comey lied about McCabe's conversation with Flynn

When asked whether McCabe was trying to set Flynn up by asserting no counsel was needed in the interview, Comey claimed he was unaware of that critical fact. But McCabe, in a written memo, asserted that he told Flynn, "[i]f you have a lawyer present, we'll need to involve the Department of Justice".

In other words, McCabe was trying to ensure Flynn had no counsel present during the interview.

5. Comey still falls back on the Logan Act scam to justify his actions

Yes, the Logan Act. When former secretary of state John Kerry meets with various Mullahs while President Trump is unwinding the disastrous Iran deal, there's no crime there !

But let Flynn, a member of the Trump transition team, have a perfectly legitimate conversation with a Russian diplomat, we get:

Mr. Comey. And I hesitate only with "wrong." I think a Department of Justice prosecutor might say, on its face, it was problematic under the Logan Act because of private citizens negotiating and all that business.

What a lying sack of gumbo. At the time, Flynn was not a private citizen. He was a member of the incoming administration, and had anyone bothered to prosecute prior transitions for similar "crimes", the entire Obama and Clinton posses would be breaking rocks at Leavenworth.

6. Comey Throws James Clapper Under the Bus

When asked by Jim Jordan about his private meeting with the President to brief him on a very tiny portion of the "salacious and unverified" (Comey's words under oath) dossier, Comey claimed ODNI James Clapper had orchestrated the entire fiasco.

Mr. Comey. ...ultimately, it was Clapper's call. I agreed -- we agreed that it made sense for me to do it and to do it privately, separately. So I don't want to make it sound like I was ordered to do it.

He wasn't ordered to do it, but it was Clapper's call.

Oooooooookay.

7. Jordan Torches Comey Over His Dossier Comments

I'll just leave this here. Comey may need to put some ice on that.

Mr. Jordan. So that's what I'm not understanding, is you felt this was so important that it required a private session with you and the President-elect, you only spoke of the salacious part of the dossier, but yet you also say there's no way any good reporter would print this. But you felt it was still critical that you had to talk to the President-elect about it. And I would argue you created the very news hook that you said you were concerned about...

...it's so inflammatory that reporters would 'get killed' for reporting it, why was it so important to tell the President? Particularly when you weren't going to tell him the rest of the dossier -- about the rest of the dossier?

8. Comey Concealed Critical National Security Concerns About Flynn From the President

This is quite unbelievable: in a private dinner with the president, Comey neglected to mention that just three days earlier he had directed the interview of Trump's ostensible National Security Advisor.

Mr. Comey. ...at no time during the dinner was there a reference, allusion, mention by either of
us about the FBI having contact with General Flynn or being interested in General Flynn investigatively.

Mr. Jordan. That was what I wanted to know. So this is not just referring to the President didn't bring it up. You didn't bring it up either.

Mr. Comey. Correct, neither of us brought it up or alluded to it.

Mr. Jordan. Why not? He's talking about General Flynn. You had just interviewed him 3 days earlier and discovered that he was lying to the Vice President, knew he was lying to the Vice President, and, based on what we've heard of late, that he lied tyour agents. Why not tell his boss, why not tell the head of the executive branch, why not tell the President of the United States, "Hey, your National Security Advisor just lied to us 3 days ago"?

Mr. Comey. Because we had an open investigation, and there would be no reason or a need to tell the President about it.

Mr. Jordan. Really?

Mr. Comey. Really.

Mr. Jordan. You wouldn't tell the President of the United States that his National Security Advisor wasn't being square with the FBI? ... I mean, but this is not just any investigation, it seems to me, Director. This is a top advisor to the Commander in Chief. And you guys, based on what we've heard, felt that he wasn't being honest with the Vice President and wasn't honest with two of your agents. And just 3 days later, you're meeting with the President, and, oh, by the way, the conversation is about General Flynn. And you don't tell the President anything?

Mr. Comey. I did not.

Mr. Meadows. So, Director Comey, let me make sure I understand this. You were so concerned that Michael Flynn may have lied or did lie to the Vice President of the United States, but that once you got that confirmed, that he had told a falsehood, you didn't believe that it was appropriate to tell the President of the United States that there was no national security risk where you would actually convey that to the President of the United States? Is that your testimony?

Mr. Comey. That is correct. We had an --

The more we learn, the dirtier a cop Comey ends up appearing.

9. Gowdy Destroys the Double Standard of Clinton vs. Flynn

Check this out:

Mr. Gowdy. ...we are going to contrast the decision to not allow Michael Flynn to have an attorney, or discourage him from having one, with allowing some other folks the Bureau interviewed to have multiple attorneys in the room, including fact witnesses. Can you see the dichotomy there, or is that an unreasonable comparison?

Mr. Comey. I'm not going to comment on that. I remember you asking me questions about that last week. I'm happy to answer them again.

Mr. Gowdy. You will not say whether or not it is an unreasonable comparison to compare allowing multiple attorneys, who are also fact witnesses, to be present during an interview but discouraging another person from having counsel present?

Mr. Comey. I'm not going to answer that in a vacuum...

10. Comey May Have Been Involved With the Infamous Tarmac Meeting

Another interesting vignette, this time from John Ratcliffe :

Mr. Ratcliffe. Okay. So it would appear from this that there had been some type of briefing the day before, with reference to yesterday, June 27, 2016, where you had requested a copy of emails between President Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Comey. I see that it says that.

Mr. Ratcliffe. ...The significance of that is, as we talked about last time, June 27th of 2016 was also the date that Attorney General Lynch and former President Bill Clinton met on a tarmac in Phoenix, Arizona. Do you recall whether or not this briefing was held at the FBI because of that tarmac meeting, or was it just happened to be a coincidence that it was held on that day? Mr. Comey. It would have to have been a coincidence. I don't remember a meeting in response to the tarmac meeting.

Muh don't know!

11. Comey confirms Obama knew Hillary Clinton was using a compromised, insecure email server

Well, spank me on the fanny and call me Nancy!

Mr. Ratcliffe. ...Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama were communicating via email through an unsecure, unclassified server?

Mr. Comey. Yes, they were between her Clinton email.com account and his -- I don't know where his account, his unclassified account, was maintained. So I'm sorry. So, yes, here were communications unclassified between two accounts, hers and then his cover account.

Mr. Ratcliffe. ...Did your review of these emails or the content of these emails impact your decision to edit out a reference to President Obama in your July 5th, 2016, press conference remarks?

If Trump had done 1/1,000,000th of this crap, he'd be -- yes -- breaking rocks in Leavenworth right now.

But there's no double-standard, rabble! Just keep buying iPhones and playing Call of Duty !

...Aaaaaaaaand I'm spent.

Okay, done for now.

But let's recap the activities of Dr. "Higher Loyalty" Comey:

But, no, there's no double-standard for the aggressiveness of law enforcement when it comes to Democrats like Clinton and Obama.

Hat tip: BadBlue Uncensored News .

[Dec 17, 2018] How you can tell that MSM is the front man for the CIA

Dec 17, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

24 minutes ago remove Share link Copy How you can tell that MSM is the front man for the CIA...nothing happens until MSM picks up the story

[Dec 16, 2018] Writers Silenced by Surveillance Self-Censorship in the Age of Big Data by Nik Williams

Notable quotes:
"... Nik Williams, the policy advisor for Scottish PEN, the Scottish centre of PEN International. We are leading the campaign opposing suspicionless surveillance and protecting the rights of writers both in Scotland and across the globe. Find out more on Twitter at @scottishpen and @nikwilliams2 . Originally published at openDemocracy ..."
"... In 2013, NSA whistle blower, Edward Snowden revealed the extent of government surveillance that enables intelligence agencies to capture the data of internet users around the world. Some of the powers revealed enable agencies to access emails in transit, files held on devices, details that document our relationships and location in real-time and data that could reveal our political opinions, beliefs and routines. ..."
"... As big data and digital surveillance is interwoven into the fabric of modern society there is growing evidence that the perception of surveillance affects how different communities engage with the internet. ..."
"... In 2013, PEN America surveyed American writers to see whether the Snowden revelations impacted their willingness to explore challenging issues and continue to write. In their report, Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives US Writers to Self-Censor , PEN America found that "one in six writers avoided writing or speaking on a topic they thought would subject them to surveillance". ..."
"... At times, surveillance appears unavoidable and this was evident in many of the writers' responses to whether they could take actions to mitigate the risks of surveillance. Without knowing how to secure themselves there are limited options: writers either resign themselves to using insecure tools or choose to avoid the internet all together, cutting them off from important sources of information and potential communities of readers and support. ..."
"... Although not explicitly laid out in the post, I'm inclined to believe any online research on PETs might single one out as a "Person of Interest" ..."
"... we know better now – EVERYTHING is recorded and archived. Privacy may not be dead yet, but now exists only in carefully curated offline pockets, away from not just the phone and the laptop, but also the smart fridge's and the face-recognising camera's gimlet eye. ..."
"... And it's not just off centre political opining that could be used in such efforts. The percentages of internet users who have accused [people of using] porn sites suggests there would be some serious overlap between the set of well known and/or 'important' people and the set of porn hounds. Remember the cack-handed attempts to smear Hans Blix? ..."
"... Most of us (real writers or just people who write) need to hold down a job and increasingly HR depts don't just 'do a Google' on all potential appointees to important roles but in large concerns at least, use algorithmic software connected to the web and the Cloud to process applications. ..."
"... Weekly Standard ..."
"... The Great Gatsby ..."
Dec 15, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Writers Silenced by Surveillance: Self-Censorship in the Age of Big Data Posted on December 15, 2018 by Yves Smith Nik Williams, the policy advisor for Scottish PEN, the Scottish centre of PEN International. We are leading the campaign opposing suspicionless surveillance and protecting the rights of writers both in Scotland and across the globe. Find out more on Twitter at @scottishpen and @nikwilliams2 . Originally published at openDemocracy

We know what censorship looks like: writers being murdered, attacked or imprisoned; TV and radio stations being shut down; the only newspapers parrot the state; journalists lost in the bureaucratic labyrinth to secure a license or permit; government agencies approving which novels, plays and poetry collections can be published; books being banned or burned or the extreme regulation of access to printing materials or presses. All of these damage free expression, but they leave a fingerprint, something visible that can be measured, but what about self-censorship? This leaves no such mark.

When writers self-censor, there is no record, they just stop writing or avoid certain topics and these decisions are lost to time. Without being able to record and document isolated cases the way we can with explicit government censorship, the only thing we can do is identify potential drivers to self-censorship.

In 2013, NSA whistle blower, Edward Snowden revealed the extent of government surveillance that enables intelligence agencies to capture the data of internet users around the world. Some of the powers revealed enable agencies to access emails in transit, files held on devices, details that document our relationships and location in real-time and data that could reveal our political opinions, beliefs and routines. Following these revelations, the UK government pushed through the Investigatory Powers Act , an audacious act that modernised, consolidated and expanded digital surveillance powers. This expansion was opposed by civil rights organisations, (including Scottish PEN where I work), technologists, a number of media bodies and major tech companies, but on 29th November 2016, it received royal assent.

But what did this expansion do to our right to free expression?

As big data and digital surveillance is interwoven into the fabric of modern society there is growing evidence that the perception of surveillance affects how different communities engage with the internet. Following the Snowden revelations, John Penny at the Oxford Internet Institute analysed traffic to Wikipedia pages on topics designated by the Department of Homeland Security as sensitive and identified "a 20 percent decline in page views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that mentioned 'al Qaeda,' 'car bomb' or 'Taliban.'" This report was in line with a study by Alex Marthews and Catherine Tucker who found a similar trend in the avoidance of sensitive topics in Google search behaviour in 41 countries. This has significant impact on both free expression and democracy, as outlined by Penney: "If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat to proper democratic debate."

But it doesn't end with sourcing information. In a study of Facebook, Elizabeth Stoycheff discovered that when faced with holders of majority opinions and the knowledge of government surveillance, holders of minority viewpoints are more likely to "self-censor their dissenting opinions online". If holders of minority opinions step away from online platforms like Facebook, these platforms will only reflect the majority opinion, homogenising discourse and giving a false idea of consensus. Read together, these studies document a slow erosion of the eco-system within which free expression flourishes.

In 2013, PEN America surveyed American writers to see whether the Snowden revelations impacted their willingness to explore challenging issues and continue to write. In their report, Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives US Writers to Self-Censor , PEN America found that "one in six writers avoided writing or speaking on a topic they thought would subject them to surveillance". But is this bigger than the US? Scottish PEN, alongside researchers at the University of Strathclyde authored the report, Scottish Chilling: Impact of Government and Corporate Surveillance on Writers to explore the impact of surveillance on Scotland-based writers, asking the question: Is the perception of surveillance a driver to self-censorship? After surveying 118 writers, including novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, translators, editors and publishers, and interviewing a number of participants we uncovered a disturbing trend of writers avoiding certain topics in their work or research, modifying their work or refusing to use certain online tools. 22% of responders have avoided writing or speaking on a particular topic due to the perception of surveillance and 28% have curtailed or avoided activities on social media. Further to this, 82% said that if they knew that the UK government had collected data about their Internet activity they would feel as though their personal privacy had been violated, something made more likely by the passage of the investigatory Powers Act.

At times, surveillance appears unavoidable and this was evident in many of the writers' responses to whether they could take actions to mitigate the risks of surveillance. Without knowing how to secure themselves there are limited options: writers either resign themselves to using insecure tools or choose to avoid the internet all together, cutting them off from important sources of information and potential communities of readers and support.

Literacy concerning the use of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (oftentimes called PETs) is a vital part of how we protect free expression in the digital age, but as outlined by the concerns of a number of the participants, it is largely under-explored outside of the tech community: "I think probably I need to get educated a wee bit more by someone because I think we probably are a bit exposed and a wee bit vulnerable, more than we realize." Another was even more stark about their worries about the available alternatives: "I have no idea about how to use the Internet 'differently'".

When interviewed, a number of writers expressed concerns about how their writing process has changed or is in danger of changing as a result of their awareness of surveillance. One participant who had covered the conflict in Northern Ireland in 70s and 80s stated that they would not cover the conflict in the same manner if it took place now; another stopped writing about child abuse when they thought about what their search history may look to someone else; when they heard of a conviction based on the ownership of the Anarchist Cookbook, a participant who bought a copy for research shredded it. Further to this a participant stated: "I think I would avoid direct research on issues to do with Islamic fundamentalism. I might work on aspects of the theory, but not on interviewing people in the past, I have interviewed people who would be called 'subversives'."

These modifications or avoidance strategies raise a stark and important question: What are we as readers being denied if writers are avoiding sensitive topics? Put another way, what connects the abuse of personal data by Cambridge Analytica, the treatment of asylum seekers by the Australian government on Manus and Nauru, the hiding of billions of pounds by wealthy individuals as revealed in the Panama and Paradise Papers, the deportation of members of the 'Windrush Generation' and the Watergate scandal? In each case, writers revealed to the world what others wanted hidden. Shadows appear less dense if writers are able to explore challenging issues and expose wrongdoing free from the coercive weight of pervasive surveillance. When writers are silenced, even by their own hand, we all suffer.

Surveillance is going nowhere – it is embedded into the fabric of the internet. If we ignore the impact it has on writers, we threaten the very foundations of democracy; a vibrant and cacophonous exchange of ideas and beliefs, alongside what it means to be a writer. In the words of one participant: "You can't exist as a writer if you're self-censoring."

Thuto , December 15, 2018 at 4:18 am

Thanks Yves, this is an important topic. Although not explicitly laid out in the post, I'm inclined to believe any online research on PETs might single one out as a "Person of Interest" (after all the state wants unfettered access to our digital lives and any attempt by individuals to curtail such access is viewed with suspicion, and maybe even a little contempt).

I trust the takeaway message from this post will resonate with any person who holds what might be considered "heretical" or dissenting views. I'd also argue that it's not just writers who are willingly submitting themselves to this self-censorship straitjacket, ordinary people are themselves sanitizing their views to avoid veering too far off the official line/established consensus on issues, lest they fall foul of the machinery of the security state.

norm de plume , December 15, 2018 at 10:31 pm

Yes – not just 'writers' as in 'those who write for a living or at least partly define themselves as writers in either a creative or an activist sense, or both' – but all of us who do not perceive ourselves as 'writers', only as people who in the course of their lives write a bit here and there, some of it on public platforms such as this, but much of it in emails and texts to friends and family. It wouldn't be quite so bad if the surveillance was only of the public stuff, but we know better now – EVERYTHING is recorded and archived. Privacy may not be dead yet, but now exists only in carefully curated offline pockets, away from not just the phone and the laptop, but also the smart fridge's and the face-recognising camera's gimlet eye.

Staying with the 'not just' for a moment – the threat is not just government security agencies and law enforcement, or indeed Surveillance Valley. It is clear that if egghead techs in those employments are able to crack our lives open then egghead techs in their parent's basement around the corner may be capable of the same intrusions, their actions not subject to any of the official box-ticking govt actors with which govt actors must (or at least should) comply.

And it is not just the danger of govt/sinister 3rd parties identifying potential security (or indeed political or economic) threats out of big data analysis, but the danger of govt and especially interested third parties targeting particular known individuals – political enemies to be sure, but also love rivals, toxic bosses, hated alpha males or queen bitches, supporters of other football clubs, members of other races not deemed fully human,.. the list is as long as that of human hatreds and jealousies. The danger lies not just in the use of the tech to ID threats (real or imagined) but in its application to traduce threats already perceived.

And it's not just off centre political opining that could be used in such efforts. The percentages of internet users who have accused [people of using] porn sites suggests there would be some serious overlap between the set of well known and/or 'important' people and the set of porn hounds. Remember the cack-handed attempts to smear Hans Blix? Apparently no fire behind that smoke, but what if there was? The mass US surveillance of other parties prior to UN Iraq deliberations (from the Merkels down to their state-level support bureaucrats) was a fleeting and hastily forgotten glimpse of the reach of TIA, its 'full spectrum dominance', from the heights of top level US-free strategy meetings down to the level of the thoughts and hopes of valets and ostlers to the leaders, who may be useful in turning up references to the peccadilloes of the higher-ups 'go massive – sweep it all up, things related and not'

And it's not just the fear of some sort of official retribution for dissenting political activism that guides our hands away from typing that deeply held but possibly inflammatory and potentially dangerous opinion. Most of us (real writers or just people who write) need to hold down a job and increasingly HR depts don't just 'do a Google' on all potential appointees to important roles but in large concerns at least, use algorithmic software connected to the web and the Cloud to process applications.

This is done without human intervention at the individual level but the whole process is set up in such a way that the algorithms are able to neatly, bloodlessly, move applicants for whom certain keywords turned up matches (union or party membership, letters to the editor or blog posts on financial fraud, climate change vanguardism, etc) to the back of the queue, in time producing a grey army of yes people in our bureaucracies.

The normal person's ability to keep pace with (let alone ahead of) the tech disappeared long ago. So when a possible anonymising solution – Tor – crops up but is soon exposed as yet another MI/SV bastard love child, the sense of disappointment is profound. Shocked but not surprised.

Truly, we are surrounded.

Steve H. , December 15, 2018 at 5:57 am

"Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables. – I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it's right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others. Isn't it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle [of society]? "

We already know insurers have been using online searches to discriminate amongst the victimae. The married/unmarried differences in cancer treatments are a confirmation. Self-censorship is a rational decision in seeking information in a linked world. (I gave up on affording insurance, and I do searches for friends; the ads I get are amusing.)

It could be said that journalists have a professional duty, but as the man said, "If you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."

As the woman said, "If your business depends on a platform, your business is already dead."

(As for the above quote, check the provenance for the relevance.)

Yves Smith Post author , December 15, 2018 at 6:07 am

The quote is, "If your business depends on a platform, you don't have a business."

Steve H. , December 15, 2018 at 7:08 am

Thank you very much, I had searched and found the variant.

Seriously, do you have a link to the original (post? comment?) I quote you often on this. Or try to.

Yves Smith Post author , December 15, 2018 at 10:46 am

Aaaw ..Lambert may have quoted it in Water Cooler. We've both said it but mainly in comments.

Steve H. , December 15, 2018 at 11:10 am

That's exactly what happened.

I confess I do concatenate your quotes on occasion: "For a currency to function as a reserve currency is tantamount to exporting jobs." Some of your most illuminating statements are in side comments to linked articles.

Means I spend a lot of time reading the site. But then I get to recategorize most other current events sites as 'Entertainment.' And since they're not very, they've been downregulated.

Arizona Slim , December 15, 2018 at 10:11 am

Giving up on affording insurance. That should never happen.

Steve H. , December 15, 2018 at 10:55 am

My choice being shackled e'n more to chains of FIRE, or living a healthy happy life, rather than increasing my stress by fighting institutions, we're investing in ourselves. Good sleep, good food, good exercise.

The basis of our diet is coffee, with cocoa (7% daily fiber with each tablespoon) and organic heavy whipping cream (your fats should be organic (;)). That cream's not cheap; well, actually it is amazingly cheap considering the energy inputs. I'll be fasting soon to murder cancer cells, and fasting also costs, lets see, nothing.

That the best thing you can do is nothing, occasionally, is a strong offset to the institutional framework. Janet's been a nurse 40 years, and every day (truth) we get another instance of not wanting the probisci inserted. Even when we get M4A, we'll be cautious in our approach.

KPC , December 15, 2018 at 5:40 pm

Pure air, pure water, pure food leads to pura vida or the good life. Paraphrasing the Karma Sutra.

The Rev Kev , December 15, 2018 at 6:58 am

I suppose that here we are looking at the dogs that did not bark for evidence of self-censorship. Certainly my plans to take over the world I do not keep on my computer. I had not considered the matter but I think that a case could be made that this may extend further than just writers. The number of writers that cannot publish in the US but must publish their work in obscure overseas publications is what happens to those who do not seek to self censor. There are other forms of censorship to be true. I read once where there was an editorial meeting for either the Washington Post or New York Times when a story came up that would make Israel look bad. The people at the table looked around and without so much as a nod that story was dropped from publication. Now that is self-censorship.
But I can see this self censorship at work elsewhere. To let my flight take fancy, who will paint the modern "Guernica" in this age? Would there be any chance that a modern studio would ever film something like "The Day After" mentioned in comments yesterday again? With so many great stories to be told, why has Hollywood run itself into a creative ditch and is content to film 1960s TV shows as a movie or a version of Transformers number 32? Where are the novels being written that will come to represent this era in the way that "The Great Gatsby" came to represent the 1920s? My point is that with a total surveillance culture, I have the feeling that this is permeating the culture and creating a chilling effect right across the board and just not in writing.

Tomonthebeach , December 15, 2018 at 1:31 pm

What we are experiencing censorship-wise is nothing new, just more insidious. It is not even a Left/Right politics issue. We just saw Trumpist fascist conservatives KILL the Weekly Standard (an action praised by Trump) for advocating the wrong conservativism. The shift in the televised/streamed media from news to infotainment has enabled neoliberal capitalism to censor any news that might alienate viewers/subscribers to justify obscene charges for advertising. Hilariously, even fascist Laura Ingram got gored by her own neolib ox.

Of course, a certain amount of self-censorship is prudent. Insulting, inflammatory, inciteful, hateful speech seldom animates beneficial change – just pointless violence (an sometimes law suits). Americans especially are so hung up on "free speech" rights that they too often fail to realize that no speech is truly free . There are always consequences for the purveyor, good and bad. Ask any kid on the playground with a bloody nose.

I would like to see some Google traitor write an article on the latest semantic analysis algorithms and tools. Thanks to the government, nobody but the FEDs and Google have access to these new tools that can mine terabytes of speech in seconds to highlight global patterns which might indicate plotting or organizing that might be entirely legal. I have been trying for years to get access to the newer unobtainable tools to help improve the development of diagnostic and monitoring self-report health measures. Such tools can also quickly scan journals to highlight and coordinate findings to accelerate new discoveries. For now, they are used to determine if your emails indicate you are a jihadist terrorist or dope peddler, or want to buy a Toyota or a Ford.

lyman alpha blob , December 15, 2018 at 5:07 pm

Where are the novels ?

Rhetorical I know, but Don DeLillo is quite good. It was in his novel Libra , although arguably from/about a different era at this point, where it first hit home to me that the Blob really does manipulate the media to its own ends all the time. And you can't swing a cat without hitting a terrorist in his books.

But to your point, DeLillo is pretty old at this point and I'm hard pressed to think of anyone picking up his mantle. And none of his novels, as brilliant as some of them might be, rise to the level of The Great Gatsby in the popular imagination to begin with.

cnchal , December 15, 2018 at 8:06 am

The surveillance people are the nicest, kindest human beings that have only your best interest at heart.

They would never break down your door and terrorize you for searching online for a pressure cooker and if you heard stories that they did that, the surveillancers have an answer for you, it's fake news, and if you persisted in not believing them, there are other methods of persuasion to get you to change your mind or at least shut up about it.

Carolinian , December 15, 2018 at 9:50 am

That pressure cooker story gets a lot of mileage. While there is undoubtedly a lot of surveillance it might be interesting to see a story on just how much of it leads to actual arrests on real or trumped up charges. Here's suggesting that the paranoia induced by books like Surveillance Valley is over the top in the same way that TV news' focus on crime stories causes the public to think that crime is rampant when it may actually be declining.

That said, journalists who indulge their vanity with Facebook or Twitter accounts are obviously asking for it. And the journalistic world in general needs to become a lot more technologically "literate" and realize that Youtube videos can be faked as well as how to separate the internet wheat from the chaff. Plus there's that old fashioned way of learning a story that is probably the way most stories are still reported: talking to people–hopefully in a room that hasn't been bugged.

Just to add that while the above may apply to America that doesn't mean the web isn't a much more sinister phenomenon in countries like China with its new social trust score. We must make sure the US never goes there.

Jeremy Grimm , December 15, 2018 at 3:36 pm

For your first sentence I think you are referencing:
The surveillance people are "the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being[s] I've ever known in my life." (ref. Statement by Major Marco about Raymond Shaw from 1962 and 2004 movies "The Manchurian Candidate"). ?
Maybe you need some refresher re-education.

thoughtful person , December 15, 2018 at 8:25 am

Expression of minority opinions and surpressed information is not a safe activity, thus we self censor. However reality asserts itself and perhaps in those moments one can more safely express alternate points of view. As far as writing online i worry about the future – with everything recorded and searchable, will we at some point be facing round ups of dissidents? What kind of supression will stressed governments and corporate hierarchies do in the future?

juliania , December 15, 2018 at 2:51 pm

Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle" is a case in point, and not about the future either.

William Hunter Duncan , December 15, 2018 at 10:43 am

I think the last blog post I wrote that was linked here at NC was called "TPP is Treason."

I was writing and was published on the Internet from 2011-2016. I continue to write, but I no longer publish anything online, I closed my Facebook account, and I rarely comment on articles outside of NC, especially anywhere I have to give up a digital-ton of personal info and contacts just to say a few words one time.

Goodness knows I do not worry a bit about fundamentalist Islamic militancy. Do I have any anxiety about jackbooted "law enforcement" mercenaries in riot gear and automatic rifles breaking down my door at the behest, basically, of the corporate/banking/billionaire, neoliberal/neoconservative status quo, my big mouth excoriating these elite imperialists, at the same time asset forfeiture laws are on the books and I can have EVERYTHING taken from me for growing a single plant of cannabis, or even having any cannabis in my house, or not, all they have to report to a complicit media and prosecutorial State is that I was growing cannabis when there was none.

Of course there is little danger of that if I am not publishing, and hardly anyone knows I ever have, and no one currently is paying any attention.

The fact in America at least is, as long as the status quo is secure, TPTB don't really care what I write, as long as they do not perceive it as a threat, and the only way they would is if a LOT of people are listening But still, there is nothing more terrifying on earth than America's Law/Corporate/Bank/Privatized Military/Media imperialist State, chilling to say the least, evidenced in the extreme by a distracted, highly manipulated and neutered citizenry.

Wukchumni , December 15, 2018 at 10:52 am

"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular."

"If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain."

Adlai Stevenson

rjs , December 15, 2018 at 11:32 am

Caitlin Johnstone has written about her own self-censorship a few times; her's one:

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/10/16/self-censorship-where-the-real-damage-is-being-done/

shinola , December 15, 2018 at 12:08 pm

Siri? Alexa? Just volunteer.

Orwell was prescient. It just took a bit longer & is more commercialized than he anticipated.

Stratos , December 15, 2018 at 1:22 pm

So true. Surveillance sold as convenience -- -or "connection" (facebook and twitter, et. al.)

[Dec 14, 2018] MI6, along with elements of the CIA, was behind the Steele Dossier. Representatives of John Brennan met in London to discus before the go ahead was given

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... MI6, along with elements of the CIA, was behind the Steele Dossier. Representatives of John Brennan met in London to discus before the go ahead was given. They later put Michael Steele onto the project; he was a guy with credible Russian contacts. Basically, the scam worked like this: ..."
"... They funneled an MI6 intelligence file to Michael Steele (governments routinely keep such files on influential foreigners and what they are up to) so he could use his contacts to launder the information and make it appear that it came from sources within Russia; they then funneled the report back to elements of the FBI so they could use it to justify to the FISA court a spying campaign on Trump ..."
"... the Obama regime purposely mishandled information in regards to the spying program (ex: Michael Steele leaked his document to various news sources before the election and later lied to congress about it), ensuring it would leak to the press; the Obama regime illegally unmasked elements of Trump's personal contacts so they could clandestinely leak suggested targets off the record to the right people ..."
"... They lost the election anyway, so they then planted dirt and negative press to make the document look legit – lies about Manafort meeting Assange (Guardian is funded by the British government to police the left), WaPo lies claiming a vast Russian conspiracy just as Trump came into office (it was an effort to delegitimize him and create calls for Hillary to take his place), leaking bank records, the special counsel .and leaking information on Trump policies to the media using a secret security clearance credentials program enacted by Obama. ..."
"... The government takes CCTV footage of you at a grocery store; in the background there is an attractive woman. The woman then goes missing. The government illegally reads your emails and finds that you like sexual jokes. The government then interviews a friend of yours who claims that you once made a risque rape joke back in college. They also plant a mole in your workplace who befriends you and reports back all of your politically incorrect humor. Then the cops find the woman's body and the government claims that you killed her because you were in the area at the time and you make bad jokes, which has been confirmed by multiple credible people. You look guilty, don't you? The government 1) took information out of context 2) laundered circumstantial evidence through a credible witness when they originally obtained it elsewhere using nefarious sources. That's what they did to Trump, but much much much worse. ..."
"... And don't forget the Skripals' affair and the relationships (via M16) between Mr. Steele and Mr. Skripal: https://thedeepstate.com/steele-skripal/ ..."
Dec 08, 2018 | www.unz.com

anon [178] Disclaimer , says: December 4, 2018 at 11:43 am GMT

"You don't say; British Collusion to influence the 2016 US Presidential elections."

MI6, along with elements of the CIA, was behind the Steele Dossier. Representatives of John Brennan met in London to discus before the go ahead was given. They later put Michael Steele onto the project; he was a guy with credible Russian contacts. Basically, the scam worked like this:

They funneled an MI6 intelligence file to Michael Steele (governments routinely keep such files on influential foreigners and what they are up to) so he could use his contacts to launder the information and make it appear that it came from sources within Russia; they then funneled the report back to elements of the FBI so they could use it to justify to the FISA court a spying campaign on Trump (the FBI illegally withheld the source of the document); they found nothing proving any Russian connection but they kept the spy program going; they tried justifying the spy program with a fake story involving a reliable asset that once passed information from Jimmy Carter's campaign to George H.W. Bush in an effort to help Reagan win the 1980 election; they later paid the asset nearly a quarter million dollars for his efforts using a fake "India-China" grant despite the grant running to 2018, the asset attempted to get a job in the Trump administration so he could act as a mole ; the Obama regime purposely mishandled information in regards to the spying program (ex: Michael Steele leaked his document to various news sources before the election and later lied to congress about it), ensuring it would leak to the press; the Obama regime illegally unmasked elements of Trump's personal contacts so they could clandestinely leak suggested targets off the record to the right people

They lost the election anyway, so they then planted dirt and negative press to make the document look legit – lies about Manafort meeting Assange (Guardian is funded by the British government to police the left), WaPo lies claiming a vast Russian conspiracy just as Trump came into office (it was an effort to delegitimize him and create calls for Hillary to take his place), leaking bank records, the special counsel .and leaking information on Trump policies to the media using a secret security clearance credentials program enacted by Obama. They also ran interference through CIA guys like Mark Warner in an effort to cover up the mole they planted; they falsely asserted this was a national security issue when the man's identity was well-known to the press and he was never an undercover spy like Jarret was, at least not in recent history.

To put this all into perspective, imagine the following scenario:

The government takes CCTV footage of you at a grocery store; in the background there is an attractive woman. The woman then goes missing. The government illegally reads your emails and finds that you like sexual jokes. The government then interviews a friend of yours who claims that you once made a risque rape joke back in college. They also plant a mole in your workplace who befriends you and reports back all of your politically incorrect humor. Then the cops find the woman's body and the government claims that you killed her because you were in the area at the time and you make bad jokes, which has been confirmed by multiple credible people. You look guilty, don't you? The government 1) took information out of context 2) laundered circumstantial evidence through a credible witness when they originally obtained it elsewhere using nefarious sources. That's what they did to Trump, but much much much worse.

annamaria , says: December 7, 2018 at 2:45 pm GMT
@anon

"MI6, along with elements of the CIA, was behind the Steele Dossier. "

And don't forget the Skripals' affair and the relationships (via M16) between Mr. Steele and Mr. Skripal: https://thedeepstate.com/steele-skripal/

[Dec 14, 2018] New York Times fraudulent election plot dossier escalates anti-Russia hysteria

Notable quotes:
"... It acknowledges that "police never identified who had hung the banners," but nonetheless goes on to assert that: "The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history." ..."
"... The authors, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, complain about a lack of "public comprehension" of the "Trump-Russia" story. Indeed, despite the two-year campaign of anti-Russian hysteria whipped up in Washington and among the affluent sections of the upper-middle class that constitute the target audience of the Times ..."
Sep 21, 2018 | www.wsws.org

The New York Times published a fraudulent and provocative "special report" Thursday titled "The plot to subvert an election."

Replete with sinister looking graphics portraying Russian President Vladimir Putin as a villainous cyberage cyclops, the report purports to untangle "the threads of the most effective foreign campaign in history to disrupt and influence an American election."

The report could serve as a textbook example of CIA-directed misinformation posing as "in-depth" journalism. There is no news, few substantiated facts and no significant analysis presented in the 10,000-word report, which sprawls over 11 ad-free pages of a separate section produced by the Times.

The article begins with an ominous-sounding recounting of two incidents in which banners were hung from bridges in New York City and Washington in October and November of 2016, one bearing the likeness of Putin over a Russian flag with the word "peacemaker," and the other that of Obama and the slogan "Goodbye Murderer."

It acknowledges that "police never identified who had hung the banners," but nonetheless goes on to assert that: "The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history." The article begins with an ominous-sounding recounting of two incidents in which banners were hung from bridges in New York City and Washington in October and November of 2016, one bearing the likeness of Putin over a Russian flag with the word "peacemaker," and the other that of Obama and the slogan "Goodbye Murderer."

It acknowledges that "police never identified who had hung the banners," but nonetheless goes on to assert that: "The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history."

Why does it "appear" to be the Kremlin? What is the evidence to support this claim? Among the 8.5 million inhabitants of New York City and another 700,000 in Washington, D.C., aren't there enough people who might despise Obama as much as, if not a good deal more than, Vladimir Putin?

This absurd passage with its "appeared" and "may well have" combined with the speculation about the Kremlin extending its evil grip onto "United States soil" sets the tone for the entire piece, which consists of the regurgitation of unsubstantiated allegations made by the US intelligence agencies, Democratic and Republican capitalist politicians and the Times itself.

The authors, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, complain about a lack of "public comprehension" of the "Trump-Russia" story. Indeed, despite the two-year campaign of anti-Russian hysteria whipped up in Washington and among the affluent sections of the upper-middle class that constitute the target audience of the Times , polls have indicated that the charges of Russian "meddling" in the 2016 presidential election have evoked little popular response among the

[Dec 10, 2018] One thing that has puzzled me about Trump methods is his constant tweeting of witch hunt with respect to Mueller but his unwillingness to actually disclose what Brennan, Clapper, Comey, et al actually did

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... One thing that has puzzled me about Trump methods is his constant tweeting of witch hunt with respect to Mueller but his unwillingness to actually disclose what Brennan, Clapper, Comey, et al actually did by declassifying all the documents and communications among them. In your opinion what is he trying to accomplish with his method here? ..."
Dec 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

blue peacock , 12 hours ago

Col. Lang

I believe you are spot on in your analysis of the Trump methods. No doubt based on your personal observations up close of similar sole proprietor business hustlers. I think one problem that Trump methods face is that he needs people around him who can make things happen despite the byzantine ways of the vast federal bureaucracy who have their own agenda.

One thing that has puzzled me about Trump methods is his constant tweeting of witch hunt with respect to Mueller but his unwillingness to actually disclose what Brennan, Clapper, Comey, et al actually did by declassifying all the documents and communications among them. In your opinion what is he trying to accomplish with his method here?

[Dec 09, 2018] NYT and CIA have had relationship with, and was caught having planted CIA workers as NYT writers

Notable quotes:
"... Non-elite members of the Party -- functionaries -- mistake their "secret" knowledge as professional courtesy rather than as perquisite and status marker. (I don't suppose it's a secret to anyone that the US CIA regularly plants stories in the NYTimes and elsewhere... unless you weren't paying attention in the strident disinfo campaign prior to the Iraq invasion.) ..."
Aug 30, 2012 | www.theguardian.com
sanda1scuptorNYC , 30 Aug 2012 07:36
Howard Zinn said, in a speech given shortly after the 2008 Presidential election, "If you don't know history, it's like you were born yesterday. The government can tell you anything." (Speech was played on DemocracyNow www.democracynow.org about Jan. 4, 2009 and is archived, free on the website.)

Being older (18 on my last Leap Year birthday - 72), I recall the NYTimes and CIA have had relationship with, and was caught having "planted CIA workers" as NYTimes writers. Within my adult lifetime, in fact.

sigil , 30 Aug 2012 05:49

This is what the CIA reflexively does: insists that [...] it is an "intelligence matter".

In a sense the CIA is always going to be right on this one - "Central Intelligence Agency" - but only as a matter of nomenclature, rather than of any other dictionary definition of the word "intelligence".

Brusselsexpats , 30 Aug 2012 05:49
Actually the collusion between the CIA and big business is far more damaging. The first US company I worked for in Brussels (it was my first job) was constantly being targeted by the US media for having connections to corrupt South American and Third World regimes. On what seemed like an almost monthly basis our personnel department would send round memos saying that we were strictly forbidden to talk to journalists about the latest exposé.

It was great fun - even the telex operators knew who the spies were.

kcameron , 30 Aug 2012 05:26
The line "'The optics aren't what they look like,' is truly an instant classic. It reminds me of one of my favorite Yogi Berra quotes (which, unlike many attributed to him, is real, I think). Yogi once said about a restaurant in New York "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." Perhaps Yogi should become an editor for the Times.
AmityAmity , 30 Aug 2012 04:55
British readers will no doubt be shocked -- shocked! -- to learn of cozy relations between a major news organization and a national intelligence agency.

... ... ...

MiltonWiltmellow , 30 Aug 2012 02:40

"'I know the circumstances, and if you knew everything that's going on, you'd know it's much ado about nothing,' Baquet said. 'I can't go into in detail. But I'm confident after talking to Mark that it's much ado about nothing.'

"'The optics aren't what they look like,' he went on. 'I've talked to Mark, I know the circumstance, and given what I know, it's much ado about nothing.'"

How can you have a Party if you don't have Party elites?

And how can a self-respecting member of the Party claim their individual status within the Party without secret knowledge designed to identify one another as members of the Party elite?

[Proles are] natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals ... Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals the Party was trying to achieve. ... The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering -- a world of of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons -- a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting -- 300 million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities, where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes... [ 1984 ,pp 73-74]

It makes no difference if an imagined socialist England, a collapsing Roman city-state empire, an actual Soviet Union, or a modern American oligarchy.

Party members thrive while those wretched proles flail in confused and hungry desperation for something authentic (like a George Bush) or even simply reassuring (like a Barack Obama.)

Non-elite members of the Party -- functionaries -- mistake their "secret" knowledge as professional courtesy rather than as perquisite and status marker. (I don't suppose it's a secret to anyone that the US CIA regularly plants stories in the NYTimes and elsewhere... unless you weren't paying attention in the strident disinfo campaign prior to the Iraq invasion.)

Manzetti has "no bad intent" because he is loyal to the Party.

Like all loyal (and very well compensated) Party members, he would never do anything as subversive as reveal Party secrets.

People can be detained for almost any reason these days!

After all, what's the future of a Party that lacks effective enforcement?

[Dec 09, 2018] The Mafia, CIA and Bush Senior - Pete Brewton, Author, Journalist (1992) Part 1 of 2

Dec 09, 2018 | nomadiceveryman.blogspot.com

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0EoOEw-hq-o/0.jpg


Posted by willyloman at No comments: Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Pinterest

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George H. W. Bush

[Dec 09, 2018] Wannabe Zionists (Bolton) has been trying hard to show his loyalty to the Jewish State

Notable quotes:
"... Trump won't fire his son-in-law, so if Jared doesn't have the decency to resign on his own, he may well be responsible for Trump's downfall in addition to his own. Trump's silly daughter, Ivanka, needs to go to. ..."
"... Time for Bolton to send for the clairvoyant Theresa May who has managed to accuse Russia, and Mr. Putin personally, in the Skripals' poisoning n the absence of any evidence ..."
Nov 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

annamaria, November 13, 2018 at 6:43 pm GMT

@Z-man The "wannabe Zionists (Bolton)" has been trying hard to show his loyalty to the Jewish State.

The latest tragicomic attempt by the mustached "person of easy morals": "John Bolton Says "No Evidence" Implicating Crown Prince On Khashoggi Kill Tape" https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-13/john-bolton-says-no-evidence-implicating-crown-prince-khashoggi-kill-tape

Comment section (David Wooten): "According to the crown prince himself, Trump's [Jewish] son-in-law gave him a secret list of his enemies -- the ones like Al Aweed who were tortured and shaken down for cash. Khashoggi might even have been on that list.

One or more of the tortured ones likely tipped off Erdogan, which is why Turkey only needed to enter the consulate, retrieve the recorded audio device they planted, and walk out with the evidence. Turkey also has evidence that puts MbS' personal doctor and other staff arriving in Turkey at convenient times to do the job -- and probably more. Khashoggi was anything but a nice person but Trump cannot say that or he'll likely be accused of involvement in his murder.

Dissociation is made far more difficult by the fact that Jared is a long time friend of Netanyahu who, like Jared, has befriended MbS .

Trump won't fire his son-in-law, so if Jared doesn't have the decency to resign on his own, he may well be responsible for Trump's downfall in addition to his own. Trump's silly daughter, Ivanka, needs to go to.

Were it not for the Khashoggi affair, fewer Republican seats would have been lost in the election."

-- Time for Bolton to send for the clairvoyant Theresa May who has managed to accuse Russia, and Mr. Putin personally, in the Skripals' poisoning n the absence of any evidence .

These people -- Bolton, May, Gavin Williamson and likes -- are a cross of the ever-eager whores and petty brainless thieves. To expose themselves as the willing participants in the ZUSA-conducted farce requires a complete lack of integrity.

Of course, there is no way to indict the journalist's murderers since the principal murderer is a personal friend of Netanyahu and Jared.

Jump, Justice, jump, as high as ordered by the "chosen."

By the way, why do we hear nothing about Seth Rich who was murdered in the most surveilled city of the US?

Z-man , says: November 13, 2018 at 7:21 pm GMT
@annamaria A 1st grader can see that MbS was behind the murder of Kashoggi.

Trump won't fire his son-in-law, so if Jared doesn't have the decency to resign on his own, he may well be responsible for Trump's downfall in addition to his own. Trump's silly daughter, Ivanka, needs to go to.

I've been hoping for this since they moved to Washington with 'big daddy'.

annamaria , says: November 14, 2018 at 12:49 pm GMT
@Anon " crappy bedtime reading the woolyheadedness "

Hey, Anon[436], is this how your parents have been treating you? My condolences.

If you feel that you succeeded with your "see, a squirrel" tactics of taking attention from the zionists' dirty and amoral attempts at coverup of the murder of the journalists Khashoggi, which was accomplished on the orders of the clown prince (the dear friend of Bibi & Jared), you are for a disappointment.

One more time for you, Anon[436]: the firm evidence of MbS involvement in the murder of Khashoggi contrasts with no evidence of the alleged poisoning of Skripals by Russian government.

The zionists have been showing an amazing tolerance towards the clown prince the murderer because zionists need the clown prince for the implementation of Oded Yinon Plan for Eretz Israel.

The stinky Skripals' affair involves harsh economic actions imposed on the RF in the absence of any evidence , as compared to no sanctions in response to the actual murder of Khashoggi, which involved MbS according to the available evidence . Thanks to the zionists friendship with the clown prince, the firm evidence of Khashoggi murder is of no importance. What else could be expected from the "most moral" Bibi & Kushner and the treasonous Bolton.

Z-man , says: November 14, 2018 at 1:58 pm GMT
@annamaria

The stinky Skripals' affair involves harsh economic actions imposed on the RF in the absence of any evidence, as compared to no sanctions in response to the actual murder of Khashoggi, which involved MbS according to the available evidence. Thanks to the zionists friendship with the clown prince, the firm evidence of Khashoggi murder is of no importance. What else could be expected from the "most moral" Bibi & Kushner and the treasonous Bolton.

Bears repeating.

[Dec 08, 2018] Interview of Lamar Waldren, Historian, on the REAL H. W. Bush by Thom Hartmann

Some information about JFK assassination. The term "Bush crime family" is not a joke. Lamar Waldren is the author of book The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination The Definitive Account of the Most Controversial Crime of the Twentieth Century
Notable quotes:
"... Thus, when local news reporters pressed Atty. Dean Andrews (a Marcello atty., according to Waldron) after he was indicted by Garrison for perjury, Andrews initially sought to evade the reporter's questions. Finally he blurted out, "If they can kill the President, they can squash me like a roach." These are but a few of the revelations that were a consequence of Garrison's courage in challenging the Federal Government's narrative about the assassination. ..."
"... At the outset of Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw, the Federal Government openly intervened to obstruct. US Attorney General Ramsey Clark announced that the Feds had already investigated Shaw and concluded he had nothing to do with the assassination! When was this investigation? Who investigated? Why did they investigate Shaw? ..."
"... Waldron includes a most salient paragraph: "...declassified files now show that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA Director Richard Helms immediately began a significant public relation counteroffensive, issuing detailed instruction on how to smear critics of the Warren Report. ..."
"... For example, in a January 4, 1967, CIA memo in which the Agency gives 53-pages of specific instructions on how to counter the growing tide of books and articles questioning the `lone-nut' conclusion...In many ways, those PR counteroffensives by the FBI and CIA would last for decades, and some writers make the case that they continue even today."(14-15) ..."
"... Important in the "get Garrison" media campaign was journalist Walter Sheridan. Waldron maintains Sheridan was sent to New Orleans by Robert Kennedy. Why would Robert Kennedy seek to destroy a DA who at least considered charging Carlos Marcello, arch-nemesis of the Kennedys? And was Robert really the dominant figure in the autopsy of his brother at Bethesda, as maintained by Waldron?(399-401) ..."
"... Because Waldron's thesis is that the Mafia had to blur the lines between two plots, an anti-Castro one in league with the CIA, and the one targeting JFK, he might have elaborated more on the CIA practices. ..."
"... Anthony Summers have documented that `nobody has ever made the flimsiest allegation that the authentic Lee Oswald had anything but good to say about John Kennedy' This is true of Oswald's interrogations, his media appearances, and his private talks."(338) ..."
Dec 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

ben , Dec 7, 2018 10:29:36 PM | link

OT, but current. Interview of Lamar Waldren, Historian, on the REAL H. W. Bush by Thom Hartmann.

http://dl.thomhartmann.com/private/podcasts/2018_1207_thp-120718-hour1.mp3

One Amazon review:

Hugh Murray, February 12, 2014

Mafcia plots

The main objection to the theory that the Mafia planned the assassination of President Kennedy has always been that it would not have had the power to cover-up its role in the murder. Nor would it have had the ability to control, curtail, and compromise the autopsy, to bamboozle all the media, to intimidate witnesses speaking to FBI agents, and to appoint a blue-ribbon commission that would issue a report with 26 volumes of documentary support, purporting to prove that the assassin was a lone-nut, never once mentioning the Mafia!

Because the Mafia clearly lacked such power, either the Warren Commission was correct in attributing the assassination to Oswald, or the cover-up and murder, were conducted by higher-ups in the US Government - like Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, the FBI, etc. Or, it was the work of Fidel Castro and/or the Soviets. Were that the case, the demand by the American public for retaliation would press our leaders to launch a large-scale invasion of Cuba, which could unleash World War III. To prevent nuclear war, American leaders chose to cover up the evidence of Communist conspiracy that culminated in Dallas. The American leaders chose cover-ups and deception in preference to the truth and nuclear war.

Waldron's purpose is to remove the chief obstacles to the view that the Mafia conspiracy resulted in the assassination of Jack Kennedy. Waldron notes that in the last days of the Eisenhower Administration, CIA and Mafia links were forged in plots to overthrow and assassinate the radical Fidel Castro in Cuba. With the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in spring 1961, however, the newly inaugurated President Kennedy believed he had been misled by the CIA and proceeded to fire its leader, Allen Dulles. Many Cuban exiles blamed Kennedy for the failure of that mission because Kennedy had refused to support the landing with major air, and if necessary, American land support.

The Missile Crisis of the fall of 1962 nudged the world to the edge of nuclear war. Though some assumed there had been a "no invasion" pledge as part of the settlement, Waldron asserts that because Castro rejected inspection on Cuban soil, the no-invasion pledge was inoperative. Moreover, Kennedy ordered a halt to any American CIA collaboration with the Mafia, in part because his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy was leading the prosecution of organized crime, and had even used some extra-legal tactics to deport New Orleans Mafia leader, Carlos Marcello. Nevertheless, Pres. Kennedy still authorized clandestine plots to kill Castro, while simultaneously allowing top secret negotiations with the Castro regime to come to some accommodation. But if no progress in those negotiations were evident by the end of November 1963, Pres. Kennedy decided to aid a coup in Cuba staged by Gen. Juan Almeida, the head of the Cuban army and the number three official under Castro. In this coup, Fidel would be assassinated, and Almeida's new government would request military intervention from the US to complete the counter-revolution. The working date for that operation was 1 December 1963.

Unbeknownst to Kennedy and his new CIA leader, John McCone, however, the CIA's Director of Planning Operations, Richard Helms, now held the highest operational post in the agency. Helms knew of the previous CIA-Mafia collaboration toward eliminating Castro, and he ignored Kennedy's demand to cut ties with the Mafia. Instead, those earlier ties were retained and solidified between some CIA operatives and Mafia organizations in Florida (led by Santo Trafficante), Chicago (represented by Johnny Rosselli), and New Orleans (led by Marcello once he made it back to the US, probably flown in by pilot David Ferrie).

By linking the government approved assassination plots to kill Castro, with its own plots to kill Kennedy, the Mafia would make it impossible to unravel the truth without exposing the US government's own deadly secrets to the American people, AND exposing General Almeida in Cuba to the wrath of Fidel. Moreover, if the Mafia plot were successful, it could then plant false information implicating Castro as the culprit. This might lead to calls for invasion of Cuba, Soviet retaliation, and WWIII. The US government would then find it necessary to avoid war by covering up what really occurred in Dallas. Thus, the cover-up was not conducted by the Mafia, but by innocent American leaders bent upon avoiding atomic war: President Lyndon Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, et al.

Waldron uses information garnered from tapes recorded for the FBI when Mafia chief Marcello was imprisoned; he confessed his role in the Kennedy assassination to a fellow inmate who was wearing a wire. The information was not released when originally recorded, nor in 1986 when the FBI operation concluded, nor in 1992 when the Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Act. In 1998, the FBI released the information, but it was buried in a flood of less important documents released at the same time. Waldron's own research found the confessions in 2006 and in this book he makes an impressive case. Waldron asserts that the Mafia planned the assassination with plots in at least three cities that Kennedy would visit in the fall of 1963, and in each, a Lee Oswald-type patsy had been selected to deflect suspicion from the real killers. Chicago, Tampa-Miami, and Dallas were the three sites that Kennedy would visit where Mafia hit men were imported to crush Camelot. Waldron also refers to confessions by other Mafia leaders, including Trafficante, and Rosselli. Waldron is good at reminding readers of how, when Congress reinvestigated the Kennedy murder, several Mafioso leaders were killed in most brutal fashions the day before they were to testify. In addition, the wealthy white Russian who befriended the poor, "Marxist" Oswald in Dallas, George de Mohrenschildt, commited suicide the day before his scheduled testimony. Waldron reminds readers of the number of "coincidental" deaths when Congress reinvestigated the events in Dallas.

Waldron provided an excellent time-line studded with provocative tidbits of information. Thus, we learn that during the height of the Missile Crisis in the fall of 1962, Oswald, the "defector" to the USSR married to a Russian, gets a job in Dallas with a corporation performing sensitive photographic work for the US government, such as interpreting pictures of Cuban missile movements. (154) Furthermore, despite his "defection" and his later distribution of Fair Play for Cuba leaflets, Oswald was never placed on the FBI's Security Index.(250, 258) Another item to ponder: Waldron reveals that both Jack Ruby and Gen. Edwin Walker (the right-wing general whom Oswald allegedly shot at) were closeted homosexuals.(174) Of course, one could argue that in the 1960s almost all gays were closeted. In that era, if a man were openly homosexual, "out," he was either "in" prison or "in" a mental institution. Waldron also mentions the story of J. Edgar's alleged arrest for homosexuality.(231) Yet, Clay Shaw is barely mentioned in the book.

Before engaging in a general critique of the book, I shall point out some minor errors. Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs, father of ABC and NPR commentator Cokie Roberts, was a US Representative, not a Senator.(31) Boggs WAS a member of the Warren Commission, but Louisiana Sen. Russell Long was NOT.(146) Also, Waldron asserts that "there were only two time periods when Oswald could have worked for Marcello as a runner: one in late April or early May 1963...and the other in late July, August, and ...September 1963,..."(181-82) But Oswald might have worked for Marcello much earlier, when he was a teenager living in New Orleans.

I disagree with Waldron's assessment that the investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison hindered the investigation by mainstream media of the Kennedy assassination.(15) Though the jury quickly found Clay Shaw not guilty of conspiring to kill JFK, they told local reporters that they were convinced that JFK was a victim of a conspiracy. Garrison's prosecution showed the Zapruder film in the courtroom, eventually unwrapping it for all to see how Kennedy's head moved to the back and left when struck by the fatal shot. Under oath Dr. Pierre Finck described how doctors in Bethesda followed military orders at the expense of providing Kennedy a thorough autopsy. If the national media were hostile to Garrison, not all of the local outlets were so biased. Thus, when local news reporters pressed Atty. Dean Andrews (a Marcello atty., according to Waldron) after he was indicted by Garrison for perjury, Andrews initially sought to evade the reporter's questions. Finally he blurted out, "If they can kill the President, they can squash me like a roach." These are but a few of the revelations that were a consequence of Garrison's courage in challenging the Federal Government's narrative about the assassination.

At the outset of Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw, the Federal Government openly intervened to obstruct. US Attorney General Ramsey Clark announced that the Feds had already investigated Shaw and concluded he had nothing to do with the assassination! When was this investigation? Who investigated? Why did they investigate Shaw? The Feds did everything possible to obstruct the Garrison prosecution, so that crucial witnesses could flee Louisiana, and governors like Ronald Reagan of California and James Rhodes of Ohio, after consulting with federal officials, simply refused to extradite important witnesses like Gordon Novel. How could any DA win a case under such circumstances?

Even Waldron concedes, "Recently released FBI files show that in the late spring of 1967, Garrison twice privately considered indicting Marcello for the assassination of JFK but decided not to."(458) Waldron's thesis is that Marcello was guilty of the murder, and yet he claims that the only official who contemplated charging Marcello with that crime, simply hindered mainstream media investigations! Were those recently released FBI files that Waldron refers to intended to facilitate DA Garrison probe? Or to sabotage it? And had Garrison charged Marcello with killing Kennedy, would the mass media have been any more sympathetic to Garrison?

Waldron includes a most salient paragraph: "...declassified files now show that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA Director Richard Helms immediately began a significant public relation counteroffensive, issuing detailed instruction on how to smear critics of the Warren Report.

For example, in a January 4, 1967, CIA memo in which the Agency gives 53-pages of specific instructions on how to counter the growing tide of books and articles questioning the `lone-nut' conclusion...In many ways, those PR counteroffensives by the FBI and CIA would last for decades, and some writers make the case that they continue even today."(14-15)

Garrison failed to convict Clay Shaw. I would contend because of the hostility of the Feds, there is no way Garrison could have convicted Marcello either. The national, main-stream media followed the marching orders of the federal government - orders issued softly through their agency operatives and friends.

Important in the "get Garrison" media campaign was journalist Walter Sheridan. Waldron maintains Sheridan was sent to New Orleans by Robert Kennedy. Why would Robert Kennedy seek to destroy a DA who at least considered charging Carlos Marcello, arch-nemesis of the Kennedys? And was Robert really the dominant figure in the autopsy of his brother at Bethesda, as maintained by Waldron?(399-401)

Because the thrust of Waldron's book is assassination by the Mafia, he mentions the murder of Guatemalan leader Castillo Armas in July 1957 by a "lone Communist" assassin, who then killed himself with the same weapon used to kill Armas. But there were rumors at the time that Armas had run afoul of the Mafia, and Rosselli was then in Guatemala.(94) Shortly after the Bay of Pigs, the strong man of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo was assassinated in what Waldron calls a gangland-type murder.(145) And since Waldron explicated MafCia assassinations, he might have expanded his all-to-brief accounts of two other assassination, even if the Mafia had nothing to do with them: - 1) the assassination of the Prime Minister in the newly independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba on 17 January 1961 (p. 136, though his name is misspelt in Waldron's index); and - 2) the assassination of South Viet Nam's Ngo Dinh Diem on 2 November 1963.(303) With Waldron's slight treatment of the latter, he evades speculation on the CIA's role in that murder and its effect on future American policy in Vietnam and any connection between Diem's demise may have had on events in Dallas. Because Waldron's thesis is that the Mafia had to blur the lines between two plots, an anti-Castro one in league with the CIA, and the one targeting JFK, he might have elaborated more on the CIA practices.

There are anomalies in Waldron's work. On the one hand, we read that: "The [New Orleans police lieutenant who talked to Oswald after his arrest with the FPCC in NO] also said that Oswald `liked the President,' a sentiment shared by most people who ever heard Oswald mention JFK;"(251) and :"...It's important to keep in mind that others such as Anthony Summers have documented that `nobody has ever made the flimsiest allegation that the authentic Lee Oswald had anything but good to say about John Kennedy' This is true of Oswald's interrogations, his media appearances, and his private talks."(338)

On the other hand, Waldron also reports that: "The head of the Ku Klux Klan told veteran newspaper report and editor Patsy Sims that he had met with Oswald in Atlanta. In her definitive history of the Klan, Sims writes that `one of her sources told her that Oswald, in the summer of 1963, had called on [Klan] Imperial Wizard James Venable in his office in Atlanta seeking the names of right-wing associates. Venable confirmed [to Sims] that he was fairly sure that Oswald had been there for that purpose.' Oswald indicated to Venable that he was on his way to Chicago. Klan leader Venable made his statement to Sims in the 1980s and it is difficult to see why Venable would make up an Oswald encounter since it tended to link Oswald with `right-wing associates,' thus potentially giving the FBI reason to interview or investigate them."

"In the 1960s, Klan leader Venable was close to an associate of Guy Banister, white supremacist Joseph Milteer, who lived in Georgia..."(286)

If this meeting did occur, it may have had more to do with the Banister-, Milteer-, far-right plot than about Oswald's personal opinion of Kennedy. Oswald may have simply been following Banister's instructions, as he had done when pretending to be a Castro-sympathizer handing out FPCC leaflets.

A related question: what was the connection between the Mafia and the racist, far-right? Clearly, some Cubans who had fled Castro's far-left oppression in Cuba, may have felt more comfortable with right end of the political spectrum. The KKK certainly inhabits that end. Milteer, who was taped predicting the assassination prior to events in Dallas, and then gloating about them, was clearly far-right. So did Milteer, who prediction of, and later gloating over, the assassination was tape-recorded. Moreover, Milteer declared that the conspiracy to kill Kennedy originated in New Orleans, backed by considerable sums, not all donated by right-wingers. Milteer mentioned only one Louisiana politician (311), but Waldron does not reveal that name. I will go on a limb to say that I suspect the politician was the leader of Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish (county), Judge Leander Perez.

In 1952 when Judge Perez decided to endorse the Republican ticket of Eisenhower and Nixon for President, Plaquemines Parish voted over 93% for the Republicans - the highest percentage of any county in the entire nation.(Glen Jeansonne, Leander Perez: Boss of the Delta, p. 194) In November 1960 when courts ordered desegregation of two New Orleans schools, Perez urged defiance, and allowed whites to escape their integrated school by attending schools in neighboring St. Bernard Parish (also Perez=dominated). In 1961 CORE began its Freedom Rides, where CORE members on buses attempted to integrate bus stations from Washington, DC, to New Orleans. Most were stopped by brutal mobs or arresting police, and one bus was burnt. This made national and international headlines. It was rumored (not Jeansonne's biography, but my memory is the source for the rest of this paragraph - HM) that Perez then induced George Lincoln Rockwell to travel from his base in Virginia through the same route as the Greyhound buses to New Orleans on his "hate bus." Rockwell was leader of the American Nazi Party. Before entering New Orleans, local police demanded that he cover some of the signs that decorated his van - "Kill Commies, Queers, and Jews!" When in May 1961 Rockwell and some of his uniformed crew were arrested for picketing the film "Exodus," there were rumors that Guy Banister, a one-time Acting Superintendent of the NO Police, paid his bail. When Judge Perez went to the Hotel Roosevelt's Blue Room (possibly the premier NO night spot at that time), Ted Lewis was performing. One of his signature acts was to sing "Me and My Shadow," while a Black dancer in black clothing danced as his shadow.

The judge was not happy with this integrated entertainment. Perhaps he was aware that Ted Lewis had been born, Theodore Friedman. To express his displeasure, the judge purposely broke glasses where the shadow was to step, causing the Black to cut his foot. In the spring of 1969 Judge Perez passed on. In Plaquemines Parish, two young Black men entered a store and announced they wanted to purchase liquor to celebrate the death of the Judge. They were quickly arrested and sentenced to 6 month's hard labor. After serving only a few months, the NAACP succeeded in curtailing the sentence.

Why would Marcello have a low-level racial extremist like Milteer aware of the plot to kill Kennedy if this were merely a Mafia operation? Does this make sense?

Let me describe several incidents related to the question I just posed. It is truly amazing how different our relatives can be from each other and from ourselves. By the late 1950s I had become an integrationist in my native New Orleans. This amounted to little more than speaking in favor of the idea in high school and then college. That changed in September 1960 when I was among the seven arrested in the first lunch-counter sit-in in New Orleans. It occurred at the large Woolworth's on Canal and Rampart Streets. When my father heard of the sit-in in progress, he left work to try to get me away. Police had cordoned off the counter area, and would not allow anyone to pass. With our arrests, and our names on p. 1 of the local paper and on national TV (we did not see it as we were still in jail), it was now clear to all that I was a nlover. Although I moved from my parents' home so as not to endanger them, it did not matter. They received phone calls in the middle of the night, threatening to bomb the home. Thank God we had no restrictive gun control laws back then. My father easily borrowed a gun and bullets from a co-worker. After a few months, the spotlight of hatred moved to the other end of the city, for in November Perez and others were instigating resistance to the court-ordered desegregation of two public schools. I was suddenly old news. My dad felt safe enough to return the gun. Upon getting it back, his co-worker asked my father, "Why did you borrow so many bullets? Only one would have done the job." I was not very popular.

But one relative sought to help, - my crazy uncle. Of course, he probably thought of me as his crazy nephew. After my arrest with CORE for integration, my uncle sought to restore honor to the family, by sending money to George Lincoln Rockwell's organization. As a young child I once overheard him moaning over some beers, "Oh, if only Hitler had won." My uncle had been in the merchant marine and had risked his life during WWII to get supplies to the nations fighting against the Axis. But he did not agree with FDR's foreign policy. Meanwhile, I had been convicted of a felony (the sit-in), and was trying to survive. I certainly was not seeking another arrest, but I did continue to participate in various demos throughout the 1960s, any one of which might result in an arrest. Finally, in 1969 my car was followed by a police helicopter, and when I let a passenger out of the auto, he was immediately arrested. I decided then it was time to leave my native city.

I would occasionally see that uncle when he visited my parents. He had a special greeting for me, "How are the burr heads doing?" This would rile me a little, but I knew him well enough just to roll my eyes. Sometimes he would speak with my dad, but sometimes he would address me, "Oh, that Bobby! They're gonna get that Bobby!" He was referring to Atty. Gen Robert Kennedy who seemed to be pushing integration. I just tried to ignore him.

After a few years, I moved back with my parents and got a job teaching 5th grade in a new, private school. Around lunch one day, Mrs. Flagg, another 5th grade teacher called me to her class room across the hall. Hers was enjoying a free period for lunch, and one of her pupils had brought in a new item, a transistor radio. She told me to listen. Most of her class was playing, making lots of noise, while she and I craned our necks above the 10-year-old and his radio. I heard the main points, but could not leave my class unattended for long.

When I returned to my class, I informed them that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. The class cheered. I was stunned. One girl placed her head on the table and cried. She was the exception. That was November 1963. Sometime after that, probably early 1964, I again encountered my uncle. "What did I tell you, huh? What did I tell you?" Honestly, I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he became more explicit, "Didn't I tell you they were going to get him?" Suddenly, shocked, I realized what he was referring to. Now, I tried a counter. "But you said they were going to get Bobby!" "Well, they got the other one instead." This time, exasperated, I finally asked, "Who is this `they' you keep talking about?" He quickly responded, "The mob out in the parish." By the mob, he meant Marcello; by "out in the parish," he meant Jefferson Parish. When he said this, my parents resided one block from the Airline Highway and the Church with the Neon Bible. We were only a few blocks from Jefferson Parish and Marcello's office in the Town and Country Motel. My uncle's response simply confirmed my view that my uncle was crazy. Who in early 1964 was linking Carlos Marcello to the Kennedy assassination? This sounded ever more absurd. When he said this, I had already earned a BA and an MA from Tulane University. My uncle had finished 5rd grade. I was a scholar. He drove a taxi. It was easy to dismiss his ravings. But years later I could only wonder, were they really ravings? Or was I too arrogant to accept information when it was handed to me?

Despite the occasional repetition and lack of footnotes, and a few minor errors, Waldron has written a book that will be difficult to ignore.

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See also:

[Dec 05, 2018] Manufacturing Official Narrative by C.J. Hopkins

Guardian is just a propaganda outlet. That sad fact does not exclude the possibility of publishing really good articles, thouth. That still happens occasionally.
The fact that they follow MI6 and Foreign Office talking points in all foreign events coverage a is just a testament the GB is a "national security state". Nothing more, nothing less.
Notable quotes:
"... I'm not going to debunk the Guardian article here. It has been debunked by better debunkers than I (e.g., Jonathan Cook , Craig Murray , Glenn Greenwald , Moon of Alabama , and many others). ..."
"... The short version is, The Guardian 's Luke Harding, a shameless hack who will affix his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, secretly met with Julian Assange (and unnamed "Russians") on numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to conspire to collude to brainwash Americans into not voting for Clinton. Harding's earth-shaking allegations, which The Guardian prominently featured and flogged, were based on well, absolutely nothing, except the usual anonymous "intelligence sources." After actual journalists pointed this out, The Guardian quietly revised the piece ( employing the subjunctive mood rather liberally ), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended like they had never published it. ..."
"... By that time, of course, its purpose had been served. The story had been picked up and disseminated by other "respectable," "authoritative" outlets, and it was making the rounds on social media. Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, in an attempt to counter the above-mentioned debunkers (and dispel the doubts of anyone else still capable of any kind of critical thinking), Politico posted this ass-covering piece speculating that, if it somehow turned out The Guardian 's story was just propaganda designed to tarnish Assange and Trump well, probably, it had been planted by the Russians to make Luke Harding look like a moron. This ass-covering piece of speculative fiction, which was written by a former CIA agent, was immediately disseminated by liberals and "leftists" who are eagerly looking forward to the arrest, rendition, and public crucifixion of Assange. ..."
"... And this is why The Guardian will not be punished for publishing a blatantly fabricated story. Nor will Luke Harding be penalized for writing it. Luke Harding will be rewarded for writing it, as he has been handsomely rewarded throughout his career for loyally serving the ruling classes. Greenwald, on the other hand, is on thin ice. It will be instructive to see how far he pushes his confrontation with The Guardian regarding this story. ..."
"... It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. ..."
"... Those who are conforming to [official truth] are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so. ..."
"... The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative. ..."
"... It is important to realize that "the truth" is not going to "rouse the masses from their slumber" and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly "wake up," "see the truth" and start "the revolution." ..."
"... The distinction is simple. We can't know the truth about distant and complex events like 9/11 or JFK unless we were directly involved, and those people are all dead. For big events we have to rely on, or ignore, the official accounts. ..."
"... Given all this, still, we can approach an approximation of truth that some can agree on. Here is where the trouble starts . ..."
Dec 03, 2018 | www.unz.com

...First, let's look at a concrete example of our system manufacturing official narrative (aka "official truth" or "truth" -- note quotes ). I'm going to use The Guardian 's most recent blatantly fabricated article (" Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy ") as an example, but I could just as well have chosen any of a host of other fabricated stories disseminated by "respectable" outlets over the course of the last two years. The " Russian Propaganda Peddlers " story. The " Russia Might Have Poisoned Hillary Clinton " story. The " Russians Hacked the Vermont Power Grid " story. The " Golden Showers Russian Pee-Tape " story. The " Novichok Assassins " story. The " Bana Alabed Speaks Out " story. The " Trump's Secret Russian Server " story. The " Labour Anti-Semitism Crisis " story. The " Russians Orchestrated Brexit " story. The " Russia is Going to Hack the Midterms " story. The " Twitter Bots " story. And the list goes on.

I'm not going to debunk the Guardian article here. It has been debunked by better debunkers than I (e.g., Jonathan Cook , Craig Murray , Glenn Greenwald , Moon of Alabama , and many others).

The short version is, The Guardian 's Luke Harding, a shameless hack who will affix his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, secretly met with Julian Assange (and unnamed "Russians") on numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to conspire to collude to brainwash Americans into not voting for Clinton. Harding's earth-shaking allegations, which The Guardian prominently featured and flogged, were based on well, absolutely nothing, except the usual anonymous "intelligence sources." After actual journalists pointed this out, The Guardian quietly revised the piece ( employing the subjunctive mood rather liberally ), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended like they had never published it.

By that time, of course, its purpose had been served. The story had been picked up and disseminated by other "respectable," "authoritative" outlets, and it was making the rounds on social media. Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, in an attempt to counter the above-mentioned debunkers (and dispel the doubts of anyone else still capable of any kind of critical thinking), Politico posted this ass-covering piece speculating that, if it somehow turned out The Guardian 's story was just propaganda designed to tarnish Assange and Trump well, probably, it had been planted by the Russians to make Luke Harding look like a moron. This ass-covering piece of speculative fiction, which was written by a former CIA agent, was immediately disseminated by liberals and "leftists" who are eagerly looking forward to the arrest, rendition, and public crucifixion of Assange.

At this point, I imagine you're probably wondering what this has to do with manufacturing "truth." Because, clearly, this Guardian story was a lie a lie The Guardian got caught telling. I wish the "truth" thing was as simple as that (i.e., exposing and debunking the ruling classes' lies). Unfortunately, it isn't. Here is why.

Much as most people would like there to be one (and behave and speak as if there were one), there is no Transcendental Arbiter of Truth. The truth is what whoever has the power to say it is says it is. If we do not agree that that "truth" is the truth, there is no higher court to appeal to. We can argue until we are blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. No evidence we produce will make the slightest difference. The truth will remain whatever those with the power to say it is say it is.

Nor are there many "truths" (i.e., your truth and my truth). There is only one "truth" the "official truth". The "truth" according to those in power. This is the whole purpose of the concept of truth. It is the reason the concept of "truth" was invented (i.e., to render any other "truths" lies). It is how those in power control reality and impose their ideology on the masses (or their employees, or their students, or their children). Yes, I know, we very badly want there to be some "objective truth" (i.e., what actually happened, when whatever happened, JFK, 9-11, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Schrödinger's dead cat, the Big Bang, or whatever). There isn't. The truth is just a story a story that is never our story.

The "truth" is a story that power gets to tell, and that the powerless do not get to tell, unless they tell the story of those in power, which is always someone else's story. The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative. They either parrot the "truth" of the ruling classes or they utter heresies of one type or another. Naturally, the powerless do not regard themselves as heretics. They do not regard their "truth" as heresy. They regard their "truth" as the truth, which is heresy. The truth of the powerless is always heresy.

For example, while it may be personally comforting for some of us to tell ourselves that we know the truth about certain subjects (e.g., Russiagate, 9-11, et cetera), and to share our knowledge with others who agree with us, and even to expose the lies of the corporate media on Twitter, Facebook, and our blogs, or in some leftist webzine (or "fearless adversarial" outlet bankrolled by a beneficent oligarch), the ruling classes do not give a shit, because ours is merely the raving of heretics, and does not warrant a serious response.

Or all right, they give a bit of a shit, enough to try to cover their asses when a journalist of the stature of Glenn Greenwald (who won a Pulitzer and is frequently on television) very carefully and very respectfully almost directly accuses them of lying. But they give enough of a shit to do this because Greenwald has the power to hurt them, not because of any regard for the truth. This is also why Greenwald has to be so careful and respectful when directly confronting The Guardian , or any other corporate media outlet, and state that their blatantly fabricated stories could, theoretically, turn out to be true. He can't afford to cross the line and end up getting branded a heretic and consigned to Outer Mainstream Darkness, like Robert Fisk, Sy Hersh, Jonathan Cook, John Pilger, Assange, and other such heretics.

Look, I'm not trying to argue that it isn't important to expose the fabrications of the corporate media and the ruling classes. It is terribly important. It is mostly what I do (albeit usually in a more satirical fashion). At the same time, it is important to realize that "the truth" is not going to "rouse the masses from their slumber" and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly "wake up," "see the truth" and start "the revolution." People already know the truth the official truth, which is the only truth there is. Those who are conforming to it are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so.

And this is why The Guardian will not be punished for publishing a blatantly fabricated story. Nor will Luke Harding be penalized for writing it. Luke Harding will be rewarded for writing it, as he has been handsomely rewarded throughout his career for loyally serving the ruling classes. Greenwald, on the other hand, is on thin ice. It will be instructive to see how far he pushes his confrontation with The Guardian regarding this story.

As for Julian Assange, I'm afraid he is done for. The ruling classes really have no choice but to go ahead and do him at this point. He hasn't left them any other option. Much as they are loathe to create another martyr, they can't have heretics of Assange's notoriety running around punching holes in their "truth" and brazenly defying their authority. That kind of stuff unsettles the normals, and it sets a bad example for the rest of us heretics.

#

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .

Manufacturing Truth

James Forrestal , says: December 3, 2018 at 6:26 pm GMT

Good piece. I think there's another layer, though.

The truth or falsehood of individual facts about the physical world can often be determined with near-certainty. But when it comes to history, or "news" about current events/ politics, reality is much too complex to address directly. Too many individual facts to be comprehensible, let alone useful.

We must pick, choose, emphasize, or ignore particular elements, and arrange them into some kind of structure, in order to form a useful narrative. Or in the case of "news," the legacy media oligarchy largely performs this function for us -- we simply passively accept/ adopt their narrative. Or, in many cases, "choose" between the closely-related variants of that narrative offered by the "liberal" vs. "conservative" press.

This process of abstraction, simplification, and organization inevitably involves data loss. So no narrative is "true" in the same sense that individual facts about the real world are true. But some narratives incorporate large amounts of "facts" that are demonstrably false, and some are more useful/ descriptive/ predictive than others. No one engaged in this process is "objective." They -- or we -- are all in some way part of the story. It should be self-evident that some narratives are more useful to the perceived interests of owners of major media outlets than others, and that these will assume a much more prominent place in their coverage than ones that are deleterious to those interests.

Ideally, most people would take these factors into account when evaluating the "news," and maintain a much more skeptical attitude than they typically do. But there are several factors that prevent this.

One is simply time/ efficiency. These individual narratives, taken together, support -- and are supported by -- our overall worldview. There aren't enough hours in the day to be constantly skeptical about everything, especially since the major tools of distortion involved in constructing mainstream narratives tend to be selection bias/ memory-holing, with obvious lies about known facts (like the Guardian story referenced here) used only sparingly. It's simply not practical to to constantly consider potentially "better" narratives, and to reevaluate one's worldview based on these.

And which narrative we believe often has more to do with perceived social pressure/ social acceptability than with "truth." As you put it,

Those who are conforming to it are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so.

Mass media pushing a common narrative creates an artificial perception of social consensus. Creating, or even finding, alternative narratives means fighting the inertia of this perceived consensus, and potentially suffering social costs for believing in the "wrong" one. The social role of narratives is largely independent of their "truth" -- if what you're "supposed" to believe is highly implausible, that actually gives it higher value as a signal of loyalty to the establishment.

It's probably best to maintain a resolutely agnostic attitude toward most "news" items, unless one is particularly interested in that particular event. " Why are they pushing this particular story?" "Why now ?" and " What are they trying to accomplish here?" are often more useful questions than "Is it true?"

It's not a new issue -- only exacerbated by the advent of mass visual media:
"Propaganda" -- Edward Bernays (1928)
"The Free Press"– Hilaire Belloc (1918)

Kratoklastes , says: December 3, 2018 at 11:17 pm GMT
I get what Hopkins is trying to do here, but redefining terms (i.e., "truth") doesn't do what he thinks it does.

The truth is not ' what most people think '; it's not ' what we are told to believe '; it's not ' the official narrative '.

There is a useful cautionary tale embedded in Hopkins' piece, but he doesn't tease it out properly.

Take this excerpt:

The truth is what whoever has the power to say it is says it is. If we do not agree that that "truth" is the truth, there is no higher court to appeal to. We can argue until we are blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. No evidence we produce will make the slightest difference. The truth will remain whatever those with the power to say it is say it is.

With significant caveats, it is a reasonable description of the way the political world works: if the political class decides that its interests are best served by declaring that a specific narrative X is 'true', it will obtain immediate compliance from about half the livestock, and can then rely on force (peer pressure; subsidy or taxation; state coercion) to get an absolute majority of the herd to declare that they accept the 'truth' of X .

If X is objectively false, too bad.

Try to run a legal argument based on the objective falsity of a thing that the political class has deemed to be true: you'll be shit outta luck.

This is highly relevant where I am sitting: here are two examples – one really obvious, one a bit less so (but far more important because of its radical implications).

Obvious Example: Drug Dogs

Recent research has shown that drug sniffing dogs give false positive signals between 60% and 80% of the time – i.e., in terms of identifying people who are in actual physical possession of drugs at any point in time, drug sniffing dogs perform worse than a coin toss.

Note that this is before considering that the dog's handler is often pointing the dog at a target that the handler thinks is likely to be carrying drugs. (Although in reality, drug dogs are paraded around at concerts and in public spaces, sniffing every passer-by).

However there is an Act of Parliament (capitalise all the magic words) that asserts that a signal from a drug sniffing dog is sufficient to qualify as what Americans call "probable cause" – i.e., reasonable suspicion for a search.

Does anyone think that evidence should be admissible if it results from a search conducted based on 'probable cause' derived from a method that produces worse outcomes than tossing a coin?

Judges will tie themselves into absolute epistemological knots to get that evidence admitted – and they will refuse to permit defence Counsel from adducing evidence about drug dog inaccuracy because since the defendant actually did have drugs in their possession, the dog didn't signal falsely.

In other words, the judge conflates posterior probability with prior probability; the prior probability that the dog is correct, is 10%-40%; this should not suffice to generate probable cause (or 'reasonable suspicion).

More Interesting Example: 'Representative' Democracy

In general, Western governments assert that their legitimacy stems from two primary sources: some founding set of principles (usually a constitution – written or otherwise), and 'representativeness' (including ratification of the constitution by a representative mechanism, for those places with written foundational documents).

The Arrow Impossibility Theorem [1,2] and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [3,4], both show that there is no way of accurately determining group preferences using an ordinal voting mechanism.

What this boils down to, is that representativeness is a lie – and it's a lie before any consideration of voting outcomes ; it's a meta -problem (the problem that ordinal voting cannot do what it is claimed to do – viz ., accurately identify the 'will of the people'/'social preferences'/'what the people want').

Beyond the meta-problem, there is also the actual counting problem: no government has ever been elected having obtained the votes of an outright bare majority, i.e., 50%-plus-1 of the entire eligible franchise. (It's more like 25-35% for most parliamentary systems – for US presidential elections in the full-franchise period, the winner is voted for by 29% of the eligible population; you would be horrified to look at US Senate results).

So when the new unhappy lords (and their Little Eichmann bureaucrat enablers) promulgate laws based on assertions of legitimacy because of a constitutional Grundnorm and/or the representative nature of government both of those things are pretty obvious furphies; they are objectively not 'truth' and no amount of heel-clicking and wishing will make it so.

Which brings us to a key legal aphorism that has a jurisprudential history going back four centuries: Ratio legis est anima legis, et mutata legis ratione, mutatur ex lex – which dates from Milborn's case ( Coke 7a KB [1609]).

The reason for a law is the soul of the law, and if the reason for a law has changed, the law is changed .

What this means – explicitly – is that " no law can survive the [extinction of the] reasons on which it is founded ".

American courts re-expressed this as " cessante ratione legis, cessat ipsa lex " (the reason for a law having ceased, the law itself ceases) – e.g., in Funk v. United States , 290 US 371 (1933) in which Justice Sutherland opined –

This means that no law can survive the reasons on which it is founded. It needs no statute to change it; it abrogates itself . If the reasons on which a law rests are overborne by opposing reasons, which in the progress of society gain a controlling force, the old law, though still good as an abstract principle, and good in its application to some circumstances, must cease to apply as a controlling principle to the new circumstances.

(Emphasis mine)

Again: try running this argument in a court: " The asserted basis for all laws promulgated by the government, is provably false. Under a doctrine with a 4-century jurisprudential provenance, the law itself is void ."

See how far you get.

So Hopkins makes a good-but-obvious point – power does not respect either rights or truth; as such it does you no good whatsoever to have the actual truth on your side. He should have made the point better.

References (links are to PDFs of each paper)

[1] Arrow (1950). " A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare " Journal of Political Economy 58 (4): 328–346

[2] Geanakoplos, John (2005). " Three Brief Proofs of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem " Economic Theory 26 (1): 211–215

[3] Gibbard (1973). " Manipulation of voting schemes: a general result " Econometrica 41 (4): 587–601.

[4] Satterthwaite (April 1975). " Strategy-proofness and Arrow's Conditions: Existence and Correspondence Theorems for Voting Procedures and Social Welfare Functions " Journal of Economic Theory 10: 187–217.

Brabantian , says: December 3, 2018 at 11:18 pm GMT
C J Hopkins, despite some good quotes and insights above, regrettably falls into the trap of peddling Derrida-tier relativistic nonsense, playing a word game about 'truth', as if 'truth' was not real merely because most people have strong incentives to avoid being devoted to it

Where you stand depends upon where you sit, etc., Karl Marx's dictums about economic and power positions shaping consciousness, and of course the century-old classic:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

from Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Hopkins more or less repeats Sinclair when he says

Those who are conforming to [official truth] are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so.

Despite selling-out truth to the relativism devil in some passages, Hopkins nevertheless creates some quotable, including the particularly insightful:

The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative.

The following notion of Hopkins is seen now and then in the alt-sphere, but always bears repeating

It is important to realize that "the truth" is not going to "rouse the masses from their slumber" and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly "wake up," "see the truth" and start "the revolution."

... ... ...

Kratoklastes , says: December 3, 2018 at 11:28 pm GMT
@Tulip

The coin of truth is iron and blood.

That's absolutely, 100% wrong.

Iron and blood are the tools used to force people to accept what isn't true. (Another way to tell: it was uttered by a fucking politician – a cunt who wanted to live in palaces paid for by the sweat of other people's brows).

Truth does not need violence to propagate itself: in a completely-peaceful system of free exchange, bad ideas (of which lies are a subset) will get driven out of the market place because they will fail to conform to ground truth.

Falsehood requires violence (arguably it is a form of violence: fraud is 'violent' because it causes its victims to misallocate their resources or to deform their preferences and expectations).

In a very real sense, truth does not need friends: all it requires is an absence of powerful enemies.

RobinG , says: December 4, 2018 at 12:21 am GMT
@James Forrestal

Occupation of the American Mind: Israel's Public Relations War in the United States

https://www.occupationmovie.org/

This film shows a great example of propaganda in action. Free to watch now and this link also includes a short version and a trailer.

Jett Rucker , says: Website December 4, 2018 at 3:04 am GMT
When I tell any Truth, it is not for the sake of Convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who Do.

~ William Blake, 1810

polistra , says: December 4, 2018 at 7:33 am GMT
The distinction is simple. We can't know the truth about distant and complex events like 9/11 or JFK unless we were directly involved, and those people are all dead. For big events we have to rely on, or ignore, the official accounts.

But we CAN know the truth about our own situation, our own neighborhood, and our own families. The current riots in France are a concrete ASSERTION of local truth against the blatant and condescending official lies. The majority of France is getting poorer and suffering more from migrant crime. Macron insists that starvation is necessary to serve Gaia, and crime is necessary to serve Juncker. The people would prefer to have a leader that serves France.

The scalpel , says: Website December 4, 2018 at 1:07 pm GMT
@FB Scientific truth is limited by two factors – assumptions, and hidden variables. For example, we might drop a brick in a vacuum and believe that it falls at 9.8 m/s squared. Here, we make the assumption that the force of gravity is constant. And for most of history we were unaware of the hidden variable of relativity to the speed of light.

So, assuming (LOL) that we are able to eliminate all assumptions and account for all hidden variables, there is a scientific truth. That is ASSUMING we are not just a simulation in someone elses computer!

Given all this, still, we can approach an approximation of truth that some can agree on. Here is where the trouble starts .

DFH , says: December 4, 2018 at 4:05 pm GMT
What is truth? – John 18:38
FB , says: December 4, 2018 at 4:26 pm GMT
@The scalpel LOL and then there is the 'observer effect' also especially in good old quantum mechanics in the end scientific truth does boil down to what 'some can agree on'
Tulip , says: December 4, 2018 at 5:40 pm GMT
@Kratoklastes Strength is the production of force over distance. That is to say, force is a quantifiable, physical phenomenon that, deconstruct it as much as you want, will hit you like a tsunami whether you believe it or not.

Force only works because there is a real world that transcends philosophical bullshit and marketing.

The subjective piece is will: victory is attained when the enemies will to resist is crushed. Through the repeated use of physical force, eventually any enemy can be worn down and vanquished.

The world is finite, desire is infinite, and for every desire and appetite, there is a will. As multiple wills will that they attain their infinite desires in a finite world, there will always be a conflict of will, which will always ultimately be resolved by force. Which means ultimately, despite the rich imaginations and appetites of humans, and their related striving, physical force will ultimately rule the day, and conquer, condition, and constrain the mental life of mankind.

Of course, desire and appetite will not take no for an answer, and in their frustration, they will imagine, fantasize, and conceptualize rationales for why this is not so. This is the nature of our desires, and in good times of prosperity and peace, they may even bend our reason in the direction of these appetites and fantasies, until the instincts for self preservation and endurance rust, and are even forgotten. But like the moon revealed by a passing cloud, the perpetual war of human existence will inevitably reassert itself, and those that have prepared for the inevitable will vanquish those who were content to daydream when they should have been preparing.

TimothyPMadden , says: December 4, 2018 at 8:52 pm GMT
What is truth ?

Truth is a word .

After reading the article and the aggregate comments, I am strengthened in my belief that the physics analogy of Schrödinger's cat is among the most useful (and notwithstanding the otherwise valid criticism of it in the comments). In the same way that the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, does not purport to define a given word, per se , but rather gives a detailed description of how the word has in fact been used over the years and centuries.

I refer to my version of Schrödinger's cat as counter-sense words or oscillating-contradictions .

Oscillating contradictions and cogno-linguistic manipulation

The primary means by which corporate supremacy, for example, is achieved and maintained in practice is via the maintenance and use of a small arsenal of about two dozen critical counter-sense or yo-yo -like words/terms that are asserted or claimed to mean either "X" or "Minus-X" at the option of the decision-maker.

Among the most important and sui generis (in a class of its own) is the word person which is held to mean a living, breathing being of conscience (literally a being of equity) with the rights, powers and privileges of such being ("X"), or else it can mean a corporate entity which is a notional/inanimate item of property to be bought and sold and otherwise traded for profit in the stock and financial markets ("Minus-X").

By way of example/demonstration of the ongoing cognitive manipulation process, if someone had managed to hit the judges of the U.S. Supreme Court with a blast of truth-ray just before they announced their decision in Citizens United, here is what we may have got instead:

[MORE]

We here at the Supreme Court are part of what can be fairly and broadly referred to as an arm of the entrenched-money-power.

At certain times and under certain circumstances it is to our enormous advantage over you the masses that corporations be natural-persons-in-law with the rights, powers and privileges of a natural person or living being of conscience.

At other times and other circumstances it is to our enormous advantage over you the masses that corporations be items of property that can be actively bought and sold and traded for profit in the stock and financial markets.

Your laughable naiveté is manifest in your expectation that you are going to receive a definitive answer from this Court, or even that it is possible for us to give you one. Among the foundational purposes of this Court is to actively prevent that question from being answered definitively at all. The instant we give a definitive answer, the game is over.

Whatever answer we give you must perpetuate the systematized delusion that the same concept (corporate personhood) can mean either X (a living being of conscience), or minus-X (an item of property), depending on the ever-changing needs of the decider.

So our current answer is that a corporation is a natural-person-in-law with the rights, powers and privileges of a natural person, except when it isn't. We'll let you know next time whether that situation has changed in the meantime.

Essentially all counter-sense words/terms follow that same template .

Notwithstanding that the respective concepts are logically and objectively mutually exclusive , the judges of the Courts (and the broadly-defined financial-world/social-control-structure) maintain that it can be either or both , and we'll let you know if and when it becomes important.

So a corporate person has a right of free speech when giving money to influence political parties, but not to object to itself being sold as a piece of property in the stock and financial markets or when it is acquired in a merger or takeover financed by its own assets. If a corporation has the legal capacity and rights of a natural person, then how can it be owned as the legal property of another? The purpose of the Courts is to ensure that that question is never presented in that way.

After person , the remaining most significant counter-sense or yo-yo -like words are (surprise surprise) essentially all money-and-finance-based, and the most important among these is the word principal and its role in facilitating illegal front-loading or ex-temporal fraud (interest illegally and unlawfully compounded in advance).

Is the amount of principal the actual or net amount advanced by the creditor and received by the debtor for their own use and control?

Or is it the amount that the debtor agrees that they owe regardless of the amount received?

Is the amount of principal a question of fact ? Or of the agreement of parties ?

[Here is the premise / offer that is referenced immediately below:]

Lender (e.g., typical second-mortgage lender): "I will loan you $10,000 at 20% per annum provided that you sign and give to me a marketable security that claims or otherwise purports to evidence that I have loaned you $15,000 at 10% per annum, plus an undisclosed and unregistered side-agreement and cheque (check) back to me for a bonus or loan fee of $5,000 as a payment from the nominal proceeds."

In the process example used above, what is the principal amount of the loan? Is it $10,000 because that is the factual net amount invested by the creditor and received by the debtor for their own use? Or is it $15,000 because that is the amount that the debtor is required to falsely agree that they have received and owe as a condition of the loan? Or is it $20,000 because that is the total cash-equivalent/money assets ($15,000 mortgage + $5,000 cheque) that the debtor has to give to the creditor?

Is it a noun/fact ? Or is it an adjective/opinion merely pretending to be a noun? All debt and therefore money in the world today depends on the answer to that question that theoretically cannot exist.

Principal is a special type (and most significant form) of counter-sense word or oscillating contradiction where dictionaries normally only give one sense, while commercial practice defines the contrary. It would be very difficult to put the Whatever-the-debtor-agrees-that-they-owe sense into a dictionary, because the fraud against meaning (as well as the criminal law) is manifest in spelling it out, and ever more so in more specialized financial dictionaries.

So virtually every legal, financial, accounting, and ordinary English dictionary and/or regulation defines it to the effect "The actual amount invested, loaned or advanced to the debtor/borrower net of any interest, discount, premium or fees", while virtually every financial security in the real world at least implicitly incorporates the fraudulent alternative/contrary meaning.

This in turn allows the academic world to function on the rational/factual definition, while the markets maintain a wholly contradictory deemed or pretended reality, while both remain oblivious to the contradiction.

Thus principal means the nominal creditor's actual and net investment, unless it doesn't .

With this class of counter-sense word where there is a necessary and definitive answer, the real job of the judges of the Courts becomes to make certain that the question is never officially asked, and under no circumstances is it to be definitively answered.

With just one of these words you can theoretically steal the Earth . With a financial system that is relatively saturated with them, such becomes child's play . With these rules a group of competently-trained chimpanzees otherwise pulling levers at random could do as well as the so-called wizards of Wall Street .

And significantly, these oscillating contradictions enable the judges to be self-righteous in the extreme on behalf of the entrenched-money-power, while looting the little people of the product of their labour.

As in: You have received the principal amount ($10,000) and you are going to pay back the principal amount ($15,000) plus the ever-accumulating (and super-leveraged) interest upon it according to your contract, while the meaning of the word oscillates between fact and opinion – between a noun and an adjective – according to what the judge needs it to mean (or accommodate) at any given instant in time.

It seems impossibly obvious in this simple example, but with several of them orchestrated simultaneously or sequentially, anything can truly be made to mean anything .

A partial list of the most critical oscillating-contradicitions includes: loan, credit, discount, interest, rate-of-interest, agreement, contract, security, repay, restitution, etc., all of which mean either "X" or its conceptual opposite "Minus-X" at the option of the entrenched-money-power whose vast financial fortunes are founded on such cogno-linguistic arbitrage .

Here are what I believe to be four essential tools needed to triangulate reality via congo-linguistic parallax . The first two are mine, and the last two are from the American and English Courts, respectively.

1. Humans are highly cogno-linguistic . We perceive reality very largely as a function of the language that we use to describe it. Most everyone inherently believes and presumes that you have to be able to think something before you can say it. The greater reality is that, above a certain base level of perception and communication, you have to have the words and language by which to say something before you can think it .

2. The world is ever-increasingly controlled and administered by people who genuinely believe whatever is necessary for the answer they need. Administrative agents of the entrenched-money-power have solved the criminal-law enigma of mens rea or guilty mind by evolving or devolving (take your pick) into professional schizophrenics who genuinely believe whatever they need to believe for the answer they need, and who communicate among themselves subconsciously by how they name things. They suffer a cogno-linguistically-induced diminished capacity that renders them incapable of perceiving reality beyond labels .

3. Their core business model or modus operandi is the systematized delusion :

"A "systematized delusion" is one based on a false premise, pursued by a logical process of reasoning to an insane conclusion ; there being one central delusion, around which other aberrations of the mind converge." Taylor v. McClintock, 112 S.W. 405, 412, 87 Ark. 243. (West's Judicial Words and Phrases (1914)).

4.

One must not confuse the object of a conspiracy [to defraud] with the means by which it is intended to be carried out. Scott v. Metropolitan Police Commissioner [1974] 60 Cr. App. R. 124 H.L.

I have long since abandoned my search for truth, per se, since I came to realize that the best I can ever do is to constantly strive to move closer to it. With apologies to the physicists, Truth is the Limit of Infinite Good Faith .

The Scalpel , says: Website December 5, 2018 at 12:34 am GMT
@Tulip " which will always ultimately be resolved by force."

Right there is where you lost the plot. That statement is just your opinion and it cannot be proven true. The rest of your argument falls victim to this logical error.

" and those that have prepared for the inevitable will vanquish those who were content to daydream when they should have been preparing."

Also, just your opinion. For example, the "dreamer" might die still comforted by his/her dreams, while the "prepper" might waste his life witing for the "inevitable' that never arrives.

redmudhooch , says: December 5, 2018 at 2:15 am GMT
Truth shall set you free.

For the First Time Since 9/11, Federal Gov't Takes Steps to Prosecute the Use of Explosives to Destroy WTCs

https://thefreethoughtproject.com/911-lawyers-petition-grand-jury-explosives/

In what can be described as a monumental step forward in the relentless pursuit of 9/11 truth, a United States Attorney has agreed to comply with federal law requiring submission to a Special Grand Jury of evidence that explosives were used to bring down the World Trade Centers.

The Lawyers' Committee for 9/11 Inquiry successfully submitted a petition to the federal government demanding that the U.S. Attorney present to a Special Grand Jury extensive evidence of yet-to-be-prosecuted federal crimes relating to the destruction of three World Trade Center Towers on 9/11 (WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7).

After waiting months for the reply, the U.S. Attorney responded in a letter, noting that they will comply with the law.

Some good documentary films here to watch for free:

http://metanoia-films.org/psywar/

Heres a couple more. Occupation of the American Mind is very good. All of John Pilgers films are great.

James Forrestal , says: December 5, 2018 at 3:58 am GMT

@Wizard of Oz

My question/quibble relates to your objection to the use of sniffer dogs to establish probable cause for search because it is no better than a coin toss. That seems fallacious if, according to your figures, the dogs sniff 500 people and get excited by 10 of them of which 3 are correctly identified and 7 are false positives.

Yeah. The concepts of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value might be very helpful in assessing this.

[Dec 03, 2018] One skilled researcher directs readers to the Warren Commission, where buried deep inside one volume is a finding that Oswald's rife was inoperable, certainly unable to function as a precise assassination weapon. Plus Oswald was a lousy shot to begin with.

Dec 03, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Posa , 4 hours ago link

But the internet has largely disabled the gigantic CIA fog-machine. Thousands of skilled researchers quickly blow apart the propaganda line from the Deep State which is why there's an hysterical reach these days to shut down the 'net (but still keep it open enough to sell lots of stuff and nake money for the Predator Class).

Take the JFK assassination. One skilled researcher directs readers to the Warren Commission, where buried deep inside one volume is a finding that Oswald's rife was inoperable, certainly unable to function as a precise assassination weapon. Plus Oswald was a lousy shot to begin with. Yet Military sharpshooters had to add parts just to site the weapon and fire. This info in the WC pretty much excludes Oswald as the lone assassin. Without the 'net, how many people could find this info themselves.

9/11? Several researchers and web sites disclosed findings of a support network for the alQ hijackers run by Saudi intelligence and the Royal family (the 28 pages inside the Congressional 9/11 Inquiry); FBI informants providing financing, housing and other logistical support to the hijackers; CIA knowledge that alQ had entered the US 18 months before 9/11 and hid this knowledge etc.

Ditto for the OKC bombing (where local TV found bombs inside the Federal Building, which blew away the FBI narrative about McVeigh)... ditto for the FBI role in handing out explosives to the perps at the first WTC bombing etc. etc.

All this info, including news reports are up on the web even today... So with this kind of info available for large numbers of people to find, the only tactic left for the deep state psy-war operations to function is complete martial law in an Orwellian Police State. At that point the game is over and the US collapses as a nation.

[Dec 03, 2018] From Killing Kennedy To Kremlin Collusion - Deep State Forced Out Of The Shadows

Dec 03, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

From Killing Kennedy To Kremlin Collusion - Deep State Forced Out Of The Shadows

by Tyler Durden Sat, 12/01/2018 - 20:15 150 SHARES Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog, The Deadliest Operation

Choose your battles wisely...

One month to the day after President Kennedy's assassination, the Washington Post published an article by former president Harry Truman.

I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency -- CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.

Truman had envisioned the CIA as an impartial information and intelligence collector from "every available source."

But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.

Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.

I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions -- and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.

Truman found, to his dismay, that the CIA had ranged far afield.

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue -- and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

The article appeared in the Washington Post's morning edition, but not the evening edition.

Truman reveals two naive assumptions. He thought a government agency could be apolitical and objective. Further, he believed the CIA's role could be limited to information gathering and analysis, eschewing "cloak and dagger operations." The timing and tone of the letter may have been hints that Truman thought the CIA was involved in Kennedy's assassination. If he did, he also realized an ex-president couldn't state his suspicions without troublesome consequences.

Even the man who signed the CIA into law had to stay in the shadows, the CIA's preferred operating venue. The CIA had become the exact opposite of what Truman envisioned and what its enabling legislation specified. Within a few years after its inauguration in 1947, it was neck-deep in global cloak and dagger and pushing agenda-driven, slanted information and outright disinformation not just within the government, but through the media to the American people.

The CIA lies with astonishing proficiency. It has made an art form of "plausible deniability." Like glimpsing an octopus in murky waters, you know it's there, but it shoots enough black ink to obscure its movements. Murk and black ink make it impossible for anyone on the outside to determine exactly what it does or has done. Insiders, even the director, are often kept in the dark.

For those on the trail of CIA and the other intelligence agencies' lies and skullduggery, the agencies give ground glacially and only when they have to. What concessions they make often embody multiple layers of back-up lies. It can take years for an official admission -- the CIA didn't officially confess its involvement in the 1953 coup that deposed Iranian leader Mohammad Mosaddeq until 2013 -- and even then details are usually not forthcoming. Many of the so-called exposés of the intelligence agencies are in effect spook-written for propaganda or damage control.

The intelligence agencies monitor virtually everything we do. They have tentacles reaching into every aspect of contemporary society, exercising control in pervasive but mostly unknown ways. Yet, every so often some idiot writes an op-ed or bloviates on TV, bemoaning the lack of trust the majority of Americans have in "their" government and wondering why. The wonder is that anyone still trusts the government.

The intelligence agency fog both obscures and corrodes. An ever increasing number of Americans believe that a shadowy Deep State pulls the strings. Most major stories since World War II -- Korea, Vietnam, Kennedy's assassination, foreign coups, the 1960s student unrest, civil rights agitation, and civic disorder, Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9/11, domestic surveillance, and many more -- have intelligence angles. However, determining what those angles are plunges you into the miasma perpetuated by the agencies and their media accomplices.

The intelligence agencies and captive media's secrecy, disinformation, and lies make it futile to mount a straightforward attack against them. It's like attacking a citadel surrounded by swamps and bogs that afford no footing, making advance impossible. Their deadliest operation has been against the truth. In a political forum, how does one challenge an adversary who controls most of the information necessary to discredit, and ultimately reform or eliminate that adversary?

You don't fight where your opponent wants you to fight. What the intelligence apparatus fears most is a battle of ideas. Intelligence, the military, and the reserve currency are essential component of the US's confederated global empire. During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump questioned a few empire totems and incurred the intelligence leadership's wrath, demonstrating how sensitive and vulnerable they are on this front. The transparent flimsiness of their Russiagate concoction further illustrates the befuddlement. Questions are out in the open and are usually based on facts within the public domain. They move the battle from the murk to the light, unfamiliar and unwelcome terrain.

The US government, like Oceania, switches enemies as necessary. That validates military and intelligence; lasting peace would be intolerable. After World War II the enemy was the USSR and communism, which persisted until the Soviet collapse in 1991. The 9/11 tragedy offered up a new enemy, Islamic terrorism.

Seventeen years later, after a disastrous run of US interventions in the Middle East and Northern Africa and the rout of Sunni jihadists in Syria by the combined forces of the Syrian government, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, it's clear that Islamic terrorism is no longer a threat that stirs the paranoia necessary to feed big military and intelligence budgets . For all the money they've spent, intelligence has done a terrible job of either anticipating terrorist strikes or defeating them in counterinsurgency warfare

So switch the enemy again, now it's Russia and China. The best insight the intelligence community could offer about those two is that they've grown stronger by doing the opposite of the US. For the most part they've stayed in their own neighborhoods. They accept that they're constituents, albeit important ones, of a multipolar global order. Although they'll use big sticks to protect their interests, carrots like the Belt and Road Initiative further their influence much better than the US's bullets and bombs.

If the intelligence complex truly cared about the country, they might go public with the observation that the empire is going broke. However, raising awareness of this dire threat -- as opposed to standard intelligence bogeymen -- might prompt reexamination of intelligence and military budgets and the foreign policy that supports them. Insolvency will strangle the US's exorbitantly expensive interventionism. It will be the first real curb on the intelligence complex since World War II, but don't except any proactive measures beforehand from those charged with foreseeing the future.

Conspiracy theories, a term popularized by the CIA to denigrate Warren Commission skeptics, are often proved correct. However, trying to determine the truth behind intelligence agency conspiracies is a time and energy-consuming task, usually producing much frustration and little illumination. Instead, as Caitlin Johnstone recently observed , we're better off fighting on moral and philosophical grounds the intelligence complex and the rest of the government's depredations that are in plain sight.

Attack the intellectual foundations of empire and you attack the whole rickety edifice, including intelligence, that supports it. Tell the truth and you threaten those who deal in lies . Champion sanity and logic and you challenge the insane irrationality of the powers that be. They are daunting tasks, but less daunting than trying to excavate and clean the intelligence sewer.


bogbeagle , 1 hour ago link

I sometimes wonder whether the Bond films are a psy-op.

I mean, the 'hero' is a psycho-killer ... the premise of the films is 'any means to an end' ... they promote the ridiculous idea that you can be 'licensed to kill', and it's no longer murder ... and they build a strong association between the State and glamour.

Bond makes a virtue out of 'following orders', when in reality, it's a Sin.

WTFUD , 25 minutes ago link

Can't remember which Section of MI6 Ian Fleming (novelist 007.5) worked but he came into contact with my Hero, the best double-agent Cambridge, maybe World, has Ever produced, Kim Philby. Fleming was a lightweight compared to him and was most likely provided the Funds, by MI6 to titillate the Masses, spread the Word of Deep State.

Norfry , 2 hours ago link

The article makes many good points but still falls into use of distorting bs language.

For example, "after a disastrous run of US interventions" - well, they stole Libya's wealth and destroyed the country: mission accomplished; that's what they were trying to do. It was not an ""intervention", it was a f***ing war of aggression based on lies.

StarGate , 2 hours ago link

Well the good news is that folks now know there is deep State, shadow govt, puppet masters, fake news MSM mockingbird programming, satanic "musik/ pop" promoters, etc.

Not everyone knows but more know, and some are now questioning the Matrix sensations they have. That they have not been told the Truth.

Eventually humanity will awaken and get on track, how long it will take is unknown.

The CIA is a symptom of the problem but not the whole problem. Primarily it is the deception that it sows, the confusion and false conclusions that the easily led fill their heads with.

Now that you know there are bad guys out there...

Find someone to love, even if it is a puppy or a guppy. Simplify your needs, and commit small acts of kindness on a regular basis. The World will heal, it may be a rocky convalescence, yet Good triumphs in the end.

[Dec 02, 2018] CIA Officials Continue Efforts To Marginalize President Trump

Dec 02, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Caius Keys , 6 hours ago link

CIA Officials Continue Efforts To Marginalize President Trump Via Washington Post

There is a particular transparency of motive which becomes clear, and reconciles all inquiry, when an interested observer accepts a particular media framework:

Hadenough1000 , 4 hours ago link

Arab brennan

was arab Obamas weaponizing king

dumbocrats you put Arabs in total power??? 😳😳

After the rapist Clinton's Arabs burned 3000 Americans to death???

what possibly could go wrong😜😜

Caius Keys , 4 hours ago link

Bushes love SA long time https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/12/its-time-to-stop-holding-saudi-arabias-hand-gcc-summit-camp-david/

CatInTheHat , 6 hours ago link

"the rout of Sunni jihadists in Syria by the combined forces of the Syrian government, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, it's clear that Islamic terrorism is no longer a threat that stirs the paranoia necessary to feed big military and intelligence budgets . For all the money they've spent, intelligence has done a terrible job of either anticipating terrorist strikes or defeating them in counterinsurgency warfare"

Excuse me,but WTF??

It's the US,NATO, Israhell and Saudis that created ISIS, with the above mentioned spending BILLIONS to combat ISIS in Syria.

The war on terror is a hoax. The lame exploitation of Arabs and Islam to manufacture consent for war on Iraq, starting with Mossad planting of low yield thermal nuke weapons that brought the Towers down..Saudis were the patsies.

All of this with blessing of Zionists banksters and US Treasury& Fed Reserve.

[Dec 02, 2018] JFK MURDER SOLVED - Reward

Dec 02, 2018 | jfkmurdersolved.com

Did the Bushes help to kill JFK?

If nothing else, these pages will show the reader the following:

Shall we say: "Only in America, the land of unlimited opportunities"?

================================================

+ All three generations Bush are members of a most powerful and most secret society. It's called The order of Skull and Bones. Those who want to learn more about Skull and Bones can do so by clicking here . Or read this book click here.

And those who argue that Skull and Bones is just a harmless fraternity or boy scout's club, may ask themselves whether it is okay for leaders of open and democratic societies, to be members of secret organizations whose agendas are not to be disclosed to the public.

"My senior year, I joined Skull & Bones, a secret society, so secret, I can't say anything more." George W. Bush, President of the United States
See George W. Bush admitting his membership of Skull and Bones by clicking here
The unauthorized biography of George H.W. Bush can be read here
Where were you, George?
+ Prescott Bush (father of George) made his fortune by financing the war effort of Adolph Hitler together with his banking partners and fellow "bonesmen" Averell and Roland Harriman. Prescott was stripped of his holdings in the Union Banking Corporation in 1942 under the "Trading with the Enemy Act".

"On March 19, 1934, Prescott Bush handed Averell Harriman a copy of that day's New York Times. The Polish government was applying to take over Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation and Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company from "German and American interests" because of rampant "mismanagement, excessive borrowing, fictitious bookkeeping and gambling in securities." The Polish government required the owners of the company, which accounted for over 45% of Poland's steel production, to pay at least its full share of back taxes. Bush and Harriman would eventually hire attorney John Foster Dulles to help cover up any improprieties that might arise under investigative scrutiny." Source: "Heir to the Holocaust" by Toby Rogers.

John Foster Dulles was the brother of Allen Dulles, the later CIA director, who was the architect - together with Vice President Richard Nixon and George Bush - of the Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro's Cuba. Allen Dulles was fired by President Kennedy because of the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs. Yet Allen Dulles was appointed by Lyndon Johnson to serve on the Warren Commission to "investigate" JFK's death.

+ A vice-president of Empire Trust in Dallas was Jack Crichton (also president of Nafco Oil & Gas, Inc.) who was connected with Army Reserve Intelligence. In a 1995 book written by Fabian Escalante, the chief of a Cuban counterintelligence unit during the late 1950s and early 1960s, he describes that as soon as intelligence was received from agents in Cuba that Fidel Castro had "converted to communism," a plan called "Operation 40" was put into effect by the National Security Council, presided over by Vice-President Richard Nixon. Escalante indicates that Nixon was the Cuban "case officer" who had assembled an important group of businessmen headed by George Bush and Jack Crichton, both Texas oilmen, to gather the necessary funds for the operation.

In Dick Russell's book, The Man Who Knew Too Much (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers/Richard Gallen, 1992), at pp. 614-615, under a section called "Origins of the Cover-up" there is a description of a group of Dallas men who surrounded Marina Oswald as soon as her husband had been arrested, but before he was killed by Jack Ruby. These were intelligence operatives seeking out Russian speakers. Ilya Mamantov knew George Bush and spoke Russian. A geologist with Sun Oil, he received a call five hours after the assassination from Jack Crichton, who was at that time the president of Nafco Oil and Gas, Inc. and a former Military Intelligence officer then attached to Army Reserve Intelligence. Crichton was also director of Dorchester Gas Producing Co. with D.H. Byrd, who owned the Texas School Book Depository building and was a close friend of Lyndon Johnson.

+ In 1968, six months after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Prescott writes this letter (click here) to Clover Dulles, wife of Allen Dulles. Note that he blames the Kennedy's for the failure of the Bay of Pigs.

+ In the 1950's Prescott and the Harrimans are the founding fathers of CBS. In 1963, CBS reporter Dan Rather makes his career break with the Kennedy Assassination by lying to the American public that he sees JFK's head move violently FORWARD on the Zapruder film. To hear Dan Rather lying click here .

The lie is possible, because the Zapruder film was bought by Time Life and kept lock and barrel from the public for 14 years. Time Life is founded and owned by Henry Luce, also a member of Skull and Bones. Luce had many friends, among them general Edward Lansdale, a known covert operative for the CIA. Henry's wife, Clare Booth Luce, Congresswoman, is a radical supporter of the Anti-Castro movement and personal friends with another high-ranking covert operative for the CIA and a resident from Fort Worth: David Atlee Phillips. Edward Lansdale and David Phillips are widely accepted as key planners of the JFK assassination. They are also exact matches for the "covert operations specialist"(Phillips) and the "top brass in military intelligence from Asia" (Lansdale) as described in Sam Giancana's biography "Double Cross" (to read the page click here ).

David Atlee Phillips and Edward Lansdale
+ David Atlee Phillips was the mastermind for the CIA staged coup by Pinochet in 1973, as well as the overthrow in 1954 of the Guatemala regime headed by Jacobo Arbenz. He is working closely with CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, another suspect in the plot to kill JFK and the leader of the infamous Watergate burglar team. In the 1950's and 1960's, Phillips is the CIA case officer for the anti Castro Cubans in Havana and Mexico City. He is also the CIA controller for Lee Harvey Oswald and James Files. James Files has confessed that he fired the shot into JFK's head from behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza. This story is completely ignored by the mainstream media, which seems strange, because even if he were lying, one would expect some exposure. The star of David Atlee Phillips rises to CIA director of Covert Operations for the Western Hemisphere. According to his nephew Shawn Phillips, who is quite a famous musician, David Atlee Phillips confirmed to his brother James Atlee Phillips that he was in Dallas the day Kennedy died. To read Shawn's email: click here.

+ Prescott Bush advised Eisenhower to run for President and then launched Richard Nixon into the Vice Presidency. Subsequently he was a major financer of Nixon's presidential campaign against Kennedy. Prescott Bush was an avid JFK opponent and Nixon has always been a puppet for the interests of the Bush family. To read the details click here .

Prescott Bush with President Dwight Eisenhower
Prescott with his protégé Dick Nixon
Prescott and Ike
+ George Herbert Walker Bush is one of the very few Americans who does not recall where he was when JFK was killed. Yet, the following document, recently declassified, places him very close to Dallas within 2 hours of JFK's assassination:
But who says the Bush telephone call really came from Tyler, Texas? To his own admission, this document places Bush IN Dallas for the remainder of the day and night of November 22, 1963. He is implicating a political activist (James Parrott) in the process. Why did Bush want to keep his telephone call confidential? And why does he not remember it? Why did he give his warning AFTER the assassination, if he thought Parrott was a serious threat for Kennedy in Houston? Kennedy had just visited Houston the day before ! And why are the sources of this hearsay information unknown? Who told him this, if anyone? Or is this just a document to furnish Bush with an alibi and plausible denial? Thirty years later the same James Parrott that Bush was accusing is working on Bush's presidential campaign against Bill Clinton.

"Figure that one out; if someone had tried to finger me for killing President Kennedy, that person would have been my worst enemy. See volume one and ten for damning evidence. The FBI agent that took Bush's call was Graham Kitchel, whose brother George Kitchel knew both de Mohrenschildt (Oswald's best friend in Dallas) and Bush. (NOTE: Graham was a favourite of FBI Director, J. E. Hoover who was briefing Bush of the CIA on November 23, 1963). On October 13, 1999, Adamson called Kenneth B. Jackson the FBI agent who investigated Parrott and received Bush's complaint. Mr. Jackson, refused to return Adamson's phone call. why? "
Source: Bruce Adamson

"The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds."

+ Nixon admitted he was in Dallas, but gave conflicting accounts. To read about those conflicting accounts click here or click here .
Is there other evidence to tie Nixon to key players in the JFK assassination? Yes, there is! Look at this bombshell document that states Jack Ruby worked for Nixon: Click here . And Ruby was just a punk with no connections to anyone?

+ One of the most tantalizing nuggets about Nixon's possible inside knowledge of JFK assassination secrets was buried on a White House tape until 2002. On the tape, recorded in May of 1972, the president confided to two top aides that the Warren Commission pulled off "the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated." Unfortunately, he did not elaborate. But the context in which Nixon raised the matter shows just how low he could stoop in efforts to assassinate the character of his political adversaries.

The Republican president made the "hoax" observation in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt against White House hopeful George Wallace, a long-time Democratic governor of Alabama. The attempt left Wallace paralyzed below the waist. Nixon blurted out his comments about the falsity of the Warren findings in the middle of a conversation in which he repeatedly directed two of his most ruthless aides, Bob Haldeman and Chuck Colson, to carry out a monumental dirty trick. He urged them to plant a false news story linking the would-be Wallace assassin -- Arthur Bremer -- to two other Democrats, Sen. Edward Kennedy and Sen. George McGovern -- possible Nixon opponents in that year's fall elections. "Screw the record," the president orders on at one point. "Just say he was a supporter of that nut (it isn't clear which of the two senators he is referring to). And put it out. Just say we have an authenticated report."

As well as helping to perpetuate the Kennedy assassination "hoax" by turning down Haldeman's proposal for a new JFK probe, Nixon had a major hand in perpetrating it. In November of 1964, on the eve of the official release of the Warren Report, private citizen Nixon went public in support of the panel's coming findings. In a piece for Reader's Digest, he portrayed Oswald as the sole assassin. And Nixon implied that Castro -- "a hero in the warped mind of Oswald" -- was the real culprit.

He claimed that Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, had authorized a larger number of wiretaps than his own administration. "But I don't criticize it," he declared, adding, "if he had ten more and -- as a result of wiretaps -- had been able to discover the Oswald Plan, it would have been worth it."

Whoops! The president apparently didn't realize his reference to "the Oswald Plan" didn't square with the government's official lone-killer finding. For if Lee Harvey Oswald had been solely responsible for the assassination, then there would not have been anyone for Oswald to conspire with about his "plan" -- on a bugged telephone, or otherwise. Was Nixon inadvertently revealing his knowledge that Mob leaders (Robert Kennedy's main wiretap targets) had a role in President Kennedy's slaying? Was such a belief based on information acquired as a result of Nixon's own solid ties to organized crime and the Mafia-infested Teamsters union? Source: click here .

+ A photograph exists of the Texas School Book Depository while the Dallas Police is sealing off the building. Among the bystanders is a civilian that could be a twin brother of George H.W. Bush.

+ George H.W. Bush is provably lying about his CIA career. He claims that his CIA directorship in 1976 was his first job for the CIA. Difficult to believe? Page 3 will show the proof for this lie. The truth is that he was actively involved in the preparation and financing of the ill faithed Bay of Pigs invasion, as a high ranking CIA official, at which time he made acquaintance with the now notorious CIA agent and Iran Contra operative Felix Rodriguez, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs and Operation 40.

... ... ...

CONCLUSIONS:

The plot to kill JFK originates from the very same forces that were working together on the Bay of Pigs and the plots to assassinate Fidel Castro: All these forces had their own reasons to recapture Cuba and to hate Kennedy, whom they also blamed for the failure of the Bay of Pigs.

These groups were

  1. The CIA with the approval of some of the highest government officials (like Johnson, Hoover, Ford and Nixon)
  2. The anti Castro Cuban exiles
  3. Mafiabosses Sam Giancana , Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante and
  4. wealthy industrialists and Texan oilmen like H.L. Hunt, Syd Richardson and Clint Murchison.

George H.W. Bush has documented connections to all four groups

Sam Giancana states in his biography that he knew Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon personally (to read the page click here ), as well as the aforementioned oil millionaires and George Demohrenshildt (to read the page click here ), , and that they planned the JFK assassination together. James Files, the confessed grassy knoll assassin who fired the fatal shot into JFK's head, did not only work for Sam Giancana, but was recruited in the CIA to train Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs, by none other than David Atlee Phillips. He claims that one of his later senior supervisors in covert operations was George H.W. Bush. Lyndon Johnson told his mistress Madeline Brown: "It was the CIA and the Oilboys". Bush was both ! In addition he was up to his neck in the Bay of Pigs and the anti Castro movement. What is the chance he could not have known about the plot?

David Atlee Phillips was also the CIA supervisor for Lee Harvey Oswald, a heroic man that was unwittingly chosen to take the blame as the patsy, while led to believe he was to penetrate the group of assassins in order to sabotage the plot and prevent JFK's assassination.

On November 22, 1963 a criminal power elite seized control through a coup d'etat and a subsequent cover up of the truth that lasts until today. This is because they strengthened their position ever since. The key to unlocking the truth lies in one of their most powerful assets: the mainstream media. That is why you were not aware of most of the above !

It is clear that Bush protected the cover-up, as well as individuals and CIA elements that were involved in the JFK assassination. Although the above may not be conclusive evidence for Bush's involvement or knowledge about JFK's murder, all together a bigger and more criminal picture than many of us dare to imagine, emerges, with a direct connection to the political situation of today.

"And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

"A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today - and in fact we have forgotten."

"Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men."

"A man does what he must-in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures-and that is the basis of all human morality."

"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. "

John F. Kennedy

[Dec 02, 2018] George H.W. Bush, who died today at 94, most likely oversaw the CIA assets assigned to the JFK kill team

Dec 01, 2018 | www.legitgov.org

George H.W. Bush dead at 94 | 01 Dec 2018

Former US President George H.W. Bush has died at age 94 in Houston, according to his spokesperson Jim McGrath.

Born into privilege and a tradition of service, Bush was a son of a senator, celebrated World War II combat pilot, student athlete, Texas oilman, Republican congressman, national party chairman, pioneering diplomat and spy chief [who likely oversaw the CIA assets assigned to the JFK kill team].

After his own 1980 presidential campaign came up short, he served two terms as Ronald Reagan's vice president before reaching the pinnacle of political power by winning the 1988 presidential election, soundly defeating Democrat Michael Dukakis.

After losing the White House in 1992, Bush became a widely admired political elder who leapt out of airplanes to mark birthday milestones.

[Dec 02, 2018] Muller investigation has all the appearance of an investigation looking for a crime

Highly recommended!
Essentially Mueller witch hunt repeat the trick invented by Bolsheviks leadership during Stalin Great Terror: the accusation of a person of being a foreign agent is a 'slam dank" move that allows all kind to nasty things to be performed to convict the person no matter whether he is guilty of not.
Consolidation of power using Foreign Counter Intelligence as a tool is a classic and a very dirty trick.
Notable quotes:
"... It would be of great value to know what the underlying predicate crime(s) are that are sustaining Mueller's scorched earth approach to what looks to be 'all things Trump,' whether the crimes relate to counter intelligence jurisdiction (treason, espionage), illicit overseas business transactions relating to sanctions violations or something of that sort, or election law violations, the smoke of which got the whole Mueller jihad underway ..."
"... This would not be unusual in a Foreign Counter Intelligence case which are almost by definition open ended; it would be very unusual, in fact prohibited, in a criminal case where a factual predicate needs to be articulated that constitutes reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. ..."
"... It seems Mueller has been riding the FCI horse whither he pleases to round up interviews, compare them, and then take the chicken shit route of charging 1001 violations to leverage his way forward. If that seems to smell bad, it is because it does. ..."
"... IMO, Trump is not helping himself or the American people get to the objective truth by declassifying all the documents and communications. Unless all the documents are released unredacted, all we have are theories and speculation. And Trump will be on the losing end of that as the news media and their Deep State collaborators have all the means to drive the narrative and attempt to convict in the court of public opinion through constant innuendo. ..."
"... In the mean time the Mueller investigation itself creates the crimes as pretty much most Trump associates have been indicted for perjury. Even Manafort was prosecuted for money laundering that took place over a decade ago ..."
"... Trump has stated that he doesn't want to declassify as the American people shouldn't know how corrupt their government is. This seems to contradict his Drain the Swamp rhetoric. ..."
"... Mueller may have created more crimes than existed before his inquiry. ..."
Dec 01, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Mad_Max22 , 12 hours ago

Very informative post.

It would be of great value to know what the underlying predicate crime(s) are that are sustaining Mueller's scorched earth approach to what looks to be 'all things Trump,' whether the crimes relate to counter intelligence jurisdiction (treason, espionage), illicit overseas business transactions relating to sanctions violations or something of that sort, or election law violations, the smoke of which got the whole Mueller jihad underway .

It certainly does give every appearance, at least from the outside perspective, of an investigation looking for a crime.

This would not be unusual in a Foreign Counter Intelligence case which are almost by definition open ended; it would be very unusual, in fact prohibited, in a criminal case where a factual predicate needs to be articulated that constitutes reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed.

It seems Mueller has been riding the FCI horse whither he pleases to round up interviews, compare them, and then take the chicken shit route of charging 1001 violations to leverage his way forward. If that seems to smell bad, it is because it does.

Precisely the same approach could have been taken vis a vis the Uranium mattter or any of the Clinton Foundation speaker forays into foreign lands and almost certainly a boatload of 1001 violations would have come into port.

kievite -> Mad_Max22
So Muller reinvented the tactics used by Bolsheviks during the Great Purge period ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... )

Most Stalin's political enemies were liquidated using the "foreign agent" charge.

Might be a good time to reread a book on "Moscow show trials" like

The prosecutor and the prey: Vyshinsky and the 1930s' Moscow show trials Arkadii V̆aksberg.

https://www.amazon.com/pros...

The quote "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce" might be applicable here.

blue peacock , 21 hours ago

IMO, Trump is not helping himself or the American people get to the objective truth by declassifying all the documents and communications. Unless all the documents are released unredacted, all we have are theories and speculation. And Trump will be on the losing end of that as the news media and their Deep State collaborators have all the means to drive the narrative and attempt to convict in the court of public opinion through constant innuendo.

In the mean time the Mueller investigation itself creates the crimes as pretty much most Trump associates have been indicted for perjury. Even Manafort was prosecuted for money laundering that took place over a decade ago .

There have been no claims from Mueller that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

Trump has stated that he doesn't want to declassify as the American people shouldn't know how corrupt their government is. This seems to contradict his Drain the Swamp rhetoric. With the Democrats gonna run the House come January. I think Trump will come under increased pressure from all sides. I don't believe the Mueller investigation will ever wind down until Trump is defeated either via impeachment or loss of the next presidential election.

Pat Lang Mod -> blue peacock , 15 hours ago
I heard Dershowitz (my new hero) say the other day that Mueller may have created more crimes than existed before his inquiry.

[Dec 01, 2018] An interesting book: The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti

Notable quotes:
"... Here's a wonderful example of the NYT's propensity for re-writing history: http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/08/30/ny-times-scrubs-mention-cia-arming-syrian-rebels-177311/ Long live the memory hole. ..."
Aug 30, 2012 | www.theguardian.com

bilejones, 30 Aug 2012 16:16

Here's a wonderful example of the NYT's propensity for re-writing history: http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/08/30/ny-times-scrubs-mention-cia-arming-syrian-rebels-177311/ Long live the memory hole.
BillOwen , 30 Aug 2012 13:15
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence Victor Marchetti

"It is the first book the federal government of the United States ever went to court to censor before its publication. The CIA demanded the authors remove 399 passages but they stood firm and only 168 passages were censored. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, chose to publish the book with blanks for censored passages and with boldface type for passages that were challenged but later uncensored."

There exists in our nation today a powerful and dangerous secret cult -- the cult of intelligence. Its holy men are the clandestine professionals of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Its patrons and protectors are the highest officials of the federal government. Its membership, extending far beyond governmental circles, reaches into the power centers of industry, commerce, finance, and labor. Its friends are many in the areas of important public influence -- the academic world and the communications media.

The cult of intelligence is a secret fraternity of the American political aristocracy.

The purpose of the cult is to further the foreign policies of the U.S. government by covert and usually illegal means, while at the same time containing the spread of its avowed enemy, communism. Traditionally, the cult's hope has been to foster a world order in which America would reign supreme, the unchallenged international leader.

Today, however, that dream stands tarnished by time and frequent failures. Thus, the cult's objectives are now less grandiose, but no less disturbing. It seeks largely to advance America's self-appointed role as the dominant arbiter of social, economic, and political change in the awakening regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And its worldwide war against communism has to some extent been reduced to a covert struggle to maintain a self-serving stability in the Third World, using whatever clandestine methods are available.

Wiki

[Nov 30, 2018] Kunstler Exposes The Dire Quandaries Of The Deep State by James Howard Kunstler

Notable quotes:
"... Brennan, the Muslim convert was Obama's handler for years. Obama was groomed by CIA ..."
Nov 30, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Watergate had tragic Shakespearean overtones , with Nixon as King Lear, but Russia-Gate - perhaps the last gate America goes through on its giant slalom run to collapse - is but a Chinese Fire Drill writ large.

The reason? In 1973, we were still a serious people. Today, the most lavishly credentialed elite in history believe the most preposterous "stories," or, surely even worse, pretend to believe them for political advantage.

Now, an epic battle of wills is setting up as Robert Mueller's investigation concludes its business and its primary target, the Golden Golem of Greatness, girds his loins to push back. Behind the flimsy scrim of Russia collusion accusations stands a bewildering maze of criminal mischief by a matrix of federal agencies that lost control of their own dark operation to meddle in the 2016 election.

The US intel community (CIA, NSA, FBI, etc), with the Department of Justice, all colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign and the intel agencies of the UK and Australia, to derail Mr. Trump as a stooge of Russia and, when he shocked them by getting elected, mounted a desperate campaign to cover their asses knowing he had become their boss.

The Obama White House was involved in all this, attempting to cloak itself in plausible deniability, which may be unwinding now, too. How might all this play out from here?

One big mystery is how long will Mr. Trump wait to declassify any number of secret files, memoranda, and communications that he's been sitting on for months .

My guess is that this stuff amounts to a potent weapon against his adversaries and he will wait until Mr. Mueller releases a final report before declassifying it. Then, we'll have a fine constitutional crisis as the two sides vie for some sort of adjudication.

Who, for instance, will adjudicate the monkey business that is already on-the-record involving misdeeds in the Department of Justice itself? Will the DOJ split into two contesting camps, each charging the other? How might that work? Does the Acting Attorney General Mr. Whitaker seek indictments against figures such as Bruce Ohr, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, et al. Will he also rope in intel cowboys John Brennan and James Clapper? Might Hillary find herself in jeopardy -- all the while on the other side Mr. Mueller pursues his targets, characters like Mr. Manafort, Michael Cohen, and the hapless Carter Page?

Or might Mr. Mueller, and others, possibly find themselves in trouble, as spearheads of a bad-faith campaign to weaponize government agencies against a sitting president? That might sound outlandish, but the evidence is adding up. In fact the evidence of a Deep State gone rogue is far more compelling than any charges Mr. Mueller has so far produced on Trump-Russia "collusion." An example of bad faith is former FBI Director James Comey's current campaign to avoid testifying in closed session before the House Judiciary and Oversight committees -- he filed a motion just before Thanksgiving. Mr. Comey is pretending that an open session would be "transparent." His claim is mendacious. If he were questioned about classified matters in an open session, he would do exactly what he did before in open session: decline to answer about "sensitive" matters on the basis of national security. He could make no such claims in a closed session. The truth is, his attorneys are trying to run out the clock on the current composition of the house committees, which will come under a Democrat majority in January, so that Mr. Comey can avoid testifying altogether.

There are other dicey matters awaiting some kind of adjudication elsewhere.

For instance, who is going to review the chain of decisions among the FISA judges who approved of warrants made in bad faith to spy on US citizens? Perhaps the shrinking violet, Mr. Huber, out in the Utah Prosecutor's Office of the DOJ, is looking into all that. He's been at something for most of the year (nobody knows what). He has to answer to Mr. Whitaker now, or the permanent AG who replaces him. And why is Mr. Trump dragging his heels on nominating a permanent AG? I suppose the FISA court matter will fall to the Supreme Court, but how does that process work, and how long might it take?

The potential for a stand-off exists that will confound any effort to untangle these things, and I can see how that might lead to an extraordinary crisis in which Mr. Trump has to declare some form of emergency or perhaps martial law to clean out this suppurating abscess of illegality and sedition .

That can only be the last and worst resort, but what if the US judicial system just can't manage to clean up the mess it has made?


Dickweed Wang , 1 minute ago link

If Trump doesn't go on a major offensive within the next couple of weeks he's fucked because once the new ... House is sworn in on January 3rd he will be dealing with so many different distractions at the same time it will make his attempt to fight back almost impossible...

Cloud9.5 , 15 minutes ago link

If Kunstler is right in his prediction of collapse. The Deep State is going to go the way of the Stasi. Systemic collapse will usher in a purge the scope of which none of us can fathom.

MK ULTRA Alpha , 59 minutes ago link

The CIA was running the entire show. The FBI was the CIA's dog.

Stefan Halper has been mislabeled by MSM as an FBI informant. Stefan Halper is a CIA operative. He is the smoking gun.

Both the CIA and MI6 were colluding to prevent Trump from being elected and then working a coup after election.

It all leads back to former CIA director Brennan and national security advisor Clapper. Both worked under the authority of Obama, thus both believe what they were doing was authorized by Obama, particularly Clapper who took his marching orders from Obama. They both believed Clinton would win and everything would be brushed under the rug as usual.

Mueller is a cover up man and yes man with plenty of felonies. Rosenstein wrote the memo Comey needed to be fired, because he wanted to replace Comey with Mueller. Rosenstein worried Comey would talk, would begin to release data and start investigation to protect himself and the FBI, so when Trump refused to appoint Mueller to FBI director, Rosenstein appointed Mueller to take out Trump.

The MSM and everyone says how good Mueller is, but he's committed countless felonies and no one at the DOJ has honor to be an American. The DOJ is political and is against this nation, against the truth.

Sessions was cover up man and a yes man. He was also afraid of being indicted by Mueller. His main purpose was illegal immigration, that's all he cared about. He didn't care what happened to Trump and figured Pence would let him stay because of his mission on illegal immigration and cannabis. Sessions believed he would roll back the legalization of cannabis and Pence would follow him. Sessions believed Trump was soft on cannabis. That seems petty, but that's the way Sessions thought.

No one follows the law anymore, this has trickled down to the people. These people have set a bad example and the people have no respect for the system anymore.

The only way to make it respected again is for these criminals like Mueller, must be killed. But because of the malaise caused by the criminals no one cares about America anymore. No one cares enough to kill criminals like Mueller. The MSM is responsible for doing incredible damage to the character of our nation. It's because of them all of this happened because they will not tell the truth.

Duc888 , 40 minutes ago link

" It all leads back to former CIA director Brennan and national security advisor Clapper. Both worked under the authority of Obama"

Brennan, the Muslim convert was Obama's handler for years. Obama was groomed by CIA to be the errand-boi-POTUS.

UselessEater , 36 minutes ago link

Just 6 corporations - all interlocking - own 95% of America's mainstream media. There's the problem. Evil controls the narrative and fools the public. For example, ANTIFA - who are they really, what are their roots, where do they come from? None of THIS will you get from the MSM:

https://europeansworldwide.wordpress.com/2018/11/15/ripping-the-red-mask-off-antifa/

... ... ...

coaltar , 1 hour ago link

When you have a working brain, it's clear Trump is just another actor...

Captain Nemo de Erehwon , 1 hour ago link

"The potential for a stand-off exists that will confound any effort to untangle these things... might lead to an extraordinary crisis in which Trump has to declare some form of emergency or perhaps martial law to clean out this suppurating abscess of illegality and sedition ..."

The crooks will not give up without a fight and Trump will have to call in the military?

[Nov 26, 2018] Orwell's story is an allegory of modern Western politics and social commentary, where so many essential but inconvenient facts are "silently dropped" from analysis.

Notable quotes:
"... Homage to Catalonia ..."
"... Homage to Catalonia ..."
"... typhlophthalmism ..."
Nov 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

In Homage to Catalonia (1938), his memoir of the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell describes how his wife was rudely woken by a police-raid on the hotel room she was occupying in Barcelona:

In the small hours of the morning there was a pounding on the door, and six men marched in, switched on the light, and immediately took up various positions about the room, obviously agreed upon beforehand. They then searched both rooms (there was a bathroom attached) with inconceivable thoroughness. They sounded the walls, took up the mats, examined the floor, felt the curtains, probed under the bath and the radiator, emptied every drawer and suitcase and felt every garment and held it up to the light. ( Homage to Catalonia , ch. 14)

The police conducted this search "in the recognized OGPU [then the Russian communist secret-police] or Gestapo style for nearly two hours," Orwell says. He then notes that in "all this time they never searched the bed." His wife was still in it, you see, and although the police "were probably Communist Party members they were also Spaniards, and to turn a woman out of bed was a little too much for them. This part of the job was silently dropped, making the whole search meaningless."

Orwell's story suggests a new word to me: typhlophthalmism , meaning "the practice of turning a blind eye to essential but inconvenient facts" (from Greek typhlos , "blind," + ophthalmos , "eye"). But it's a long word, so let's call it typhlism for short. Shorter is better, because the term could be used so often today. Orwell's story is an allegory of modern Western politics and social commentary, where so many essential but inconvenient facts are "silently dropped" from analysis.

[Nov 26, 2018] The deceased was the nephew of the arms dealer, Adnan.

Nov 26, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

hagar , October 24, 2018 at 10:51

Sharp Ears,

Is this Kashoggi that has been butchered allegedly related to the biggest arms dealer in the world, Adnan Kashoggi? Who had the biggest super yacht in the world, and did he sell said super yacht to Donald back in the day?

Your super research skills could help me out this morning.

I have just been told by the secretary of the Prof. at the Beatson in Glasgow that the Secretary of State's new rules on cancer treatment with Medical Cannabis oil which is supposed to come into effect on the 1st of November does not apply to me. But will not tell me why I am excluded.
Is this another con by the Tory Gov. to make themselves look like a caring Gov. treating young children only?

I can't find the criteria anywhere. Mind you I have difficulty focusing on anything at the moment while steam is coming out my ears in anger.
Maybe I should move to Israel to get a Medical Cannabis cure? NAE CHANCE!!!

Sharp Ears , October 24, 2018 at 13:00

The deceased was the nephew of the arms dealer, Adnan.

The Heil has all the lurid family details.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6280767/Missing-Saudi-journalist-Jamal-Khashoggi-second-cousin-Princess-Dianas-lover.html

No wonder the establishment had Diana killed.

[Nov 25, 2018] Senior Saudi Prince Says CIA's Khashoggi Findings Cannot Be Trusted

Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
If anybody had any doubts about the Washington's determination to give Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman a pass over allegations that he was involved with the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, President Trump put them to rest earlier this week when he released a statement praising Saudi Arabia, openly questioning the CIA and stressing the importance of the US-Saudi relationship (while also portraying Khashoggi as a suspicious and untrustworthy figure with ties to terror groups).

And while rumors about a possible intra-family coup in Riyadh have been simmering since Khashoggi disappeared inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 (with the latest reports surfacing earlier this week ), the notion that MbS's spurned relatives might rise up and exact their revenge for last year's brutal "corruption crackdown" at the Riyadh Ritz Carlton is looking increasingly improbable. In other words, as long as the international response to the Khashoggi incident is limited to countries that don't sell weapons to Saudi Arabia ending arms sales to the kingdom, then MbS will almost certainly survive.

And in the latest indication that the royal family - not to mention nearly all of the Saudis' regional allies - remains firmly behind the Crown Prince, even as the return of his uncle from exile has set tongues wagging about MbS' impending ouster, one senior prince recently told Reuters that the CIA's findings are "not to be trusted."

[Nov 25, 2018] Remarks Prepared for Delivery at the Trade Mart in Dallas President John F. Kennedy November 22, 1963

Nov 25, 2018 | www.jfklibrary.org

"I am honored to have this invitation to address the annual meeting of the Dallas Citizens Council, joined by the members of the Dallas Assembly--and pleased to have this opportunity to salute the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest.

It is fitting that these two symbols of Dallas progress are united in the sponsorship of this meeting. For they represent the best qualities, I am told, of leadership and learning in this city--and leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. The advancement of learning depends on community leadership for financial and political support and the products of that learning, in turn, are essential to the leadership's hopes for continued progress and prosperity. It is not a coincidence that those communities possessing the best in research and graduate facilities--from MIT to Cal Tech--tend to attract the new and growing industries. I congratulate those of you here in Dallas who have recognized these basic facts through the creation of the unique and forward-looking Graduate Research Center.

This link between leadership and learning is not only essential at the community level. It is even more indispensable in world affairs. Ignorance and misinformation can handicap the progress of a city or a company, but they can, if allowed to prevail in foreign policy, handicap this country's security. In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America's leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.

There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.

But today other voices are heard in the land--voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, wholly unsuited to the sixties, doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory and that peace is a sign of weakness. At a time when the national debt is steadily being reduced in terms of its burden on our economy, they see that debt as the greatest single threat to our security. At a time when we are steadily reducing the number of Federal employees serving every thousand citizens, they fear those supposed hordes of civil servants far more than the actual hordes of opposing armies.

We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will "talk sense to the American people." But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this Nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense.

I want to discuss with you today the status of our strength and our security because this question clearly calls for the most responsible qualities of leadership and the most enlightened products of scholarship. For this Nation's strength and security are not easily or cheaply obtained, nor are they quickly and simply explained. There are many kinds of strength and no one kind will suffice. Overwhelming nuclear strength cannot stop a guerrilla war. Formal pacts of alliance cannot stop internal subversion. Displays of material wealth cannot stop the disillusionment of diplomats subjected to discrimination.

Above all, words alone are not enough. The United States is a peaceful nation. And where our strength and determination are clear, our words need merely to convey conviction, not belligerence. If we are strong, our strength will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will be of no help.

I realize that this Nation often tends to identify turning-points in world affairs with the major addresses which preceded them. But it was not the Monroe Doctrine that kept all Europe away from this hemisphere--it was the strength of the British fleet and the width of the Atlantic Ocean. It was not General Marshall's speech at Harvard which kept communism out of Western Europe--it was the strength and stability made possible by our military and economic assistance.

In this administration also it has been necessary at times to issue specific warnings--warnings that we could not stand by and watch the Communists conquer Laos by force, or intervene in the Congo, or swallow West Berlin, or maintain offensive missiles on Cuba. But while our goals were at least temporarily obtained in these and other instances, our successful defense of freedom was due not to the words we used, but to the strength we stood ready to use on behalf of the principles we stand ready to defend.

This strength is composed of many different elements, ranging from the most massive deterrents to the most subtle influences. And all types of strength are needed--no one kind could do the job alone. Let us take a moment, therefore, to review this Nation's progress in each major area of strength.

I.

First, as Secretary McNamara made clear in his address last Monday, the strategic nuclear power of the United States has been so greatly modernized and expanded in the last 1,000 days, by the rapid production and deployment of the most modern missile systems, that any and all potential aggressors are clearly confronted now with the impossibility of strategic victory--and the certainty of total destruction--if by reckless attack they should ever force upon us the necessity of a strategic reply.

In less than 3 years, we have increased by 50 percent the number of Polaris submarines scheduled to be in force by the next fiscal year, increased by more than 70 percent our total Polaris purchase program, increased by more than 75 percent our Minuteman purchase program, increased by 50 percent the portion of our strategic bombers on 15-minute alert, and increased by too percent the total number of nuclear weapons available in our strategic alert forces. Our security is further enhanced by the steps we have taken regarding these weapons to improve the speed and certainty of their response, their readiness at all times to respond, their ability to survive an attack, and their ability to be carefully controlled and directed through secure command operations.

II.

But the lessons of the last decade have taught us that freedom cannot be defended by strategic nuclear power alone. We have, therefore, in the last 3 years accelerated the development and deployment of tactical nuclear weapons, and increased by 60 percent the tactical nuclear forces deployed in Western Europe.

Nor can Europe or any other continent rely on nuclear forces alone, whether they are strategic or tactical. We have radically improved the readiness of our conventional forces--increased by 45 percent the number of combat ready Army divisions, increased by 100 percent the procurement of modern Army weapons and equipment, increased by 100 percent our ship construction, conversion, and modernization program, increased by too percent our procurement of tactical aircraft, increased by 30 percent the number of tactical air squadrons, and increased the strength of the Marines. As last month's "Operation Big Lift"--which originated here in Texas--showed so clearly, this Nation is prepared as never before to move substantial numbers of men in surprisingly little time to advanced positions anywhere in the world. We have increased by 175 percent the procurement of airlift aircraft, and we have already achieved a 75 percent increase in our existing strategic airlift capability. Finally, moving beyond the traditional roles of our military forces, we have achieved an increase of nearly 600 percent in our special forces--those forces that are prepared to work with our allies and friends against the guerrillas, saboteurs, insurgents and assassins who threaten freedom in a less direct but equally dangerous manner.

III.

But American military might should not and need not stand alone against the ambitions of international communism. Our security and strength, in the last analysis, directly depend on the security and strength of others, and that is why our military and economic assistance plays such a key role in enabling those who live on the periphery of the Communist world to maintain their independence of choice. Our assistance to these nations can be painful, risky and costly, as is true in Southeast Asia today. But we dare not weary of the task. For our assistance makes possible the stationing of 3-5 million allied troops along the Communist frontier at one-tenth the cost of maintaining a comparable number of American soldiers. A successful Communist breakthrough in these areas, necessitating direct United States intervention, would cost us several times as much as our entire foreign aid program, and might cost us heavily in American lives as well.

About 70 percent of our military assistance goes to nine key countries located on or near the borders of the Communist bloc--nine countries confronted directly or indirectly with the threat of Communist aggression - VietNam, Free China, Korea, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Greece, Turkey, and Iran. No one of these countries possesses on its own the resources to maintain the forces which our own Chiefs of Staff think needed in the common interest. Reducing our efforts to train, equip, and assist their armies can only encourage Communist penetration and require in time the increased overseas deployment of American combat forces. And reducing the economic help needed to bolster these nations that undertake to help defend freedom can have the same disastrous result. In short, the $50 billion we spend each year on our own defense could well be ineffective without the $4 billion required for military and economic assistance.

Our foreign aid program is not growing in size, it is, on the contrary, smaller now than in previous years. It has had its weaknesses, but we have undertaken to correct them. And the proper way of treating weaknesses is to replace them with strength, not to increase those weaknesses by emasculating essential programs. Dollar for dollar, in or out of government, there is no better form of investment in our national security than our much-abused foreign aid program. We cannot afford to lose it. We can afford to maintain it. We can surely afford, for example, to do as much for our 19 needy neighbors of Latin America as the Communist bloc is sending to the island of Cuba alone.

IV.

I have spoken of strength largely in terms of the deterrence and resistance of aggression and attack. But, in today's world, freedom can be lost without a shot being fired, by ballots as well as bullets. The success of our leadership is dependent upon respect for our mission in the world as well as our missiles--on a clearer recognition of the virtues of freedom as well as the evils of tyranny.

That is why our Information Agency has doubled the shortwave broadcasting power of the Voice of America and increased the number of broadcasting hours by 30 percent, increased Spanish language broadcasting to Cuba and Latin America from I to 9 hours a day, increased seven-fold to more than 3-5 million copies the number of American books being translated and published for Latin American readers, and taken a host of other steps to carry our message of truth and freedom to all the far corners of the earth.

And that is also why we have regained the initiative in the exploration of outer space, making an annual effort greater than the combined total of all space activities undertaken during the fifties, launching more than 130 vehicles into earth orbit, putting into actual operation valuable weather and communications satellites, and making it clear to all that the United States of America has no intention of finishing second in space.

This effort is expensive--but it pays its own way, for freedom and for America. For there is no longer any fear in the free world that a Communist lead in space will become a permanent assertion of supremacy and the basis of military superiority. There is no longer any doubt about the strength and skill of American science, American industry, American education, and the American free enterprise system. In short, our national space effort represents a great gain in, and a great resource of, our national strength--and both Texas and Texans are contributing greatly to this strength.

Finally, it should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America which has fully educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the hidden dangers of the world in which we live. And only an America which is growing and prospering economically can sustain the worldwide defenses of freedom, while demonstrating to all concerned the opportunities of our system and society.

It is clear, therefore, that we are strengthening our security as well as our economy by our recent record increases in national income and output--by surging ahead of most of Western Europe in the rate of business expansion and the margin of corporate profits, by maintaining a more stable level of prices than almost any of our overseas competitors, and by cutting personal and corporate income taxes by some $ I I billion, as I have proposed, to assure this Nation of the longest and strongest expansion in our peacetime economic history.

This Nation's total output--which 3 years ago was at the $500 billion mark--will soon pass $600 billion, for a record rise of over $too billion in 3 years. For the first time in history we have 70 million men and women at work. For the first time in history average factory earnings have exceeded $100 a week. For the first time in history corporation profits after taxes--which have risen 43 percent in less than 3 years--have an annual level of $27.4 billion.

My friends and fellow citizens: I cite these facts and figures to make it clear that America today is stronger than ever before. Our adversaries have not abandoned their ambitions, our dangers have not diminished, our vigilance cannot be relaxed. But now we have the military, the scientific, and the economic strength to do whatever must be done for the preservation and promotion of freedom.

That strength will never be used in pursuit of aggressive ambitions--it will always be used in pursuit of peace. It will never be used to promote provocations--it will always be used to promote the peaceful settlement of disputes.

We in this country, in this generation, are--by destiny rather than choice--the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of "peace on earth, good will toward men." That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: "except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."

Source: Remarks Prepared for Delivery at the Trade Mart in Dallas , November 22, 1963

[Nov 25, 2018] John F. Kennedy and the Monolithic and Ruthless Conspiracy by Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Nov 22, 2006 | www.sott.net

Comment: This is the concluding article in a series of 12 articles written in 2006 commemorating (at the time) the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of JFK. This day, November 22nd, 2018, is the 55th anniversary of what can, in hindsight and in Truth, be called the Day America Died .

... ... ...

The fact is, the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a form of control of the government of the United States. It is the ultimate form of control of the election process. Understanding this can lead us to understand what has happened to our country since that terrible day in November, 43 years ago. Studied carefully, the assassination of John F. Kennedy can reveal who really controls the United States and its polices, particularly foreign policy. As John Kennedy himself said:

"For we are opposed, around the world, by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence; in infiltration instead of invasion; on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice; on guerillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations. Its preparations are concealed not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined, its dissenters are silenced, not praised; no expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the cold war, in short, with a wartime discipline no democracy would ever hope to wish to match. ..."
He was right; but I think he didn't realize how far they were willing - and able - to go.

Nowadays, we know how far they are able and willing to go: just look at the events of September 11, 2001, which bear the same unmistakable stamp of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In fact, as I have mentioned before, the same gang is involved.

... ... ...

Laura Knight-Jadczyk is a seventh generation Floridian, a historian/mystic and author of 14 books and many articles published in print and on the internet. She is the founder of SOTT.net and the inspiration behind the Cassiopaean Experiment. She lives in France with her husband, Polish mathematical physicist, Arkadiusz Jadczyk, four of her five children, extended family, eight dogs, five birds and a cat.

Ned Ludd · 3 days ago

The dumb thing is the Kennedys were up to their ass in deep state dirty dealing and well understood how things were done. So, it does them no credit to have failed to strike first against their enemies, to have used the full power of the presidency to crush their opponents pre-emptively. Instead, they sucked out, rolled over and fed the machine Bobby.
lsjarvi · a day ago
Ned Ludd They went into it with their eyes open, but could do nothing to prevent it except to wimp out. And they refused to wimp out. Sometimes your fate, if you choose to meet it, is to be martyred.

[Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" ..."
"... "The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016." ..."
"... "Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele dossier..." ..."
"... this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war ..."
"... Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same laws as the rest of the UK. ..."
"... The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth ..."
"... British hypocrisy publicly called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me ..."
"... It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint does not bode well for such relations ..."
"... A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants? ..."
"... I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins. ..."
"... The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's explicit approval. ..."
"... Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda ..."
"... This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap. ..."
"... Pat Lang posted a report that strongly implies that charges of Russian influence on Trump are a deliberate falsification ..."
"... It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6 meddling ..."
"... As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was the best candidate for the job. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love? ..."
"... They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass psychological pathology among the elites. ..."
"... The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist "order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation. ..."
"... Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is Strength." The three pillars of political power. ..."
"... Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK government. ..."
"... William Browder ..."
Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns Steveg , Nov 24, 2018 11:43:44 AM | link

In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream.

We have already seen many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who does not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign against Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but seems to be part of a different project.

The ' Integrity Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via social media to take action when the British center perceives a need.

On June 7 it took the the Spanish cluster only a few hours to derail the appointment of Perto Banos as the Director of the National Security Department in Spain. The cluster determined that he had a too positive view of Russia and launched a coordinated social media smear campaign (pdf) against him.


bigger

The Initiative and its operations were unveiled when someone liberated some of its documents, including its budget applications to the British Foreign Office, and posted them under the 'Anonymous' label at cyberguerrilla.org .

The Initiative is nominally run under the (government financed) non-government-organisation The Institute For Statecraft . Its internal handbook (pdf) describes its purpose:

The Integrity Initiative was set up in autumn 2015 by The Institute for Statecraft in cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to bring to the attention of politicians, policy-makers, opinion leaders and other interested parties the threat posed by Russia to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, across Europe and North America.

It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" and promises that:

Cluster members will be sent to educational sessions abroad to improve the technical competence of the cluster to deal with disinformation and strengthen bonds in the cluster community. [...] (Events with DFR Digital Sherlocks, Bellingcat, EuVsDisinfo, Buzzfeed, Irex, Detector Media, Stopfake, LT MOD Stratcom – add more names and propose cluster participants as you desire).

The Initiatives Orwellian slogan is 'Defending Democracy Against Disinformation'. It covers European countries, the UK, the U.S. and Canada and seems to want to expand to the Middle East.

On its About page it claims: "We are not a government body but we do work with government departments and agencies who share our aims." The now published budget plans show that more than 95% of the Initiative's funding is coming directly from the British government, NATO and the U.S. State Department. All the 'contact persons' for creating 'clusters' in foreign countries are British embassy officers. It amounts to a foreign influence campaign by the British government that hides behind a 'civil society' NGO.

The organisation is led by one Chris N. Donnelly who receives (pdf) £8,100 per month for creating the smear campaign network.


Chris Donnelly - Pic via Euromaidanpress

From its 2017/18 budget application (pdf) we learn how the Initiative works:

To counter Russian disinformation and malign influence in Europe by: expanding the knowledge base; harnessing existing expertise, and; establishing a network of networks of experts, opinion formers and policy makers, to educate national audiences in the threat and to help build national capacities to counter it .

The Initiative has a black and white view that is based on a "we are the good ones" illusion. When "we" 'educate the public' it is legitimate work. When others do similar, it its disinformation. That is of course not the reality. The Initiative's existence itself, created to secretly manipulate the public, is proof that such a view is wrong.

If its work were as legit as it wants to be seen, why would the Foreign Office run it from behind the curtain as an NGO? The Initiative is not the only such operation. It's applications seek funding from a larger "Russian Language Strategic Communication Programme" run by the Foreign Office.

The 2017/18 budget application sought FCO funding of £480,635. It received £102,000 in co-funding from NATO and the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense. The 2018/19 budget application shows a planned spending (pdf) of £1,961,000.00. The co-sponsors this year are again NATO and the Lithuanian MoD, but also include (pdf) the U.S. State Department with £250,000 and Facebook with £100,000. The budget lays out a strong cooperation with the local military of each country. It notes that NATO is also generous in financing the local clusters.

One of the liberated papers of the Initiative is a talking points memo labeled Top 3 Deliverable for FCO (pdf):

  • Developing and proving the cluster concept and methodology, setting up clusters in a range of countries with different circumstances
  • Making people (in Government, think tanks, military, journalists) see the big picture, making people acknowledge that we are under concerted, deliberate hybrid attack by Russia
  • Increasing the speed of response, mobilising the network to activism in pursuit of the "golden minute"

Under top 1, setting up clusters, a subitem reads:

- Connects media with academia with policy makers with practitioners in a country to impact on policy and society: ( Jelena Milic silencing pro-kremlin voices on Serbian TV )

Defending Democracy by silencing certain voices on public TV seems to be a self-contradicting concept.

Another subitem notes how the Initiative secretly influences foreign governments:

We engage only very discreetly with governments, based entirely on trusted personal contacts, specifically to ensure that they do not come to see our work as a problem, and to try to influence them gently, as befits an independent NGO operation like ours, viz;
- Germany, via the Zentrum Liberale Moderne to the Chancellor's Office and MOD
- Netherlands, via the HCSS to the MOD
- Poland and Romania, at desk level into their MFAs via their NATO Reps
- Spain, via special advisers, into the MOD and PM's office (NB this may change very soon with the new Government)
- Norway, via personal contacts into the MOD
- HQ NATO, via the Policy Planning Unit into the Sec Gen's office.
We have latent contacts into other governments which we will activate as needs be as the clusters develop.

A look at the 'clusters' set up in U.S. and UK shows some prominent names.


bigger

Members of the Atlantic Council, which has a contract to censor Facebook posts , appear on several cluster lists. The UK core cluster also includes some prominent names like tax fraudster William Browder , the daft Atlantic Council shill Ben Nimmo and the neo-conservative Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. One person of interest is Andrew Wood who handed the Steele 'dirty dossier' to Senator John McCain to smear Donald Trump over alleged relations with Russia. A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times, Neil Buckley from the FT and Jonathan Marcus of the BBC.


bigger - bigger

A ' Cluster Roundup ' (pdf) from July 2018 details its activities in at least 35 countries. Another file reveals (pdf) the local partnering institutions and individuals involved in the programs.

The Initiatives Guide to Countering Russian Information (pdf) is a rather funny read. It lists the downing of flight MH 17 by a Ukranian BUK missile, the fake chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun and the Skripal Affair as examples for "Russian disinformation". But at least two of these events, Khan Sheikun via the UK run White Helmets and the Skripal affair, are evidently products of British intelligence disinformation operations.

The probably most interesting papers of the whole stash is the 'Project Plan' laid out at pages 7-40 of the 2018 budget application v2 (pdf). Under 'Sustainability' it notes:

The programme is proposed to run until at least March 2019, to ensure that the clusters established in each country have sufficient time to take root, find funding, and demonstrate their effectiveness. FCO funding for Phase 2 will enable the activities to be expanded in scale, reach and scope. As clusters have established themselves, they have begun to access local sources of funding. But this is a slow process and harder in some countries than others. HQ NATO PDD [Public Diplomacy Division] has proved a reliable source of funding for national clusters. The ATA [Atlantic Treaty Association] promises to be the same, giving access to other pots of money within NATO and member nations. Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow.

The programme has begun to create a critical mass of individuals from a cross society (think tanks, academia, politics, the media, government and the military) whose work is proving to be mutually reinforcing . Creating the network of networks has given each national group local coherence, credibility and reach, as well as good international access. Together, these conditions, plus the growing awareness within governments of the need for this work, should guarantee the continuity of the work under various auspices and in various forms.

The third part of the budget application (pdf) list the various activities, their output and outcome. The budget plan includes a section that describes 'Risks' to the initiative. These include hacking of the Initiatives IT as well as:

Adverse publicity generated by Russia or by supporters of Russia in target countries, or by political and interest groups affected by the work of the programme, aimed at discrediting the programme or its participants, or to create political embarrassment.

We hope that this piece contributes to such embarrassment.

Posted by b on November 24, 2018 at 11:24 AM | Permalink

Comments Perfidious ALbion!

When will we learn?


pretzelattack , Nov 24, 2018 11:44:00 AM | link

Coincidentally, or not, i just saw this article at the guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/23/robert-mueller-profile-donald-trump-russia-investigation.
Anya , Nov 24, 2018 11:57:00 AM | link
The British government has been running a serious meddling into the US affairs:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-23/mi6-scrambling-stop-trump-releasing-classified-docs-russia-probe

"The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016."

A Steele & Skrupal's anti-Russian / anti-Trump saga: https://spectator.org/big-dots-do-they-connect/

"Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele dossier..."

For M16 to expose this level of stupidity is stunning.

james , Nov 24, 2018 11:58:02 AM | link
thanks b....

this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war.. i guess the idea is to get the ordinary people to think in terms of hating another country based on lies and that this would be a good thing... it is very sad what uk / usa leadership in the past century has come down to here.... i can only hope that info releases like this will hasten it's demise...

Ingrian , Nov 24, 2018 12:03:55 PM | link
Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same laws as the rest of the UK.

The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth

james , Nov 24, 2018 12:15:31 PM | link
@6 ingrian... things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit Russia fully, as they'd intended...
et Al , Nov 24, 2018 12:20:09 PM | link

Let the Doxx wars begin! Sure, Anonymous is not Russian but it will surely now be targeted and smeared as such which would show that it has hit a nerve. British hypocrisy publicly called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me.

I think we've all noticed the euro-asslantic press (and friends) on behalf of, willingly and in cooperation with the British intelligence et al 'calling out' numerous Russians as G(R)U/spies/whatever for a while now yet providing less than a shred of credible evidence.

It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint does not bode well for such relations.

Meanwhile in Brussels they are having their cake and eating it, i.e. bemoaning Europe's 'weak response' to Russian propaganda:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/experts-lament-underfunding-of-eu-task-force-countering-russian-disinformation/

BTW, did anyone read Wired UK's current advertorial (nov 14) by Carl Miller for Brigade 77?

Forthestate , Nov 24, 2018 12:26:09 PM | link
"A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants?
worldblee , Nov 24, 2018 12:33:05 PM | link
Yet another example of the pot calling the kettle black when in fact the kettle may not be black at all; it's just the pot making up things. "These Russian criminals are using propaganda to show (truths) like the fact the DNC and Clinton campaigns colluded to prevent Sanders from being nominated, so we need to establish a clandestine propaganda network to establish that the Russians are running propaganda!"
psychohistorian , Nov 24, 2018 12:34:32 PM | link

....full cluster of smear merchants". May all the clusters of smear merchants be exposed to the public as the acolytes of evil they are.

plantman , Nov 24, 2018 12:36:48 PM | link
"In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream."

I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins.

The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's explicit approval.

Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda

BUT...the author assures us that the "deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow" Huh?? In other words, the fix is in. Mueller will pardon Trump on collusion charges but the propaganda campaign against Russia will continue...with the full support of both parties. I could be wrong, but that's how I see it...

m , Nov 24, 2018 12:40:07 PM | link
This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap.

A lot of sour grapes with this so-called 'integrity initiative', IMO. BP was behind a lot of this, I would also think. When Assad pulled the plug on the pipeline through the Levant in 2009, the Brits hacked up a fur ball. It's gone downhill for them ever since. Couldn't happen to a nicer lot. If you can't invade or beat them with proxies, you can at least call them names.

Jackrabbit , Nov 24, 2018 12:40:58 PM | link
Anya

Pat Lang posted a report that strongly implies that charges of Russian influence on Trump are a deliberate falsification: THE CHIMERA OF DONALD TRUMP, RUSSIAN MONEY LAUNDERER :

If Trump was taking dirty money or engaged in criminal activity with Russians then he was doing it with Felix Sater, who was under the control of the FBI... And who was in charge of the FBI during all of the time that Sater was a signed up FBI snitch? You got it -- Robert Mueller (2001 thru 2013) ...

It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6 meddling, including:

Steele dossier: To create suspicion in government, media, and later the public

Leaking of DNC emails to Wikileaks (but calling it a "hack"): To help with election of Trump and link Wikileaks (as agent) to Russian election meddling

Cambridge Analytica: To provide necessary reasoning for Trump's (certain) win of the electoral college.

Note: We later found that dozens of firms had undue access to Facebook data. Why did the campaign turn to a British firm instead of an American firm? Well, it had to be a British firm if MI6 was running the (supposed) Facebook targeting for CIA.

As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was the best candidate for the job.
Cyril , Nov 24, 2018 1:10:13 PM | link
The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love?
Russ , Nov 24, 2018 1:16:21 PM | link
Posted by: james | Nov 24, 2018 12:15:31 PM | 7

"things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of russia after the fall of the soviet union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit russia fully, as they'd intended..."

They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass psychological pathology among the elites.

The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist "order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation.

GeorgeV , Nov 24, 2018 1:34:08 PM | link
Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is Strength." The three pillars of political power.
Sasha , Nov 24, 2018 1:38:39 PM | link
Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK government...and in this context, new empowerished sovereign governemts into the EU should consider the possibility expelling these traitors as spies of the UK....

http://www.voltairenet.org/article204051.html

Some of the "clusters" unmasked here....some, like Ignacio Torreblanca in Spain, are related to the CFR....

https://www.rt.com/news/444737-uk-funded-campaign-russia-leaks/

Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 2:12:45 PM | link
Country list of agents of influence according to the leak:
Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 2:13:28 PM | link
cresty , Nov 24, 2018 2:18:30 PM | link
Thank you very much for going through all the files, b. Will share far and wide

[Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-)

Highly recommended!
Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Perfidious Albion: or yet another example of the pot calling the kettle black when in fact the kettle may not be black at all; it's just the pot making up things

In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream.

We have already seen many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who does not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign against Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but seems to be part of a different project.

The ' Integrity Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via social media to take action when the British center perceives a need.

[Nov 24, 2018] Looks like we got the Ministry of Love, courtesy of CIA, MI6 and British government

Brennan and Obama as Godfathers of Ministry of Truth. How fitting ; -)
Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Now we know who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-) Perfidious Albion: or yet another example of the pot calling the kettle black when in fact the kettle may not be black at all; it's just the pot making up things

In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream.

[Nov 24, 2018] Looks like we got the Ministry of Love, courtesy of CIA, MI6 and British government

Brennan and Obama as Godfathers of Ministry of Truth. How fitting ; -)
Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Now we know who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-) Perfidious Albion: or yet another example of the pot calling the kettle black when in fact the kettle may not be black at all; it's just the pot making up things

In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream.

[Nov 23, 2018] Kunstler Exposes The Core Truth Of The 2016 Russia Collusion Story

Notable quotes:
"... For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years, I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth. ..."
"... For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years, I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth. ..."
Nov 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Kunstler Exposes "The Core Truth" Of The 2016 Russia Collusion Story

by Tyler Durden Fri, 11/23/2018 - 15:25 23 SHARES Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com, Holiday Doings And Undoings

Somehow I doubt that this Christmas will win the Bing Crosby star of approval. Rather, we see the financial markets breaking under the strain of sustained institutionalized fraud, and the social fabric tearing from persistent systemic political dishonesty. It adds up to a nation that can't navigate through reality, a nation too dependent on sure things, safe spaces, and happy outcomes. Every few decades a message comes from the Universe that faking it is not good enough.

The main message from the financials is that the global debt barge has run aground, and with it, the global economy. That mighty engine has been chugging along on promises-to-pay and now the faith that sustained those promises is dissolving. China, Euroland, and the USA can't possibly meet their tangled obligations, and are running out of tricks for rigging, gaming, and jacking the bond markets, where all those promises are vested. It boils down to a whole lot of people not getting paid, one way or the other -- and it's really bad for business.

Our President has taken full credit for the bubblicious markets, of course, and will be Hooverized as they gurgle around the drain. Given his chimerical personality, he may try to put on an FDR mask -- perhaps even sit in a wheelchair -- and try a few grand-scale policy tricks to escape the vortex. But the net effect will surely be to make matters worse -- for instance, if he can hector the Federal Reserve to buy every bond that isn't nailed to some deadly derivative booby-trap. But then he'll only succeed in crashing the dollar. Remember, there are two main ways you can go broke: You can run out of money; or you can have plenty of worthless money.

On the social and political scene, I sense that some things have run their course. Is a critical mass of supposedly educated people not fatigued and nauseated by the regime of "social justice" good-think, and the massive mendacity it stands for , starting with the idea that "diversity and inclusion" require the shut-down of free speech. The obvious hypocrisies and violations of reason emanating from the campuses -- a lot, but not all of it, in response to the Golden Golem of Greatness -- have made enough smart people stupid to endanger the country's political future. A lot of these formerly-non-stupid people work in the news media. It's not too late for some institutions like The New York Times and CNN to change out their editors and producers, and go back to reporting the reality-du-jour instead of functioning as agit-prop mills for every unsound idea ginned through the Yale humanities departments.

Shoehorned into the festivity of the season is the lame-duck session in congress, and one of the main events it portends is the end of Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. The Sphinx-like Mueller has maintained supernatural silence about his tendings and intentions. But if he'd uncovered anything substantial in the way of "collusion" between Mr. Trump and Russia, the public would know by now, since it would represent a signal threat to national security. So it's hard not to conclude that he has nothing except a few Mickey Mouse "process" convictions for lying to the FBI. On the other hand, it's quite impossible to imagine him ignoring the well-documented evidence trail of Hillary Clinton colluding with Russians to influence the 2016 contest against Mr. Trump -- and to defame him after he won. There's also the Hieronymus Bosch panorama of criminal mischief around the racketeering scheme known as the Clinton Foundation to consider. Do these venal characters get a pass on all that?

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) has announced plans to call Federal Attorney John Huber (Utah District) to testify about his assignment to look into these Clinton matters. It's a little hard to see how that might produce any enlightenment, since prosecutors are bound by law to not blab about currently open cases. The committee has also subpoenaed former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former FBI Director James Comey, and others who have some serious 'splainin' to do. But if both Huber and Mueller come up empty-handed on the Clintons it will be one of the epic marvels of official bad faith in US history.

There is a core truth to the 2016 Russia collusion story, and the Clintons are at the heart of it. Failure to even look will have very dark consequences for the public interest.


XWeatherman , 40 seconds ago link

It ought to be obvious to just about everyone who is paying attention and not a Corporate-Whore Democrat that the "The Russians Did It" delusion and the accompanying Mueller "investigation" is only a distraction to draw attention away from the obvious and numerous crimeS of H. Clinton, including running an electronic drop-box for U.S. state secrets using a server in her basement, charity fraud, pay-to-play bribe-taking, the uranium to Russia case, etc. And, that's not counting the inexcusable Unprovoked War of Aggression WAR CRIME against Libya. (Of course, she had an excuse: "Destroy a country in order to save a few "protesters".

Mueller is the Deep State (Corporations [especially Military Industrial Complex Death-Merchants, who direct the politicians and foreign policy actions (continual War-For-Humongous-Profits that has taken and takes multiple trillions of dollars away from potential domestic programs & Wall Street bankster-fraudsters who bankrupted the country with the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2008-2009 financial fiasco and who sent U.S. industrial production jobs to other countries] and Oligarchs who reap the profits of such crimes and their results) operative who apparently was brought in the head the FBI to fail to prevent and to coverup the real actors and actions that occurred in association with the downing of buildings at the New York City World Trade center on 9/11.

Hapa , 5 minutes ago link

Sorry, nobodies going to jail and all will be swept under the rug. We will have war to cover their tracks along with all the other frauds. The political buddy buddy system at the upper levels is set up to protect the guilty, and nobody has to pay the price lest the whole thing crumble. It's built that way.

Our only way out is a crash and a reset, with no guarantee what happens on the other side.

I used to be optimistic, but the level of lies, double speak and university factories pumping out marxist leftists portends a bleak future. How anyone thinks we can reason our way out of this situation is fooling themselves about human nature.

SantaClaws , 6 minutes ago link

Nice to see Kunstler focusing on some serious issues like the Uranium One scandal for a change. He seems to be on the concluding end of a cold-turkey or other rehab from some long-term unholy influence. As a result, he has been producing increasingly readable articles for the past several months. Congratulations are due him but with the warning that recovery is always one day at a time.

VWAndy , 7 minutes ago link

Did the Clintons go on a world tour like some kinda rockstars selling us all out?

An nobody said ****!

He–Mene Mox Mox , 14 minutes ago link

" Remember, there are two main ways you can go broke: You can run out of money; or you can have plenty of worthless money". Both pretty much sums up America's predicament. Americans are deep in debt, and their money is worthless.

MarsInScorpio , 1 minute ago link

OK.let's try this for speculative prediction:

Mueller isn't going to touch the Clintons - they have way too much criminal dirt on him. And Huber is an unknown lightweight with no Malicious Seditious Media support.

Sooooo . . . there is only one thing to do once the new Congress takes its oath: Trump gets DOJ Acting AG to appoint the long-awaited Special Prosecutor.

There are more than enough recognized felonies to go after - unlike the Mueller fishing expedition. That will put the Democrat investigation on ice - mainly because lots of Demo chairs and members will be part of the investigation.

"Yes Virginia, Hillary is going to prison . . .:"

navy62802 , 34 minutes ago link

Any serious investigation of the Clinton Foundation would reveal that "Russian Collusion" has everything to do with distraction from the crimes of the Clinton family. The fact that Bill and Hillary have escaped accountability for their heinous crimes is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in US history. It is truly quite frightening.

The Merovingian , 34 minutes ago link

There is a reason why the DOJ, Congress (both parties), MSM, the MIC, the Deep State don't want ANYONE to look into corruption ... because they are ALL ******* guilty as sin and buried neck deep in ****. Its long past time for the whole ******* thing to come down. We're all fucked.

Jim in MN , 13 minutes ago link

Weiner laptop For The Win. Give us that hard drive, Mr. President! We'll have it all analyzed in one weekend.

Meanwhile, Seth Rich awaits Mueller's OH SO DILIGENT investigation.

Can you believe that the 'core' of Mueller's 'case' ends up being about WIKILEAKS?

What the serious ****.

If he's done zero serious looks at Seth Rich all Mueller's work will just be thrown out of court anyway.

Ham sandwich my fat turkey-enriched ***.

For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years, I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth.

chippers , 40 minutes ago link

This guy is dreaming if he thinks anything is going to happen to the clintons, the MSM/DOJ is protected those 2 scumbags with the line that if they are investigated trump is going after his political opponents, just like a banana republic. But truthfully nothing reaks more of banana repubicism more then letting the high and mighty of on crimes.

chunga , 12 minutes ago link

I'd like to give a shout out to the "opposition" red team that has sat by and done nothing for more than 30 years.

And for you dopes in Rio Linda, that doesn't mean I'd rather have Honest Hill'rey, for crying out loud.

Bricker , 41 minutes ago link

Theres only one truth...Hillary and Co (CIA) colluded to bring down Trump and Trump kicked the **** out of her.

If we had a true republic, Hillary, Holder, Lynch, Obama, Clapper, Brennan, Lerner would all be under indictment. I mean the ******* list is long

pissonmefico , 19 minutes ago link

If they weren't all on the same side, that of the international bankster cabal, Trump would order his justice department to prosecute those people you mentioned.

The purpose of the Russia investigation is to fool you into thinking there are two sides, and to demonized Russia to create public opinion in favor of attacking Russia because it is not on board with the jwo totalitarian world government. WTFU.

navy62802 , 28 minutes ago link

For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years, I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth.

Teamtc321 , 24 minutes ago link

Mueller long ago gave up the fruitless hunt for Russian collusion involving President Trump and is now desperately seeking overdue library books or unpaid parking tickets on anyone remotely connected to President Trump to justify his mooching taxpayer dollars.

[Nov 22, 2018] Trump, JFK, and the Deep State Part Q by Jack Ravenwood

Notable quotes:
"... Q says that Donald Trump was asked to run for the Presidency by a team of military generals and other assorted true patriots who have slowly and patiently coalesced behind the scenes, waiting for the right time to strike back against Cabal. Q says that President Trump and the Q team say a prayer to the departed spirit of JFK each and every day in the White House, to steel them for the battle against Cabal. Q says that John F. Kennedy Jr. was a close friend of Donald Trump, and either was killed by the Clintons to ensure Hillary's Senate seat, or faked his own death and is still alive, helping Trump and Team Q fight Cabal behind the scenes. Some believe he might even be Q himself. ..."
"... One of the remarkable things about the Q phenomenon is how it has reversed some of the beliefs and values that have long been held by conspiracy theorists. For example, ever since investigators during the Iran-Contra scandal found out about the REX-84 plan to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law in the event of a national emergency, people have worried that someday the government is going to round up all the patriots and stick them in a FEMA camp somewhere. (See the aforementioned William Cooper book for a typical presentation of this.) But now, with Q talking about military tribunals for the members of Cabal, many of the same people are applauding the idea of doing away with due process and Constitutional rights for those accused of a crime. ..."
"... Q supporters often point to the bizarre exchange between Lindsey Graham and Brett Kavanaugh during the latter's confirmation hearings. Graham made a point of establishing the legitimacy of such tribunals during times of war, noting that the United States has technically been at war since 9-11. This is seen as further evidence that Graham and Kavanaugh are both on Team Q and gearing up for "The Storm." Apparently Graham's years of shilling for the neocons' war agenda are just water under the bridge now. ..."
"... Then there is the last case that Kavanaugh presided over before his appointment to the Supreme Court by President Trump. That was the case of Morley vs. CIA , which was brought about by journalist Jefferson Morley, who discovered the identity of the aforementioned George Joannides back in the 1990s. Ever since that time, he has been fighting the CIA in court to try to get the records on Joannides, so that historians and researchers can try to piece together his role in the events surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination. In a 2-1 decision, Kavanaugh sided with the CIA against Morley in deciding that, when a litigant successfully sues the government for records through the Freedom of Information Act, the government is not liable to pay their legal costs. This "incentivizes the CIA and other agencies to abuse FOIA and discourages investigative reporting," because whereas the government has virtually unlimited resources to fight, stall, and stonewall in court, the average citizen journalist or investigator does not. ..."
"... Trump is probably no more motivated to expose deep state treasons from the past than Obama was to actually improve the lot of black people in America. They're both the political equivalent of pressure relief valves. ..."
"... Trump is a complete fraud, and Q's purpose is to keep the idiots who voted for Trump thinking "any day now, any day any day now " ..."
Nov 22, 2018 | www.unz.com

We are now at year 55 since the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. This defining event of the Baby Boomer generation still looms large over the American nation, ever finding new ways to stay relevant to contemporary events.

There have been two significant developments during the Trump presidency. First was Trump's tweet in October 2017 saying that he would declassify all the remaining JFK files that the government is still withholding. I and many others who are interested in the JFK investigation were hopeful that this would happen, as I wrote in March of that year. While Trump's supporters cheered and took it as further confirmation of Trump's anti-establishment bona fides, the claim unfortunately turned out to be false. More than 15,000 records remain withheld, including some of the most important records that researchers have been waiting for, such as those on CIA man George Joannides.

Joannides, a mysterious figure whose identity was only discovered in the late 1990s, oversaw the agency's relationship with a Cuban exile group that Lee Harvey Oswald was in contact with, and was then brought out of retirement in the 1970s in order to oversee the CIA's relationship with the Congressional committee that had re-opened the JFK investigation. The Congressional investigators were led to believe that Joannides was just a regular CIA employee with no relation to the events in question. When House Select Committee on Assassinations chairman Robert Blakey finally found out, decades later, who Joannides really was, he admitted (to his credit) that he was wrong to think that the CIA had cooperated with his investigation, and that he should have believed his investigators like Gaeton Fonzi and Edward Lopez, who knew that the Agency was deceiving them, and tried to say so.

So we're still waiting for all the JFK files, and President Trump has not pushed the CIA to disclose them. But with a tweet and a subsequent release of some previously classified material, most people have been convinced otherwise. Ask the average Trump supporter whether or not Trump released all the JFK files and they will likely say that he has. This is because most of Trump's supporters, even otherwise intelligent and skeptical people, are strongly inclined to believe most everything that he says, (must be that master level persuasion) the same way that his detractors foolishly believe every negative story that the fake news media reports about him, including the conspiracy theory that Russia "hacked" the 2016 election.

(One important finding – to my knowledge totally unreported in any mainstream source – is that the stolen DNC emails were transferred at a speed far too fast to have been done by outside hacking , whether by Russians across the sea or teenagers down the block. Instead they must have been transferred onto a USB, by someone inside the DNC. Gee, I wonder who that could have been.)

But the biggest new story in the long tale of the JFK assassination and its cover-up is the emergence of Q.

With an ongoing series of posts on anonymous message boards known for being pro-Trump stomping grounds, Q – whoever he is or they are – has created a grand conspiracy theory on par with that of Milton William Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse , or Chris Carter's X-Files narrative (which I've always thought used material from Cooper).

The Q story holds that since President Kennedy's assassination, if not before, the United States has been under the control of a shadowy entity which Q followers call "Cabal." Within Cabal are all the bad guys of all the great conspiracy theories of the past hundred years, and more – the CIA, the Masons, the mafia, the black nobility, the Vatican, and even aliens. And they not only engineer almost every significant event that happens in the political and social landscape, from elections to blockbuster movies to false flag shootings, but they also commit the most heinous and unspeakable crimes, for the strangest of ritual and metaphysical reasons, that you can imagine.

Q says that Donald Trump was asked to run for the Presidency by a team of military generals and other assorted true patriots who have slowly and patiently coalesced behind the scenes, waiting for the right time to strike back against Cabal. Q says that President Trump and the Q team say a prayer to the departed spirit of JFK each and every day in the White House, to steel them for the battle against Cabal. Q says that John F. Kennedy Jr. was a close friend of Donald Trump, and either was killed by the Clintons to ensure Hillary's Senate seat, or faked his own death and is still alive, helping Trump and Team Q fight Cabal behind the scenes. Some believe he might even be Q himself.

What a great story! Where is Chris Carter to turn this into a tv show? (Arkhaven Comics is already turning it into a comic book .) But then, times have changed, and one could argue that there is no need to turn it into a show, because it is already a show that we are watching in real time and following on social media. This would make Jean Baudrillard's head explode, if he were still alive.

One of the remarkable things about the Q phenomenon is how it has reversed some of the beliefs and values that have long been held by conspiracy theorists. For example, ever since investigators during the Iran-Contra scandal found out about the REX-84 plan to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law in the event of a national emergency, people have worried that someday the government is going to round up all the patriots and stick them in a FEMA camp somewhere. (See the aforementioned William Cooper book for a typical presentation of this.) But now, with Q talking about military tribunals for the members of Cabal, many of the same people are applauding the idea of doing away with due process and Constitutional rights for those accused of a crime.

Q supporters often point to the bizarre exchange between Lindsey Graham and Brett Kavanaugh during the latter's confirmation hearings. Graham made a point of establishing the legitimacy of such tribunals during times of war, noting that the United States has technically been at war since 9-11. This is seen as further evidence that Graham and Kavanaugh are both on Team Q and gearing up for "The Storm." Apparently Graham's years of shilling for the neocons' war agenda are just water under the bridge now.

Kavanaugh likewise has been hailed by Trump and Q supporters as another fighter in the battle against Cabal. I'm inclined to believe that the sexual assault charges against Kavanaugh were false, especially because Blasey Ford's testimony was so obviously constructed for maximum emotional effect and minimal legal accountability for perjury. (I'm also inclined to believe that Kavanaugh's innocuous explanations of the various terms in his yearbook were bullshit. The only thing teenage boys like more than beer is sex.) But much more important than any of that is the fact that Kavanaugh is alleged to have helped cover up the likely murder of Vince Foster when he worked for Ken Starr's investigation of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. A witness in the Foster case, Patrick Knowlton, recently recounted his experience with Kavanaugh during that investigation on Ed Opperman's podcast . So how does Kavanaugh go from covering for the Clintons to being on team Lock-Her-Up?

Then there is the last case that Kavanaugh presided over before his appointment to the Supreme Court by President Trump. That was the case of Morley vs. CIA , which was brought about by journalist Jefferson Morley, who discovered the identity of the aforementioned George Joannides back in the 1990s. Ever since that time, he has been fighting the CIA in court to try to get the records on Joannides, so that historians and researchers can try to piece together his role in the events surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination. In a 2-1 decision, Kavanaugh sided with the CIA against Morley in deciding that, when a litigant successfully sues the government for records through the Freedom of Information Act, the government is not liable to pay their legal costs. This "incentivizes the CIA and other agencies to abuse FOIA and discourages investigative reporting," because whereas the government has virtually unlimited resources to fight, stall, and stonewall in court, the average citizen journalist or investigator does not.

I can't take a position on whether or not Q is "real," i.e. someone actually connected to the President, simply because I have no way of knowing. The "Q proofs" that supporters offer up are not proofs at all, but some of them do indeed seem to defy explanation. But what is more significant is that President Trump is clearly in on the game. And what is even more significant is that the mainstream media, while publishing article after article about how stupid the Q theory is and how dangerous the Q followers are, never acknowledge Trump's obvious acceptance of it, nor ask him to do anything about it.

The Q phenomenon could be killed in an instant, in a very simple way. All President Trump has to do is tweet: "Q is not real. It's not anyone connected to me." Boom. Done. But he hasn't done that, or anything like it, such as having a friendly journalist pitch the question to him. For whatever reason, he wants Q to continue. Why? And why is the media scared to ask him about it, especially if they're so sure that it's just a larp, but nonetheless oh so very dangerous?

At least some of the benefit for Trump is obvious. The Q narrative paints him as perhaps the greatest President in American history, selflessly devoted to battling evil in the name of truth, justice, and the American way. Just like how many people think of JFK. Except that, whereas JFK is supposed to have been killed by the military-industrial complex, we're now supposed to be rooting for the military-industrial complex as the good guys, fighting against the shadowy and nefarious Cabal. The plot has shifted from Seven Days in May to G.I. Joe vs. Cobra . Trump, JFK, and the Deep State: Part Q, by Jack Ravenwood - The Unz Review

I don't think that President Trump would continue to subtly encourage the Q phenomenon just for the ego boost, or for the few thousand extra votes it gets him. But I could be wrong – stranger things have happened in American politics.

We may yet learn the truth about who or what is behind Q. For those of us who believe that the prince of this world is the father of lies, it's not impossible to believe that there are rich and powerful people who are as evil as Q says they are. And it's difficult not to hope, in some part of your mind, that Trump really is what Q supporters believe him to be, and that The Storm really is going to round up all those "bad, bad people" that Trump called out during his campaign. But I'm not holding my breath, just like I'm not holding it waiting for the rest of those files.

I suspect, rather, that Q will disappear when the people behind him deem the time to be right, and no explanations will be forthcoming. Competing theories will emerge – it was a psyop, it was just an elaborate hoax, it was Trump himself, it really was JFK Jr.! – and researchers and historians will debate the minutiae, talking about how these pieces of evidence point to this conclusion, but these other pieces of evidence point to that conclusion. And the question of Who Was Q? will take its place alongside that other historical mystery that I'm sure I and others will still be writing and wondering about five, ten, twenty years from now, and beyond: Who Killed JFK?

JLK , says: November 21, 2018 at 7:19 pm GMT

Trump is probably no more motivated to expose deep state treasons from the past than Obama was to actually improve the lot of black people in America. They're both the political equivalent of pressure relief valves.

Of course, I hope I'm wrong.

Trump, JFK, and the Deep State: Part Q, by Jack Ravenwood - The Unz Review
Haxo Angmark , says: Website November 22, 2018 at 12:34 am GMT
Trump is a complete fraud, and Q's purpose is to keep the idiots who voted for Trump thinking "any day now, any day any day now "

[Nov 21, 2018] Keeping Bin Salman In Place Will Hurt Trump s Middle East Policies

Notable quotes:
"... The CIA disliked MbS since he replaced Mohammed bin Nayef as crown prince. MbN is a longtime U.S. asset with a proven record of cooperation. ..."
"... Khashoggi's projects were allegedly financed by Qatar but probably also had CIA support. MbS got wind thereof. He told his private office chief Bader Al Asaker to send his bodyguards to kill Khashoggi. They did so on October 2 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. But it was a much too large and too complicate mission. They Saudi agents made too many mistakes. They also underestimated the Turkish intelligence service. ..."
"... Sounds like, for all of MbS's recklessness and all the regime's existential dependency on the US military, the Saudis aren't willing to place all their bets on one US pony but, like most of the rest of the world, are trying to diversify if not detach from the tottering US empire. ..."
"... funny thing.. why is it that those who call for free and open elections in the middle east countries where the us/uk/west military industrial complex have murdered countless innocent people in iraq, libya, syria and now yemen - never complain about the absence of free and open elections in saudi arabia??? i know these same people are hypocritical liars.. what their real interests are is money off military sales and nothing more.. ..."
"... Trump is essentially doing all of Israel's talking points... iran this and that, hezbollah, or hamas this and that.. ..."
"... they sure aren't busy getting their head out of the military industrial complex's ass ..."
"... "Trump's priorities in the Middle East are: the 'deal of the century' for Israel, the forging of a united Arab front against Iran, weapon sales, cheap oil and minor issue like financing the U.S. occupation of Syria and ending the unsavory war on Yemen. Delivering on the deal of a century is not the priority, the promise is. United Arab front is not a priority because it's not needed. Most of all, stopping the war in Yemen is not. ..."
"... Is it too late for MbS to finally spit out the truth? "Khasshoggi was an Enemy of the Kingdom fomenting the mechanism for a coup, and I ordered him liquidated." ..."
"... "The Erdogan machine has sensed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to simultaneously bury the House of Saud's shaky Islamic credibility while solidifying Turkish neo-Ottomanism, but with an Ikhwan framework." ..."
"... We have seen oil prices plummet since the Khashoggi event although that may be due to insider trading of those knowing Trump was backing off on Iran oil sanctions which accelerated after being announced in November ..."
"... MBS is anti Iran and pro Israel. Trump is in Bibis pocket. More important MBS is a counter to Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood. More conflicts in the region are desirable . He is also willing to bomb US civilian targets in Yemen so they can pretend to have no involvement, and as such will buy more weapons ..."
"... If MBS gets the message and follows orders, he stays. If he doesn't and makes Lockheed Martin disappointed, he goes. Also that Saudi Aramco IPO has to happen before 2020. The list is long. ..."
"... There is another angle to the Khashoggi killing and that is that the US or UK organized the killing to embarrass Trump and remove MBS. ..."
"... The CIA also fear Trump; and they have shown that they are not and never will be a friend to him. So I am inclined to agree with john mason 28 when he suspects the US or UK organized the killing to embarrass Trump and remove MBS. ..."
Nov 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Russ , Nov 21, 2018 1:02:55 PM | link

Against the advise from his intelligence services U.S. President Trump decided to leave the effective Saudi ruler, clown prince Mohammad bin Salman, in place. That move is unlikely to help with his larger policy plans.

Bruce Riedel, a (former) high level CIA analyst, long warned of betting on Mohammad bin Salman. Even before the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Riedel wrote that Saudi Arabia is at its least stable in 50 years (also here ):

The stability of Saudi Arabia is becoming more fragile as the young crown prince's judgment and competence are increasingly in doubt. Mohammed bin Salman has a track record of impulsive and reckless decisions at home and abroad that calls into question the kingdom's future.

Riedel warned that the Trump administration, by betting on Mohammad bin Salman, put everything on one dubious card. MbS is unstable and made himself many internal enemies. If King Salman suddenly dies there will probably be a leadership crisis . Saudi Arabia could end up in chaos. U.S. Middle East policy, largely build around MbS, would then fall apart.

The CIA disliked MbS since he replaced Mohammed bin Nayef as crown prince. MbN is a longtime U.S. asset with a proven record of cooperation. MbS came from nowhere and the CIA has no control over him. That he is indeed impulsive and reckless only adds to that. That the CIA feared that MbS meant trouble even before the Khashoggi disaster, explains why it sabotaged Trump's attempts to exculpate MbS over the murder of Khashoggi.

While Riedel was writing about the Saudi danger, Jamal Khashoggi, a longtime Saudi intelligence agent who had aligned himself with the wrong prince, went to Istanbul to build the public relation infrastructure for regime change in Saudi Arabia:

Jamal Khashoggi, a prolific writer and commentator, was working quietly with intellectuals, reformists and Islamists to launch a group called Democracy for the Arab World Now. He wanted to set up a media watch organization to keep track of press freedom.

He also planned to launch an economic-focused website to translate international reports into Arabic to bring sobering realities to a population often hungry for real news, not propaganda.

Part of Khashoggi's approach was to include political Islamists in what he saw as democracy building.
...
Khashoggi had incorporated his democracy advocacy group, DAWN, in January in Delaware, said Khaled Saffuri, another friend. .. The project was expected to reach out to journalists and lobby for change, representing both Islamists and liberals, ...

Khashoggi's projects were allegedly financed by Qatar but probably also had CIA support. MbS got wind thereof. He told his private office chief Bader Al Asaker to send his bodyguards to kill Khashoggi. They did so on October 2 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. But it was a much too large and too complicate mission. They Saudi agents made too many mistakes. They also underestimated the Turkish intelligence service.

The Turks had bugged the Saudi consulate and have records of all phone calls. When they learned from Khashoggi's fiancee, a well connected daughter of a co-founder of Erdogan's AK Party, that Khashoggi was missing, they wound back the tapes and unraveled the story. The killers had made four phone calls to Al Asaker to report back. In one of the calls the mission leader told him : "Tell your boss" that "the deed was done." The Turkish president Erdogan was delighted to receive such a gift. It allowed him to cut his strategic competitor down to size.

The Saudis were too slow to recognize the danger. They came up with all sorts of unbelievable claims over what happened in their consulate. Trump sent Secretary of State Pompeo who told them to find a sufficiently high ranking scapegoat ...

XXX

Interesting times. Sounds like, for all of MbS's recklessness and all the regime's existential dependency on the US military, the Saudis aren't willing to place all their bets on one US pony but, like most of the rest of the world, are trying to diversify if not detach from the tottering US empire.

But I suspect the Saudi regime is too far committed on its prior US-dependent path to survive in any other way. They're going down too.

Never Mind the Bollocks , Nov 21, 2018 1:06:21 PM | link

Mystery solved: here's why the Western mainstream media suddenly 'discovered' the war in Yemen
thinkingmind111 , Nov 21, 2018 1:10:58 PM | link
Trump is openly and proudly accepting blood for money, so what? It's just business as usual for the US whom are running all and any of their global businesses and operations on that premise since decades. But Karma is a bitch and will haunt back, and we're getting closer to the day of reckoning while already witnessing the loss of power and influence of the US and their allied western powers and vassals.

The close future will see China, Russia, India, Asia and Eurasia ruling the global affairs, and soon it's check mate concerning the new great chess game, e.g. game over for the US. The only remaining question: do we get there with or without an all-out nuclear war, because the US won't accept their loss of power? Time will tell ...

james , Nov 21, 2018 1:29:14 PM | link
thanks b... good overview.... as we noted - the kashoggi murder is the gift that keeps on giving to erdogan and the cia...

funny thing.. why is it that those who call for free and open elections in the middle east countries where the us/uk/west military industrial complex have murdered countless innocent people in iraq, libya, syria and now yemen - never complain about the absence of free and open elections in saudi arabia??? i know these same people are hypocritical liars.. what their real interests are is money off military sales and nothing more..

well, this is what the usa-uk and poodles have come down to... military arms sales... and they now have competition with russia who appears to make better weapons..

mbs is not going to last... he might hang in for another year, but i doubt much longer, if that.. meanwhile, trump is standing naked for all to see what his priorities are... make america great again, lol... yeah, right.. making the usa look like shit again is more like it..

james , Nov 21, 2018 1:34:36 PM | link
here is a link to caitlin johnstone's comments on trumps response to the kashoggi murder...

Trump is essentially doing all of Israel's talking points... iran this and that, hezbollah, or hamas this and that.. . why can't the usa gets it's head out of israels ass?? they sure aren't busy getting their head out of the military industrial complex's ass either...

CasualObserver , Nov 21, 2018 1:53:54 PM | link Peter AU 1 , Nov 21, 2018 1:54:14 PM | link
"The Turks had bugged the Saudi consulate and have records of all phone calls. When they learned from Khashoggi's fiancee, a well connected daughter of a co-founder of Erdogan's AK Party, that Khashoggi was missing, they wound back the tapes and unraveled the story."

Turks bugged the embassy but only listen to the tapes after something happens .. unlikely.
With the animosity or competition between KSA and Turkey prior to the killing, it is more likely that KSA embassy calls were monitored in real time.

james , Nov 21, 2018 1:59:18 PM | link
@6 ort.. here is the direct link!
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/11/21/nothing-in-any-conspiracy-theory-is-as-bad-as-whats-being-done-out-in-the-open/
S , Nov 21, 2018 2:19:40 PM | link
Risk-taker king + S-400/Bastion/GLONASS = switch from 100% dollar oil sales to something like 40% yuan, 30% euro, 30% dollar. Others follow suit, American manipulation of world economy lessens. I'll take it.
steven t johnson , Nov 21, 2018 2:30:47 PM | link
"When [the Turks] learned from Khashoggi's fiancee, a well connected daughter of a co-founder of Erdogan's AK Party, that Khashoggi was missing, they wound back the tapes and unraveled the story."

This is ficion, as there is every likelihood the Turks knew perfectly well ahead of time that Kashoggi was walking into trouble. And it is very likely they had an agent on scene, part of the crime. As for the tapes, it is still unknown whether the real leverage in the tapes is what Kashoggi said.

The notion the CIA has sabotaged Trump with its assessment is wrong. If the CIA had given the tapes to Erdogan or is funding plots within KSA against MbS, that's sabotaging Trump's support. Nobody believed Trump before the assessment, and nobody believed Trump would change his mind for any reason whatsoever. The assessment just lets the CIA pretend to be competent and objective, rather than producing cooked intelligence in service of predetermined policy goals. The actual covert operations are under presidential control, and only presidential control. No deep state, much less Congress, has any say on those. That's why presidents like the CIA so much.

"Trump's priorities in the Middle East are: the 'deal of the century' for Israel, the forging of a united Arab front against Iran, weapon sales, cheap oil and minor issue like financing the U.S. occupation of Syria and ending the unsavory war on Yemen. Delivering on the deal of a century is not the priority, the promise is. United Arab front is not a priority because it's not needed. Most of all, stopping the war in Yemen is not.

the pair , Nov 21, 2018 2:36:13 PM | link
always odd when the (relatively) "good guys" in a story are the CIA and their bloggers at the WaPo. but then they object to MbS for the same reason they are mortified by trump: his style and not his substance.

as for trump, he's always been a spoiled and petulant rich kid and that type only change course when it's "their idea".

on oil: it's been a pain in the ass for Iran and Russia to some degree but also here in Canada's Texas aka the oil sands. the usual ayn rand-reading "get rid a' the gubmint" rednecks are panicked and suddenly want said government to force production cuts in the sector. when it comes to iran, china and others have made it clear that they care as much about sanctions as the US does about climate and nuclear treaties. not hard to guess what russia and venezuela would like the saudis to do since they've both been suffering (probably intentional) pain from the petrol glut. russia has weathered it incredibly well but the timing for maduro and the chavism experiment couldn't be better with the usual pack of US-aligned wolves fomenting trouble in the continent.

nice thorough article as usual.

Bart Hansen , Nov 21, 2018 3:24:26 PM | link
I see that the Magnitsky Act had been slapped on some KSA usual suspects several days ago. Has anyone asked Ben Cardin, godfather of the act, why MbS has escaped the same fate?
peter , Nov 21, 2018 3:24:52 PM | link
@12

Of course the CIA isn't trying to sabotage Trump. They just came to the same painfully obvious solution any other intelligence operation worth its salt arrived at.

Erdogan required no help from them. His people just connected the dots like everyone else. The CIA does not have to try and "appear" competent. Like 'em or hate 'em, they're as competent as hell.

Trump has chosen to wobble om MsM's culpability so he can pursue his tortured agenda throwing numbers about with abandon on the reams of cash that the Saudis will come supposedly up with whether it's imaginary arms deals or production numbers that will keep the price of oil low.

Nobody believes Trump. Nobody except his hardcore base and they will never change. If their faith remains solid after two years of total skullduggery, lies and ill-considered deals with batshit-crazy dictators then what could he possibly do or say that would change things now? They're like those lunatic Baptists that play with rattlesnakes during their services.

The US needs the KSA for a number of reasons and Trump has decided to forfeit any moral high ground or any appearance of sanity or reason to achieve his aims.

Clueless Joe , Nov 21, 2018 4:15:04 PM | link
Well, MBS staying in charge for a bit longer is good news for many. Were he to be replaced, someone half-competent might take his place. With him at the helm, we're sure he's going to bumble and make a mess of his next endeavours, weakening the Saudis and being all around counter-productive to Saudi Arabia's long-term interests. Of course, his days are numbered, yet he can still do a lot of damage to the kingdom.
karlof1 , Nov 21, 2018 4:37:40 PM | link
Is it too late for MbS to finally spit out the truth? "Khasshoggi was an Enemy of the Kingdom fomenting the mechanism for a coup, and I ordered him liquidated." IMO, that's less awkward than continuing the other charades, shuts-up Erdogan and wrong-foots his detractors. Now, I don't particularly care for MbS, but IMO he's no worse than Erdogan, Sisi, Trump, or May, all of whom are Capital Criminals. And I'd prefer to see someone independent of the CIA in charge of Saudi, although that's probably his only redeeming asset.

Perhaps, MbS will send a body-double to G-20, and the CIA will crash his plane only to see MbS alive and well, taunting Haspel and Trump as he personally beheads arrested CIA assets.

dh-mtl , Nov 21, 2018 5:46:43 PM | link
'Keeping Bin Salman In Place Will Hurt Trump's Middle East Policies', but removing him will hurt Trump's mid-east policies even more.

If he is removed, he will be replaced by a 'Globalist' puppet. The 'Globalists' will then use Saudi as an additional lever to try to drag Trump into a war with Russia, which so far Trump has desperately tried to avoid. I also don't think that MBS will go easily. The same fate as Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein is what awaits him. However, I think Trump is too weak to save MBS. Look for MBS to turn Saudi towards Russia to look for salvation.

karlof1 , Nov 21, 2018 6:03:28 PM | link
Pepe Escobar reminds us of another issue at stake: Leadership of the Umma, which was Ottoman for centuries prior to the artificial elevation of Saudi by Ottoman's European rivals. Pepe smartly invokes Alastair Crooke's take that if Saudi was to lose that distinction, it "would strip the Gulf of much of its significance and value to Washington." Pepe:

"The Erdogan machine has sensed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to simultaneously bury the House of Saud's shaky Islamic credibility while solidifying Turkish neo-Ottomanism, but with an Ikhwan framework."

Iran, Syria, Iraq, Qatar, Russia, and China all seem to be okay with that. IMO, most here will agree with Pepe's conclusion: "Expect major fireworks ahead."

VietnamVet , Nov 21, 2018 6:09:03 PM | link

Thanks. This clarifies the contradictions. The USA has only one Middle East ally left; Israel, which also influences American politics. With the main goal in life to make more money. Morality and decency have disappeared in the West. All that is left is a mercenary force illegally occupying Eastern Syria for a paltry 100 million dollars surrounded by professed enemies. Basically, MbS isn't delivering the cash the oligarchs want. He must go. This is highly unstable. Ignoring reality is a sure-fire way to ignite the prophesied Abrahamic Apocalypse.
vk , Nov 21, 2018 6:15:53 PM | link
Trump is doing nothing out of the ordinary by a POTUS. If it was a Democrat POTUS in the same situation, it would also ultimately support Saudi Arabia (the NYT and WaPo would, obviously, be silent, but Fox News would propagate the scandal).

I stick to my hypothesis: Trump's only sin to the liberal eyes is that he erodes America's soft power among its First World allies. If you take out his image, he's a normal POTUS doing normal POTUS things.

Baron , Nov 21, 2018 6:24:03 PM | link
(1) Nobody has yet figured that the Turks must have listened to what was going on in the Consulate if not before K's first visit then at least from the time K first stepped into the building, the Turks knew what was coming, could have waned K, but didn't. Does it not make them complicit in the murder?

(2) MbS cannot be kicked out, the decision to promote him was made by the King for a reason, the old man thinks ahead, he sees the Republic losing its grip on things worldwide, he wants to make a move towards the coming powers of the East, Russia and China, hence the King's visit to Moscow last December. What did the King and Putin talk about?

(3) Bibi backs the King, the Israeli lobby in Washington will buy anyone opposing MbS, the atrocity will be swept under the carpet, the Donald will be OK the American unwashed don't give AF about the Saudis, most of them probably don't know where the country is.

Pft , Nov 21, 2018 6:38:26 PM | link
Since when has US and Israel goals has been about stability in the region. Chaos makes waves and rock the boat to the delight of the baby in the cradle. Wheeee.

Besides, MBS may have went a bit rogue but the Khashoggi event, set up or what not, was meant to reign him in and show him who is boss. We have seen oil prices plummet since the Khashoggi event although that may be due to insider trading of those knowing Trump was backing off on Iran oil sanctions which accelerated after being announced in November

MBS is anti Iran and pro Israel. Trump is in Bibis pocket. More important MBS is a counter to Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood. More conflicts in the region are desirable . He is also willing to bomb US civilian targets in Yemen so they can pretend to have no involvement, and as such will buy more weapons

The Event was probably also meant to get him to back off his investment efforts that would compete with US efforts to do the same, and to back off Russian and China military/economic cooperation.

If MBS gets the message and follows orders, he stays. If he doesn't and makes Lockheed Martin disappointed, he goes. Also that Saudi Aramco IPO has to happen before 2020. The list is long.

Krollchem , Nov 21, 2018 6:47:31 PM | link
According to this report by Eric Zuesse the leader of the UAE had a part in cleaning up the consulate in Turkey:
http://theduran.com/turkish-newspaper-implicates-uaes-crown-prince-in-covering-up-murder-of-khashoggi/
john mason , Nov 21, 2018 7:11:26 PM | link
There is another angle to the Khashoggi killing and that is that the US or UK organized the killing to embarrass Trump and remove MBS.

Can't see that the Saudis are that naive to believe that their Embassy wouldn't be under surveillance and the mention of "tell your boss...." is too convenient. One assumes that the boss is MBS but it could be anyone else also.

SteveK9 , Nov 21, 2018 7:25:54 PM | link
The problem with Trump's plan ... is Trump's plan. It makes no sense for the United States as a nation to destroy Iran. That is only for Israel-firsters. Perhaps their power is just too great for Trump to resist, but what would have worked well would have been rapprochement with Iran.
karlof1 , Nov 21, 2018 7:53:45 PM | link
Very sagacious observation :

"With regard to #SaudiArabia, as with #Israel, #US foreign policy is entrenched, it cannot change, nor adapt. It rather tries to change the politics in the region according to its rigid framework. There must be a breaking point to this approach and it might come under #Trump."

Trump's also about to forfeit what remaining influence he has with Lebanon as Magnier posits .

At least we won't need to wait long to see what happens next as the G-20 begins November 30--Will MbS undergo an assassination attempt before, during, after, or constantly if he does attempt to attend.

Jen , Nov 21, 2018 7:56:13 PM | link
John Mason @ 28: Another possible angle is that while Jamal Khashoggi's killing is real enough, the narrative that the Turks are feeding out is being fabricated continuously, and in response to whatever the Saudis are doing to deny or excuse any possibility that the Crown Prince ordered it. The recordings being parceled out could be complete fakes or the original recording may have had other, fabricated recordings added to it.

I'm with Clueless Joe @ 16 and Karlof1 @ 17 in keeping MbS as Crown Prince: he is no more if no less sociopathic and vicious than the current crop of Western political leaders. If Gavin Williamson and his guru / mentor (in the form of his pet tarantula) were to replace Theresa May as British Prime Minister, then British-Saudi leadership relations need a voice of relative sanity and MbS would be that voice.

Ghost Ship , Nov 21, 2018 8:03:25 PM | link
Meanwhile Tulsi Gabbard tweeted "Hey @realdonaldtrump: being Saudi Arabia's bitch is not "America First.""

And various Republican morons popped out of the woodwork rehashing that crap that Assad had murdered 500,000 Syrians while fine upstanding Americans like Jimmy Dore and Stephen Linzer are backing her.

BTW, I'm surprised the trash with learning disabilities at the Washington Post haven't accused her of being ISIS (see second picture in article credited to the Washington Post)

frances , Nov 21, 2018 8:07:23 PM | link
b- you pointed out that: "..the CIA feared that MbS meant trouble even before the Khashoggi disaster, explains why it sabotaged Trump's attempts to exculpate MbS over the murder of Khashoggi."

The CIA also fear Trump; and they have shown that they are not and never will be a friend to him. So I am inclined to agree with john mason 28 when he suspects the US or UK organized the killing to embarrass Trump and remove MBS.

I am further inclined to take this reasoning a bit further and suggest that the CIA facilitated this murder; probably by telling their reporter asset he could safely go to Turkey and by telling SA when he would arrive. For how else could anyone purportedly as clever as this fellow think they would be safe on SA defacto soil?

The CIA want their own guy in SA and they want Trump on his knees, so far they don't have what they want. Which leads me to also wonder if the CIA is possibly responsible for the misadventures Bibi is having. If the CIA and its masters can dethrone Bibi and the Prince, Trump's ME strategy would be toast, significantly diminishing or even wiping out his US/Israeli support and possibly destroy his shot at a second term. For all his flaws he did and has overturned a lot of apple carts; the Deep State wants their damn carts back.

[Nov 21, 2018] An alternative view on Turkey and Khashoggi by Marios Evriviades

Notable quotes:
"... By Marios Evriviades ..."
"... [*] Marios Evriviades is a former Cyprus diplomat and presidential advisor. He is a professor of international relations at universities in Greece and Cyprus. ..."
www.defenddemocracy.press
Turkey: Milking the Khashoggi Murder

By Marios Evriviades
Athens

Can a man gasping for breath as he is forcibly suffocated with a plastic bag over his head, articulate his survival problem multisyllabically with a medicalized request to which he invited his killers to consent? "I'm suffocating Take this bag off my head, I'm claustrophobic".

These are the alleged last words of Saudi politician and journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to the latest leak from the Turkish intelligence agencies. If you are keeping count, this may be the 22nd in the series since Khashoggi's disappearance in Istanbul on October 2. The last words come from the audio tape of a recording system installed, unsuspected and undetected in the Saudi consulate, by some of the finest electronic equipment the Turkish services have received from their western allies.

Before the new last words leaked into the press, there was no plastic bag. The previous Turkish version was that Khashoggi was attacked within minutes of entering the Saudi

consulate at 13:14 on the fateful day; strangled by the bare hands of at least one, possibly two attackers, as he fought and screamed for his life. Those screams, according to an even earlier Turkish leak, were recorded on a device Khashoggi was wearing undetected on his wrist, primed to transmit to his Turkish fiancée standing outside the building.

Then there is the crucial matter of the corpus delicti. For without that, in a police or coroner's court in a country other than Turkey, there is only the case of a missing person. That person's body is missing, the world was originally told, because it had been cut into pieces with a bone-saw.

In disclosures to the press which have followed, the body pieces were taken in packages by car to the nearby house of the Saudi Consul-General. There they were either buried in the backyard, or thrown in a garden well, or carried off in another vehicle by a local Turkish subcontractor and disposed of in a nearby forest. Because Turkish investigators have found no trace of any of these things, we are now told that none of them happened. In addition, no explanation has been given by the Turkish services, which had earlier provided photographs of body parts, including a scalped head, allegedly Khashoggi's, which have been circulating in Turkey and other countries.

The version which has followed in the more squeamish western press is that the body parts of Khashoggi were dissolved in acid at the home of the consul, and that is the reason we are now told the body could not be found. Strangely, no traces of acid were reported to have been found in the house or its well or waste system, after the Turks entered and searched it thoroughly days before the story of the acid appeared. The acid traces were reported to have been found in the house of the consul days later, once the earlier versions of Khashoggi's "disappearance" had ceased to be plausible or possible.

Read also: The Empire Strikes Back: Hillary Clinton and the military-industrial complex

The world has been asked by the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to believe all of this in sequence, and forget each story as the Turks released new ones. Also, the world was requested to share in the Turks' moral outrage at the dastardly act. Turkish morality is the reason Erdogan's subordinates threw a temper tantrum when the French Foreign Minister,

Jean-Yves Le Drian, accused Erdogan of "playing a political game" https://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFKCN1NH0O5 with the Khashoggi murder. The evidence Erdogan has been releasing makes this plain to everyone.

But not to the righteous Turks. Did not their president say to an international audience on October 23, and in an editorial he arranged with the Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=%2fnews%2fglobal-opinions%2fwp%2f2018%2f11%2f02%2frecep-tayyip-erdogan-saudi-arabia-still-has-many-questions-to-answer-about-jamal-khashoggis-killing%2f%3f on November 2, that he will move "earth and heaven" to get to the bottom of the Khashoggi case; have the Saudi perpetrators punished no matter how high-ranking they are -- Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's photograph is placed in illustration of Erdogan's words, but he himself doesn't dare name him. Erdogan has also promised to serve justice; give Khashoggi a muslim funeral; and ensure that nothing of this kind will ever again occur in a NATO member state. (These are not assurances Erdogan has offered the families of the fourteen Turkish journalists also still missing in Erdogan's jurisdiction; seven of them confirmed dead, including the famous Hrant Dink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hrant_Dink )

How dare anyone question Erdogan's integrity? is the unanimous cry out of Turkey.

Let me tell you why. The Turks do not have to move "earth and heaven" now to get to the bottom of the Khashoggi murder. They could have done that within hours – repeat hours -- of the reported disappearance of Khashoggi, by arresting the eighteen alleged Saudi murderers; by searching the premises of the Istanbul consulate and the residence of the Saudi consul; and by arresting him as a co-conspirator in the homicide. Within hours, the Turkish authorities reporting to Erdogan had all the prima fac ie evidence they needed to establish that a crime had been committed. But act they did not. Instead, they – that means Erdogan -- allowed the alleged murderers to leave Istanbul on the evening after the crime was committed. They allowed the Saudi Consul, Mohammed al-Otaibi, to take his time – two weeks -- before he departed on October 16.

Read also: Saudi Arabia has to be stopped and this time it may get stopped

On what the Turks did or did not do in their prosecution of the Khashoggi case, let

Yasar Yakis tell us. Yakis is a retired career diplomat, a former Turkish Foreign Minister and member of Erdogan's Islamist party. In a subtle article, "What Turkey did and didn't do about the Khashoggi murder", published on October 24 in the English-language

Turkish website Ahval, https://ahvalnews.com/jamal-khashoggi/what-turkey-did-and-didnt-do-about-khashoggi-murder based in Washington, Yakis endorsed Turkey for what it "did". He also went on to report what it "didn't do", and why. Yakis is quite revealing.

By citing the official time frame of Khashoggi's disappearance, Yakis shows that the authorities had ample time to decide they were holding enough evidence that a serious crime had been committed on the premises of the Saudi Consulate and at the home of the Saudi consul in Istanbul; by a group of Saudi nationals carrying diplomatic passports who had flown into the country in two private jets and a commercial airline early on October 2. Since Turkish laws had been violated, the authorities knew they had the legal right, in line with the 1963 Geneva Convention on Consular Relations, to search the Saudi diplomatic premises, and arrest the suspects, including the Consul-General. Their diplomatic status, the Turkish authorities knew at the time and Yakis has repeated, guaranteed immunity from search and arrest only in the Saudi performance of diplomatic duties. Committing murder, as the evidence immediately suggested, was not one of them.

Yakis does argue that the relevant articles of the Geneva Convention limited the right of Turkish entry and search at the consulate and the consul's home, putting off-limits the Saudi

office archives and documents related to the diplomatic activities routinely carried out at the mission.

Additionally in his Ahval article Yakis discloses a crucial detail. Whether Yakis intended it or not, he reveals the deliberate and manipulative behaviour of the Turkish authorities. Fifteen of the alleged culprits departed in two private planes at 18.20 and 22.50 hours respectively, after going through regular customs clearance. Even if as Erdogan revealed in his October 23 statement the Turkish authorities did not learn the fate of Khashoggi until 17:50 on October 2 -- a time that is patently false if the timeline leaked by Turkish intelligence is accepted as the truth – there was still plenty of time for the Turks to arrest the fifteen, plus another three of the conspirators who left on a commercial flight.

What is reported by Yakis is that "the plane carrying part of the Saudi team was stopped in the skies above Nallihan (a rural district in the Ankara Province) and ordered into a holding pattern, before being allowed on its way. If the plane had been forced to land, and itspassengers put under questioning, a great deal of now unknown information would have been obtained".

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Yakis reveals that it wasn't necessary for the Turks to move "earth and heaven" – all they had to do on the evening of October 2 was to prevent the alleged culprits from fleeing the scene of the crime, or stopping them at the airport, or in their airplanes before they left Turkish airspace. At that time, even if the Consul had been left untouched, the case would have been wrapped up in no time.

But Erdogan and his associates had other, more ambitious plans. It is those plans unfolding which have dictated each new leak. Had Erdogan decided to hold the eighteen fleeing Saudis, that would have meant rupturing relations with the Saudi kingdom, but this is something Erdogan and his officials repeat they do not want to do. However, such behaviour is exactly what the French foreign minister meant when he accused Erdogan, directly and personally, "that he has a political game to play in these circumstances."

And what is this game? Foremost, the Turks are attempting to concoct an image of themselves and of their Great (Buyuk) Leader as defenders of justice and of international law and order, while extracting rewards for this pretence from all those, primarily the West

and Israel, who have a stake in the stability of the present Saudi regime. If Khashoggi's death was Saudi state murder, Erdogan's game is Turkish state extortion. That makes two crimes.

This Saudi regime does not deserve sympathy. It must be held accountable, not only for the fate of Khashoggi, but for much more which the regime is responsible for in promoting war, terrorist violence and sectarian extremism from Syria to Yemen and further afield. Holding the Saudis accountable for Khashoggi's murder is one thing. It's not the only thing. Allowing Erdogan's Turkey to prevail as source and judge of the truth of this case serves faking and falsehood, not justice. End+

[*] Marios Evriviades is a former Cyprus diplomat and presidential advisor. He is a professor of international relations at universities in Greece and Cyprus.

[Nov 19, 2018] Clapper's Credibility by Ray McGovern

Notable quotes:
"... Special to Consortium News ..."
"... Clapper was appointed Director of National Intelligence by President Barack Obama in June 2010, almost certainly at the prompting of Obama's intelligence confidant and Clapper friend John Brennan, later director of the CIA. ..."
"... Let's ask the really important question of Clapper. What was he doing and where was he on 9/11, the "New Pearl Harbor," and what was his role in the coverup and transformation of the CIA in the ensuing years? ..."
"... I think there is a big difference between "group think" and inventing and cherry picking intelligence to fit policy objectives. I believe there is ample evidence of fraud. The "dodgy dossier" and the yellow cake uranium that led to Plame being exposed as a CIA operative are two examples that come immediately to mind. "Sexed up" intelligence is beyond groupthink. It is the promoting of lies and the deliberate elimination of any counter narrative in order to justify an unjust war. ..."
"... But fraud from the top was shown very well by Bamford in his book Pretext For War. Where discredited evidence was retained by intel agencies, as in the Iraq War II case, traitors like the zionist Wolfowitz simply installed known zionist warmongers Perl, Feith, and Wurmser into "stovepipe" offices at CIA, DIA, NSA to send the known-bad "evidence" to Rumsfeld & Cheney. ..."
"... They seem to conveniently classify anything that could prove illegality such as fraud, or in the case of the JFK assassination, something much worse. They use tools such as redaction and classification not only to protect "national security", but to cover up their crimes. ..."
"... Furthermore, I am an American, and I am definitely NOT FINE with the misuse of classification and redaction to cover up crimes. The way to fix the "entire ecosystem" is to start to demand it by prosecuting known liars like James Clapper, and to break up the MSM monopoly so people get REAL news again, and wake people up until they refuse to support the two party system. ..."
"... What Clapper did was fraud. What went on in his head was group-think. The two are by no means incompatible. The man admits to outright fabrication- "my team also produced computer-generated images of trucks fitted out as 'mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.' ..."
"... Clapper played the central role in deceiving America into abandoning the republic and becoming the genocidal empire now terrorizing Planet Earth. If it is too late; if the criminals have permanent control of our government, there won't be a cleansing Nuremberg Tribunal, and our once-great USA will continue along its course of death and destruction until it destroys itself. ..."
"... Part of the problem of "intelligence" is its reliance upon images that show a lot of detail but without any definite meaning, and upon guesses to keep managers and politicians happy. So "expert assessments" that milk trucks in aerial photos might be WMD labs became agency "confidence" and then politician certainties, never verified. ..."
"... When suspect evidence was retained by intel agencies, as in the Iraq War II case, traitors like the zionist Wolfowitz simply installed known zionist warmongers Perl, Feith, and Wurmser into "stovepipe" offices at CIA, DIA, NSA to send the non-evidence to Rumsfeld. See Bamford's Pretext For War. ..."
Nov 01, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Special to Consortium News

Former DNI James Clapper had his own words read back to him by Ray McGovern, exposing his role in justifying the Iraq invasion based on fraudulent intelligence. Clapper Admits Gross Intelligence Failure on Iraq WMDs But Still Escapes Justice

Former National Intelligence Director James Clapper's key role in helping the Cheney/Bush administration "justify" war on Iraq with fraudulent intelligence was exposed on Tuesday at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington. His own words were quoted back to him from his memoir "Facts and Fears: Hard Truths From a Life in Intelligence." Hard truths, indeed.

Clapper was appointed Director of National Intelligence by President Barack Obama in June 2010, almost certainly at the prompting of Obama's intelligence confidant and Clapper friend John Brennan, later director of the CIA. Despite Clapper's performance on Iraq, he was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. Obama even allowed Clapper to keep his job for three and a half more years after he admitted that he had lied under oath to that same Senate about the extent of eavesdropping on Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA). He is now a security analyst for CNN.

In his book, Clapper finally places the blame for the consequential fraud (he calls it "the failure") to find the (non-existent) WMD "where it belongs -- squarely on the shoulders of the administration members who were pushing a narrative of a rogue WMD program in Iraq and on the intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found what wasn't really there." ( emphasis added ) .

So at the event on Tuesday I stood up and asked him about that. It was easy, given the background Clapper himself provides in his book, such as:

"The White House aimed to justify why an invasion of and regime change in Iraq were necessary, with a public narrative that condemned its continued development of weapons of mass destruction [and] its support to al-Qaida (for which the Intelligence Community had no evidence)."

What Clapper chokes on -- and avoids saying -- is that U.S. intelligence had no evidence of WMD either. Indeed, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had put him in charge of the agency responsible for analyzing imagery of all kinds -- photographic, radar, infrared, and multispectral -- precisely so that the absence of evidence from our multi-billion-dollar intelligence collection satellites could be hidden, in order not to impede the planned attack on Iraq. That's why, as Clapper now admits, he had to find "what wasn't really there."

Members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) who have employed Clapper under contract, or otherwise known his work, caution that he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. So, to be fair, there is an outside chance that Rumsfeld persuaded him to be guided by the (in)famous Rumsfeld dictum: "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

But the consequences are the same: a war of aggression with millions dead and wounded; continuing bedlam in the area; and no one -- high or low -- held accountable. Hold your breath and add Joe Biden awarding the "Liberty Medal" to George W. Bush on Veteran's Day.

' Shocked'

Clapper writes:

" we heard that Vice President Cheney was pushing the Pentagon for intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and then the order came down to NIMA [the National Imagery and Mapping Agency] to find (emphasis in original) the WMD sites. We set to work, analyzing imagery to eventually identify, with varying degrees of confidence, more than 950 sites where we assessed there might be WMDs or a WMD connection. We drew on all of NIMA's skill sets and it was all wrong."

"To support his [Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5, 2003] speech, NIMA (which Clapper headed) had gone through the difficult process of declassifying satellite images of trucks arriving at WMD sites just ahead of the weapons inspectors to move materials before they could be found, and my team also produced computer-generated images of trucks fitted out as 'mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.' Those images, possibly more than any other substantiation he presented, carried the day with the international community and Americans alike."

"[For] the invasion of Iraq on March 20, six weeks after Powell's speech, NIMA prepared a prioritized list of our suspect [WMD] sites with specific locations. Using this information, they [the fourteen-hundred-member international Iraq Survey Group] went from site to site but found almost nothing. We were shocked. The trucks we had identified as "mobile production facilities for biological agents" were in fact used to pasteurize and transport milk."

McGovern questions Clapper at Carnegie Endowment in Washington on Tuesday. (Alli McCracken)

As for those mischievous trucks allegedly used "to move materials before they could be found," as Scott Ritter, former chief UN weapons inspector for Iraq, has pointed out, they were clearly decontamination vehicles. UN inspectors had visited the site in question. It was an ammunition bunker, and the decontamination vehicle was a water truck used to keep the dust levels down because of the sensitive fuses located in the bunker. These were known facts but Clapper chose to ignore them.

Nor did he give up easily, before he could resist no longer and admit, as he writes, that "it was all wrong." In late October 2003, Clapper briefed Washington media on his latest guesses as to what really happened to the (notional) WMD. The Washington Times 's Bill Getz wrote a long article replete with detailed quotes from Clapper, starting with: "Iraqi military officers destroyed or hid chemical, biological and nuclear weapons goods in the weeks before the war, the nation's top satellite spy director said yesterday. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said vehicle traffic photographed by U.S. spy satellites indicated that material and documents related to the arms programs were shipped to Syria."

In his book, Clapper refers to that briefing and says he conceded "we'd made some assumptions we shouldn't have " and admitted that "I was still baffled that no WMD sites had been discovered. I mentioned that in the days before the invasion started, we saw a lot of cars and trucks fleeing the country into Syria. I probably should have clarified what a stretch it would be" to suggest the WMD had been transported to Syria." Well, yes, that would have prevented further embarrassment.

During the Q and A I was sorely tempted to quote Hans Blix, the then head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, who on June 23, 2003 quipped to the Council on Foreign Relations, "It's sort of puzzling that you can have 100 percent confidence about WMD existence, but zero certainty about where they are." But that would have brought loud boos from the docile audience at Carnegie, and gotten me off on the wrong foot.

Instead, I cited to Clapper his most grievous offense against the profession of intelligence analysis -- his inordinate eagerness to please whatever superiors he was working for at the time, and give them the information they lusted after to "justify" things like war.

I observed that exactly two years ago, the Obamas and Clintons were desperate to blame Trump's victory on Russian interference. And so, I asked, was this a repeat performance? Had Clapper snapped to and again "found what really wasn't there?" This, I emphasized, was the conclusion of VIPS, including two former Technical Directors at NSA.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/iqXhH8zzZOE?feature=oembed

From 'WMD" to 'Russian Hacking'

I noted that after Clapper had briefed President Obama on January 5, 2017 on the evidence-impoverished "Intelligence Community Assessment" alleging that Russian President Putin had personally ordered the "Russian hacking," Obama seems not to have been persuaded. I asked Clapper why the President told a press conference on January 18, 2017 that the conclusions of the intelligence community regarding how "Russian hacking" of Democratic National Committee emails had gotten to WikiLeaks were "inconclusive." Clapper said he could not explain why the President said that.

Travel tip for Clapper: do not travel abroad to any country bold enough to invoke the principle of universal jurisdiction which includes the duty to arrest those suspected of war crimes when their home country fails to do so. Your mentor Donald Rumsfeld had a close brush with this international form of Lady Justice in October 2007, when he abruptly fled Paris upon learning that the Paris Prosecutor had been served a formal complaint against him for authorizing torture. The complaint noted that authorities in the U.S. and Iraq had failed to launch any independent investigation into Rumsfeld's responsibility, and also noted that the U.S. had refused to join the International Criminal Court, which might have had more routine jurisdiction.

Former President George W. Bush, too, had a close call in February 2011. When Bush heard that criminal complaints had been lodged against him in Switzerland, he decided not to take any chances and abruptly nixed longstanding plans to address a Jewish charity dinner in Geneva. Thus, both Rumsfeld and Bush were spared the humiliation that befell Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who had been head of Chile's military dictatorship from 1973 to 1990. While on a trip to the United Kingdom in 1998, Pinochet was arrested on a Spanish judicial warrant and was held under house arrest until 2000.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. Among his duties as a CIA analyst was chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing/briefing the President's Daily Brief. He is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).


Protection Racquet , November 17, 2018 at 2:46 am

When did this perjurer before Congress have any credibility? The guys a professional liar.

Mild -ly Facetious , November 18, 2018 at 5:27 pm

The guy is a professional liar, anda member of The Establishment "The Anglo-American Establishment" Copyright 1981/ Books in Focus, Inc,

Anonymot , November 16, 2018 at 8:56 pm

Clapper and Brennan were simply neo-fascist stand-ins for Cheney and Rumsfeld. They were the voice of the Deep State Mindset and turned those ideas into action. As standard issue, high level bureaucrats they became more than just counsel to the decision makers, they made the decisions. Those decisions were so inept and corrupt that now they would like to recast their images – and follow the Clinton/Obama footsteps to fortunes via books, speeches, Board members and consultants.

They and the many of their ilk in DC should join the others qualified for orange striped suits, but there's no one left with the clout and integrity to lock them up.

Mild -ly - Facetious , November 18, 2018 at 7:33 pm

Anonymot , Yes! Here Is A Sequence of books for those who reside in chosen darkness:

JRGJRG , November 16, 2018 at 7:29 pm

All this is fine, except it dares not touch the still taboo subject among these "professionals" of how all of this started getting justified in the first place when America attacked itself on September 11, 2001 in New York City and Washington in the most sophisticated and flawed false flag attack in history, murdering thousands of its own citizens Operation Northwoods style, blaming it on 19 Saudi hijackers with box cutters, the most grandiose of all conspiracy theory, the official 911 story.

The incriminating evidence of what happened that day in 2001 is now absolutely overwhelming, but still too incredible and controversial for even these esteemed folks to come to grips with. If we're going to take a shower and clean all this excrement off ourselves, let's do it thoroughly.

JRGJRG , November 16, 2018 at 7:46 pm

In fact, wait! Let's ask the really important question of Clapper. What was he doing and where was he on 9/11, the "New Pearl Harbor," and what was his role in the coverup and transformation of the CIA in the ensuing years? Why doesn't Ray ask him about that?

GKJames , November 16, 2018 at 6:46 am

(1) One needn't be a Clapper fan to say that he was merely a cog in a body politic that (a) lives and breathes using military force to "solve" geopolitical problems; and (b) has always been driven by the national myth of American exceptionalism and the American love of war. The only issue ever is the story Americans tell themselves as to why a particular assault on some benighted country that can't meaningfully shoot back is justified. But for that, there are countless clever people in the corridors of power and the Infotainment Complex always eager to spread mendacity for fun and profit. Sure, hang Clapper, but if justice is what you're after, you'd quickly run out of rope and wood.

(2) What doesn't compute: Clapper is quoted as saying that he and cohort "were so eager to help that [they] found what wasn't really there". That's followed by: "Rumsfeld put him in charge so that the absence of evidence could be hidden . Clapper now admits [that] he had to find 'what wasn't really there'". While Rumsfeld's intent was exactly that, i.e., to prevent a narrative that he and Cheney had contrived, that's not the same as Rumsfeld's explicitly instructing Clapper et al to do that. Further, it mischaracterizes Clapper's admission. He doesn't admit that "he had to find" what wasn't there (which would suggest prior intent). What he does admit is that the eagerness to please the chain of command resulted in "finding" what didn't exist. One is fraud, the other group-think; two very different propositions. The latter, of course, has been the hallmark of US foreign policy for decades, though the polite (but accurate) word for it is "consensus". Everybody's in on it: the public, Congress, the press, and even the judiciary. By and large, it's who Americans are.

(3) Does this really equate the WMD fiasco with the alleged "desperate [attempt] to blame Trump's victory on Russian interference"? Yes, Clapper was present in 2003 and 2016. But that's a thin reed. First, no reasonable person says that Russian interference was the only reason that Clinton lost. Second, to focus on what was said in January 2017 ignores the US government's notifying various state officials DURING THE CAMPAIGN in 2016, of Russian hacking attempts. If, as is commonly said, the Administration was convinced that Clinton would win, how could hacking alerts to the states have been part of an effort to explain away an election defeat that hadn't happened yet, and which wasn't ever expected to happen? And, third, as with WMDs, Clapper wasn't out there on his own. While there were, unsurprisingly, different views among intelligence officials as to the extent of the Russian role, there was broad agreement that there had been one. Once again, fraud vs. group-think.

Skip Scott , November 16, 2018 at 1:46 pm

I think there is a big difference between "group think" and inventing and cherry picking intelligence to fit policy objectives. I believe there is ample evidence of fraud. The "dodgy dossier" and the yellow cake uranium that led to Plame being exposed as a CIA operative are two examples that come immediately to mind. "Sexed up" intelligence is beyond groupthink. It is the promoting of lies and the deliberate elimination of any counter narrative in order to justify an unjust war.

The same could be said of the "all 17 intelligence agencies" statement about RussiaGate that was completely debunked but remained the propaganda line. It was way more than "groupthink". It was a lie. It is part of "full spectrum dominance".

I do agree that "Clapper wasn't out there on his own". He is part of a team with an agenda, and in a just world they'd all be in prison.
It wasn't "mistaken" intelligence, or "groupthink". You are trying to put lipstick on a pig.

GKJames , November 17, 2018 at 7:21 am

Fraud is easy to allege, hard to prove. In the case of Iraq, it's important to accept that virtually everyone -- the Administration, the press, the public, security agencies in multiple countries, and even UN inspectors (before the inspections, obviously) -- ASSUMED that Saddam had WMDs. That assumption wasn't irrational; it was based on Saddam's prior behavior. No question, the Administration wanted to invade Iraq and the presumed-to-exist WMDs were the rationale. It was only when evidence appeared that the case for it wasn't rock-solid that Cheney et al went to work. (The open question is whether they began to have their own doubts or whether it never occurred to them, given their obsession.) But there is zero evidence that anyone was asked to conclude that Saddam had WMDs even though the Americans KNEW that there weren't any. That's where the group-think and weak-kneed obeisance to political brawlers like Cheney come in. All he had to do was bark, and everyone fell in line, not because they knew there were no WMDs, but because they weren't sure but the boss certainly was.

In that environment, what we saw from Clapper and his analysts wasn't fraud but weakness of character, not to mention poor-quality analysis. And maybe that gets to the bigger question to which there appears to be an allergy: Shouting Fraud! effectively shuts down the conversation. After all, once you've done that, there's not much else to say; these guys all lied and death and destruction followed. But what if the answer is just as likely that the national security state created by Truman has grown into something uncontrollable, beyond legitimate oversight by the people it's supposed to serve? What if the people in that business aren't all that clever, let alone principled? After all, the CIA is headed by a torture aficionada and we haven't heard peep from the employee base, let alone the Congress that confirmed her. That entire ecosystem has been permitted to flourish without adult supervision for decades. Whenever someone asks, "that's classified". What do you do when Americans as a whole are perfectly fine with that?

Sam F , November 18, 2018 at 8:17 am

But fraud from the top was shown very well by Bamford in his book Pretext For War. Where discredited evidence was retained by intel agencies, as in the Iraq War II case, traitors like the zionist Wolfowitz simply installed known zionist warmongers Perl, Feith, and Wurmser into "stovepipe" offices at CIA, DIA, NSA to send the known-bad "evidence" to Rumsfeld & Cheney.

Skip Scott , November 18, 2018 at 9:27 am

They seem to conveniently classify anything that could prove illegality such as fraud, or in the case of the JFK assassination, something much worse. They use tools such as redaction and classification not only to protect "national security", but to cover up their crimes.

"But what if the answer is just as likely that the national security state created by Truman has grown into something uncontrollable, beyond legitimate oversight by the people it's supposed to serve?"

I believe this is very much the case, but that doesn't preclude fraud as part of their toolkit. The people at the top of the illegalities are clever enough to use those less sharp (like Clapper) for their evil purposes, and if necessary, to play the fall guy. And although the Intelligence Agencies are supposed to serve "We the People", they are actually serving unfettered Global Capitalism and the .1% that are trying to rule the world. This has been the case from its onset.

Furthermore, I am an American, and I am definitely NOT FINE with the misuse of classification and redaction to cover up crimes. The way to fix the "entire ecosystem" is to start to demand it by prosecuting known liars like James Clapper, and to break up the MSM monopoly so people get REAL news again, and wake people up until they refuse to support the two party system.

Sam F , November 16, 2018 at 9:01 pm

I will second Skip on that. The groupthink of careerists is not "who Americans are." "Broad agreement" on an obvious fraud is a group lie.

Tom Hall , November 17, 2018 at 10:49 am

What Clapper did was fraud. What went on in his head was group-think. The two are by no means incompatible. The man admits to outright fabrication- "my team also produced computer-generated images of trucks fitted out as 'mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.' Those images, possibly more than any other substantiation he presented, carried the day with the international community and Americans alike." He knew exactly what he was doing.

K , November 15, 2018 at 11:07 pm

Well done Ray, challenging those responsible for international war crimes is a necessity if the world is to be fundamentally changed for the better. Illegal wars & the catastrophic consequences for nation states & their citizens has to be answerable in a war crimes tribunal. This should include both governments & corporate entities that elicit profits from doing so.

wootendw , November 15, 2018 at 10:41 pm

"Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said vehicle traffic photographed by U.S. spy satellites indicated that material and documents related to the arms programs were shipped to Syria "

Syria and Iraq became bitter enemies in 1982 when Syria backed Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. Syria even sent troops to fight AGAINST Saddam during the first Iraq War. Syria and Iraq did not restore diplomatic relations until after Saddam was captured. The idea that Saddam would send WMDs (if he had them) to Syria is ludicrous.

Helen Marshall , November 15, 2018 at 5:41 pm

While serving in an embassy in 2003, the junior officer in my office was chatting with the long-time local employee, after viewing the Powell Shuck and Jive. One said to the other, "the US calls North Korea part of the 'Axis of Evil' but doesn't attack it because there is clear evidence that it has WMD including nukes." And the other said "yes, and that's why the US is going to invade Iraq because we know they don't." QED

Taras 77 , November 15, 2018 at 4:36 pm

Thanks, Ray, for an excellent article! You are one of few who are calling out these treasonous bastards. I am still .waiting for at least some of them to do the perp walk, maybe in the presence of war widows, their children, and maimed war veterans.

Chris Fogarty , November 15, 2018 at 12:27 pm

Clapper played the central role in deceiving America into abandoning the republic and becoming the genocidal empire now terrorizing Planet Earth. If it is too late; if the criminals have permanent control of our government, there won't be a cleansing Nuremberg Tribunal, and our once-great USA will continue along its course of death and destruction until it destroys itself.

Where are our patriots? If any exist, now is the time for a new Nuremberg.

Zhu , November 15, 2018 at 8:56 pm

The genocidal empire goes back to 1950 the Korean War.

bostonblackie , November 16, 2018 at 1:58 pm

How about 1945 and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

JRGJRG , November 16, 2018 at 7:08 pm

Keep going. Further back than that.
How about the Spanish American War, justified by the false flag blowing up of the Maine in Havana Harbor, which led to the four-year genocidal war against Filipino rebels and the war against the Cubans?
How about the 19th Century genocide of Native Americans? What was that justified by, except for lust for conquest of territory and racism?
How about America's role with other western colonial powers in the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China.
The list of American violations of international law is too long to restate here, in the hundreds.
The only way out of this moral dilemma is to turn a new page in history in a new administration, hold our war criminals in the dock, and make amends under international law, and keep them, somehow without sacrificing national jurisdiction or security. America has to be reformed as an honest broker of peace instead of the world's leading pariah terrorist state.

bostonblackie , November 17, 2018 at 4:29 pm

How about slavery? America was founded on genocide and slavery!

Skip Scott , November 15, 2018 at 9:44 am

I think Ray is being a little overly optimistic about Clapper being travel restricted. Universal Jurisdiction is for the small fry. Even with Bush and Rumsfeld, their changing travel plans was probably more about possible "bad press" than actual prosecution. Maybe down the road, when the USA collapse is more obvious to our "vassals" and they start to go their own way, such a thing could happen. Even then, we've got tons of armaments, and a notoriously itchy trigger finger.

My hope is that the two party system collapses and a Green Party candidate gets elected president. He or she could then sign us on to the ICC, and let the prosecutions begin. I know it's delusional, but a guy's gotta dream.

Robert Emmett , November 15, 2018 at 8:52 am

It occurs to me that even given Cheney's infamous 1% doctrine, these no-goodniks couldn't even scratch together enough of a true story to pass that low bar. So they invented, to put it mildly, plausible scenarios, cranked-up the catapults of propaganda and flung them in our faces via the self-absorbed, self-induced, money grubbing fake patriots of mass media.

But, geez, Ray, it's not as if we didn't already know about fixing facts around the policy, resignations of career operatives because of politicizing intelligence, reports of Scott Ritter, plus the smarmy lying faces & voices of all the main actors in the Cheney-Rumsfeld generated mass hysteria. I doubt these types of reveals, though appreciatively confirming what we already know, will change very many minds now. After all, the most effective war this cabal has managed to wage has been against their own people.

Perhaps when these highfalutin traitors, treasonous to their oaths to protect the founding principles they swore to preserve, at last shuffle off their mortal coils, future generations will gain the necessary perspective to dismiss these infamous liars with the contempt they deserve. But that's just wishful thinking because by then the incidents that cranked-up this never-ending war likely will be the least of their worries.

In the meantime, the fact that this boiled egghead continues to spew his Claptrap on a major media channel tells you all you need to know about how deeply the poison of the Bush-Cheney era has seeped into the body politic and continues to eat away at what remains of the foundations while the military-media-government-corporate complex metastasizes.

Sam F , November 15, 2018 at 9:03 pm

Ray knows that the well-informed know much of the story, and likely writes to bring us the Clapper memoir confession and summarize for the less informed.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , November 15, 2018 at 7:11 am

I am always glad to see confirmation in such matters, however, for people who work to inform themselves and think critically, there are no real surprises to be discovered about the invasion of Iraq.

It could be clearly seen as a fraud at the time because there were a number of experts, experts not working for the American government, who in effect told us then that it was a fraud.

What the whole experience with Iraq reveals is a couple of profound truths about imperial America, truths that are quite unpleasant and yet seem to remain lost to the general public.

One, lying and manipulation are virtually work-a-day activities in Washington. They go on at all levels of the government, from the President through all of the various experts and agency heads who in theory hold their jobs to inform the President and others of the truth in making decisions.

Indeed, these experts and agency heads actually work more like party members from George Orwell's Oceania in 1984, party members whose job it is to constantly rewrite history, making adjustments in the words and pictures of old periodicals and books to conform with the Big Brother's latest pronouncements and turns in policy.

America has an entire industry devoted to manufacturing truth, something the rather feeble term "fake news" weakly tries to capture.

The public's reaction to officials and agencies in Washington ought to be quite different than it generally is. It should be a presumption that they are not telling the truth, that they are tailoring a story to fit a policy. It sounds extreme to say so, but it truly is not in view of recent history.

We are all watching actors in a costly play used to support already-determined destructive policies.

Two, the press lies, and it lies almost constantly in support of government's decided policies. You simply cannot trust the American press on such matters, and the biggest names in the press – the New York Times or Washington Post or CBS or NBC – are the biggest liars because they put the weight of their general prestige into the balance to tip it.

Their fortunes and interests are too closely bound to government to be in the least trusted for objective journalism. Journalism just does not exist in America on the big stuff.

This support is not just done on special occasions like the run-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq but consistently in the affairs of state. We see it today in everything from "Russia-gate" to the Western-induced horrors of Syria. Russia-gate is almost laughable, although few Americans laugh, but a matter like Syria, with more than half a million dead and terrible privations, isn't laughable, yet no effort is made to explain the truth and bring this monstrous project – the work equally of Republicans and Democrats – to an end.

Three, while virtually all informed people know that Israel's influence in Washington is inordinate and inappropriate, many still do not realize that the entire horror of Iraq, just like the horror today of Syria, reflects the interests and demands of Israel.

George Bush made a rarely-noticed, when Ariel Sharon was lobbying him to attack other Middle Eastern countries following the Iraq invasion, along the lines of, "Geez, what does the guy want? I invaded Iraq for him, didn't I?"

Well, today, pretty much all of the countries that Sharon thought should be attacked have indeed been attacked by the United States and its associates in one fashion or another – covertly, as in Syria, or overtly, as in Libya. And we are all witnessing the ground being prepared for Iran.

It has been a genuinely terrifying period, the last decade and a half or so. War after war with huge numbers of innocents killed, vast damages inflicted, and armies of unfortunate refugees created. All of it completely unnecessary. All of it devoid of ethics or principles beyond the principle of "might makes right."

It simply cannot be distinguished, except by order of magnitude, from the grisly work of Europe's fascist governments of the 1930s and '40s.

All the discussions we read or see from America about truth in journalism, about truth in government, and about founding principles are pretty much distraction and noise, meaningless noise. The realities of what America is doing in the world make it so.

john Wilson , November 15, 2018 at 4:47 am

It seems to me that showing up the blatant lies of the Iraq affair, while laudable, doesn't really get us anywhere. The guilty are never and will never be brought to account for their heinous crimes and some of the past villains are still lying, scheming, and brining about war, terror and horror today.

If the white helmets in Syria, the lies about Libya, the West engineered coupé in The Ukraine, Yemen, etc, aren't all tactics from the same play book used by the criminal cabals of the Iraq time, then we are blind. These days, the liars in the deep state, an expression which encapsulates everything from Intel to think tanks, don't even try to tell plausible lies, they just say anything and MSM cheers them on. Anyone challenging the MSM/government/deep state etc are just ridiculed and called conspiracy theorists, no matter how obvious and ludicrous the lies are.

Sam F , November 15, 2018 at 6:26 am

In fact "showing up the blatant lies of the Iraq affair" informs others, to whom the MSM can no longer cheer on liars, nor ridicule truth. Truth telling, like contemplation, is essential before the point of action.

F. G. Sanford , November 15, 2018 at 1:33 am

"We drew on all of NIMA's skill sets and it was all wrong."

Every time I hear the term, "skill sets", I recall a military colleague who observed, "We say skill sets so we don't have to say morons." They used to say, "The military doesn't pay you to think." Now they say, "We have skill sets." It's a euphemism for robotized automatons who perform specific standardized tasks based on idealized training requirements which evolve from whatever the latest abstract military doctrine happens to be. And, they come up with new ones all the time.

"The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." This is a phrase Rumsfeld borrowed directly – and I'm not making this up – from the UFO community. It was apparently first uttered by Carl Sagan, and then co-opted by people like Stanton Friedman. He's the guy who claims we recovered alien bodies from flying saucers at Roswell, New Mexico. The scientific antidote to the "absence of evidence" argument is, of course, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." Simply put, absence of evidence really just means "no evidence". A hypothesis based on "no evidence" constitutes magical thinking.

It's probably worth going to Youtube and looking up a clip called "Stephen Gets a Straight Answer Out of Donald Rumsfeld". He admits to Colbert that, "If it was true, we wouldn't call it intelligence." Frankly, Clapper's gravest sin is heading up a science-based agency like NIMA, but failing to come to the same conclusion as General Albert Stubblebine. People who analyze reconnaissance imagery are supposed to be able to distinguish explosive ordnance damage from other factors. But, I guess Newtonian Physics is "old school" to this new generation of magical thinkers and avant-garde intelligence analysts.

Sam F , November 16, 2018 at 10:44 am

Part of the problem of "intelligence" is its reliance upon images that show a lot of detail but without any definite meaning, and upon guesses to keep managers and politicians happy. So "expert assessments" that milk trucks in aerial photos might be WMD labs became agency "confidence" and then politician certainties, never verified.

When suspect evidence was retained by intel agencies, as in the Iraq War II case, traitors like the zionist Wolfowitz simply installed known zionist warmongers Perl, Feith, and Wurmser into "stovepipe" offices at CIA, DIA, NSA to send the non-evidence to Rumsfeld. See Bamford's Pretext For War.

Gen Dau , November 14, 2018 at 10:20 pm

Thank you, Ray, for a very good article that treats Clapper objectively and not as a demi-god, as most of the MSM and the Democratic establishment does. It is totally unacceptable for a government official, current or former, to answer "I don't know." That is the hideout of irresponsible scoundrels. Questioners should be allowed to ask follow-up questions such as, "If you didn't know, did you try to think about why the President's opinion on this very important question was different from yours? Is simply not knowing acceptable for an intel officer, especially one in a leadership position?" I look forward to your further reports and analyses.

Thanks also to the editors for returning at least the main text to a readable font. But why not go whole hog and make reading everything a pleasure again? Putting the headlines in a hard-to-read and distracting font is especially unfortunate, since some casual visitors to Consortium News may be turned off by the headlines and skip reading the very important articles attached to the headlines.

Daniel , November 15, 2018 at 3:13 am

You are right, my friend.

Skip Edwards , November 14, 2018 at 10:10 pm

Thanks, as always, go out to Ray for his continued bravery in speaking truth to power. I remember years ago when David McMichaels, Ex-CIA, gave a talk at Ft Lewis College in Durango, CO, about Ronnie Reagan's corruption in what the US was doing to the elected government in Nicaragua. Thanks to both of these men for trying to inform us all about the corruption so rampant in our government. This is further proof that Trump is only a small pimple on top of the infectous boil that is our government.

Sam F , November 14, 2018 at 9:52 pm

Hurray for Ray McGovern! A beautiful and superbly-planned confrontation. We are lucky that Clapper admitted these things in his memoir, but we needed you to bring that out in public with full and well-selected information. You are truly a gem, whom I hope someday to meet.

Sam F , November 14, 2018 at 10:19 pm

An astounding revelation of systematic delusion in secret agencies.

But until now my best source on the Iraq fake WMD has been Bamford's Pretext For War, in which he establishes that zionist DefSec Wolfowitz appointed three known zionist operatives Perl, Wurmser, and Feith to "stovepipe" known-bad info to Rumsfeld et al. Does the memoir shed any light there, and does your information agree?

mike k , November 14, 2018 at 7:58 pm

Spies lie constantly, they have no respect for the truth. To trust a spy is a sign of dangerous gullibility. Spies are simply criminals for hire.

dfnslblty , November 15, 2018 at 9:59 am

I would offer that spies do not lie ~ they gather information. Spy masters do lie ~ they prevaricate to fit the needs of their masters.

Mild-ly - Facetious , November 18, 2018 at 4:44 pm

"Clapper's Credibility Collapses" as does Colin Powell's U.N.BULL Spit Yellow Cake propaganda/all that's required is a Sales Pitch to everyday striving citizens into how a brutal strain of aristocrat have come to rule america and how you must delve into the Back-Stories of, for example, GHW Bush CIA connection and his presents in Dallas, 1963 credibility collapses abound under weight of 'what really happened' after Cheney convened summit of oil executives just PRIOR to 9/11?

[Nov 16, 2018] US Is Optimistic It Will Prosecute Assange

Nov 15, 2018 | www.wsj.com

Over the past year, U.S. prosecutors have discussed several types of charges they could potentially bring against the WikiLeaks founder

The Justice Department is preparing to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and is increasingly optimistic it will be able to get him into a U.S. courtroom, according to people in Washington familiar with the matter. Over the past year, U.S. prosecutors have discussed several types of charges they could potentially bring against Mr. Assange, the people said. Mr. Assange has lived in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since receiving political asylum from the South American country in 2012...

The exact charges Justice Department might pursue remain unclear, but they may involve the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the disclosure of national defense-related information.

[Nov 14, 2018] Clapper and Brennan are felons Probably yes.

Notable quotes:
"... Brennan was the leading force behind the prosecutions of eight national security whistleblowers during the Obama administration, almost three times the number of whistleblowers charged under the Espionage Act by all previous presidents combined. ..."
"... I worked for Clapper once and detest the man. I consider him to be an unprincipled careerist devoid of loyalty to anything or anyone but himself. He was IMO by far the worst Director the Defense Intelligence Agency has ever had and a man who did great damage to that agency in the process of seeking favor from his superiors. He is also a confessed perjurer. ..."
"... I first knew John Brennan when he was a junior analyst attached to the CIA station in Saudi Arabia and I was the Defense Attaché in the same embassy. I had a great deal of opportunity to observe him on the job and found him to be lacking in integrity, courtesy and intellect. ..."
"... He is well made up and looks to me to be hanging on through will power. ..."
"... Sir, I have to agree, Trump is beginning to fray on the edges and I think it will get worse. The 24/7 media attacks and resistance movement in general is having the desired impact. Trump is probably already distracted and angered by the impending impeachment process, criminal investigations and lawsuits that are coming beginning in January. Trump will not get a second term even if he wants it at this point. ..."
"... Whether it's Clapper, Clinton, Trump, Brennan, Obama, the neocon cabal in Bush II admin, or pick any scion from Wall Street's rogues gallery of bad actors from the last twenty years. Individuals charged with authority, those holding immense wealth, or in many instances both, have broken public trust. Repeatedly. And often egregiously. And they seem to be increasingly in your face about it. ..."
"... Col.- I agree. Especially with respect to the beating he is taking from all sides. He wrecked both the Bush and Clinton dynasties -- quite the vindictive bunch. And then had the unmitigated gall to take on the DC beast with no real allies and through only sheer tyranny of will. I'm amazed he's lasted this long without totally capitulating. ..."
"... My guess would be that he was a CIA informer/asset on the CPUSA, but apparently wasnt very good at it. Why this resulted in him being effectively promoted to agent, well, no idea. ..."
"... The somewhat paranoid explanation is that the KGB had a cunning plan of hindering US IC by trying to make them recruit morons. Imagine not-Stirlitz, who is CIA/DIA HR but actually KGB, carefully perusing different candidates and trying to figure out who would likely do the most damage if ever employed by the respective agency. ..."
"... He is and has always been a leftist who penalized straight, white men for being such when he was director of DIA without regard to talent or experience issuing a directive to HR that no such could be hired or promoted without his permission in each case. Brennan was a communist sympathizer but Clapper was a proponent of identity politics before it was fashionable. ..."
"... I hope their new best friends in the Democratic "Russia! Russia! Russia!" Party are happy with them. Why do they (if I remember correctly) still have their security clearances? ..."
Nov 14, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

12 November 2018 Clapper and Brennan are felons? Probably yes. "The CIA is required by law to inform congressional oversight committees whenever one of its officers, agents, or administrators breaks the law, when an operation requires congressional approval because it is a "covert action" program, or whenever something happens at the CIA that's potentially controversial and the agency wants to save itself the embarrassment of explaining itself to Congress later.

" I could see no reason to withhold declassification of these documents." Grassley said. "They contained no information that could be construed as [betraying] sources and methods."

Brennan was the leading force behind the prosecutions of eight national security whistleblowers during the Obama administration, almost three times the number of whistleblowers charged under the Espionage Act by all previous presidents combined.

Indeed, I was one of the "Obama Eight." I was charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, after I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program. Of course, I hadn't committed espionage and those charges were eventually dropped, but not until I had agreed to take a plea to a lesser charge. I served 23 months in a federal prison.

Brennan and Clapper think the law doesn't apply to them. But it does. Without the rule of law, we have chaos. The law has to apply equally to all Americans. Brennan and Clapper need to learn that lesson the hard way. They broke the law. They ought to be prosecuted for it." Kiriakou in Consortium News

-----------

I worked for Clapper once and detest the man. I consider him to be an unprincipled careerist devoid of loyalty to anything or anyone but himself. He was IMO by far the worst Director the Defense Intelligence Agency has ever had and a man who did great damage to that agency in the process of seeking favor from his superiors. He is also a confessed perjurer.

I first knew John Brennan when he was a junior analyst attached to the CIA station in Saudi Arabia and I was the Defense Attaché in the same embassy. I had a great deal of opportunity to observe him on the job and found him to be lacking in integrity, courtesy and intellect. It should be remembered that he was a supporter of the Communist Party of the United States before the CIA for some obscure reason hired him. pl

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/11/11/john-brennan-and-james-clapper-should-be-prosecuted-for-breaking-the-law/


Farmer Don , a day ago

It's amazing to some one outside the country, to see how the Liberal people in the US, now love Clapper and Brennan, who they would normally hate, just because they hate Trump so much more. John Kiriakou's book "Doing time like a spy" is an eye opening read for someone who has no idea about the power plays in Washington. I'm glad he has bounced back from the pounding they gave him. I may be wrong, but I think Meuller was the head person pushing the false charges. Kiriakou wrote a piece were he advises Trump not to testify for Meuller, as it will be all twisted against him.
The Porkchop Express -> Farmer Don , 20 hours ago
Farmer

Maureen Dowd had the following column in the NYT on Sunday. Thought it apropos of your comments:

"Only Trump could get the pussy-hat crowd to fill Times Square to protest Jeff Sessions's firing."

https://www.nytimes.com/201...

At some point, the politically powerful and financially wealthy are going to have to be treated -- and be seen to be treated -- equally to their fellow citizens. If this bullshit continues without some publicly corrective measure(s) the wheels are going to start falling off the wagon.

Pat Lang Mod -> The Porkchop Express , 16 hours ago
I have the impression that Trump is entering a melt-down stage, not from the Mueller nonsense but rather just from the unending pressure against him from the left and from within the GOP. I would not be surprised to see some sort of collapse either physically or in policy. Watch the border.
Farmer Don -> Pat Lang , 14 hours ago
I don't know, Trump may be the only person who looks younger after eight years in office! Doesn't he look in better shape then two years ago? I think the White house cooks are limiting his intake of KFC and cheese burgers to good effect.
Pat Lang Mod -> Farmer Don , 13 hours ago
I do not agree. He is well made up and looks to me to be hanging on through will power.
Eric Newhill -> Pat Lang , 11 hours ago
Sir, I have to agree, Trump is beginning to fray on the edges and I think it will get worse. The 24/7 media attacks and resistance movement in general is having the desired impact. Trump is probably already distracted and angered by the impending impeachment process, criminal investigations and lawsuits that are coming beginning in January. Trump will not get a second term even if he wants it at this point.

Basically, the country is done for. In 20 years it will be as fully socialist as the worse of Europe (Sweden?). The 1 and 2 amendments will be gutted. The others? Well, it depends on your skin color, gender and your political leanings. Not good for whites, males and conservatives. The successful will be taxed into oblivion and there will be open borders, globalism, etc. That is what the people have been trained by the education system and Hollywood propaganda to want. Trump was a last gasp of the original American ideals and he knows it. It was all for naught.

English Outsider -> Eric Newhill , 6 hours ago
A long way from 2016, Mr Newhill, both sides of the Atlantic. Still all to play for though.
PRC90 -> The Porkchop Express , 14 hours ago
If the Dem controlled HR play only to the adulation of the pink pussy-hat crowd, and if they regard themselves as far above the Deplorables then the wheels may also drop off. Their exuberance portends some unsafe use of their new found legislative power.
The Porkchop Express -> PRC90 , 7 hours ago
PRC-

I was speaking in a much broader sense about political culpability re: wheels falling off the wagon. I think one of the attitudes that both the pussy-hatters and the deplorables share (though I'm sure they would loathe to admit it) and that is relevant to our current "climate" of hostility revolves around their respective sense on a core issue of fairness. Not that I'm saying life is or should be fair. But, come on. A ruling class can only piss all over a polity, or publicly appear to be doing so, for only so long while telling them it's raining before it boomerangs.

Whether it's Clapper, Clinton, Trump, Brennan, Obama, the neocon cabal in Bush II admin, or pick any scion from Wall Street's rogues gallery of bad actors from the last twenty years. Individuals charged with authority, those holding immense wealth, or in many instances both, have broken public trust. Repeatedly. And often egregiously. And they seem to be increasingly in your face about it.

As Mark Blyth, an economist at Brown, has noted on several occasions: "The Hamptons are not a defensible position."

Col.- I agree. Especially with respect to the beating he is taking from all sides. He wrecked both the Bush and Clinton dynasties -- quite the vindictive bunch. And then had the unmitigated gall to take on the DC beast with no real allies and through only sheer tyranny of will. I'm amazed he's lasted this long without totally capitulating.

Pat Lang Mod -> The Porkchop Express , 7 hours ago
I don't think he will surrender, but he may break.
Snow Flake , 16 hours ago
It should be remembered that he was a supporter of the Communist Party of the United States before the CIA for some obscure reason hired him. pl

doesn't show on Wikipedia on first sight. I don't have much knowledge about the communist party in the US. I recall that Bertold Brecht was on McCarty's list as suspect. That's my field, the arts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

PRC90 -> Snow Flake , 15 hours ago
According to https://edition.cnn.com/201... his vote for a Communist candidate was his protest against 'the system', ie., it was his means of expressing disquiet with either Nixon or Ford. Perhaps there is a long story in there somewhere.
Pat Lang Mod -> PRC90 , 13 hours ago
Whatever his motivation the vote should have been a permanent bar to employment in the IC
Pat Lang Mod -> Snow Flake , 16 hours ago
It has been widely reported in the media here and he has not denied it. The CPUSA was an instrument of the USSR.
Lefty -> Pat Lang , 15 hours ago
Brennan fits Stalin's description of CPUSA members as "useful idiots".
Snow Flake -> Pat Lang , 15 hours ago
thanks Pat. I trust your takes on people, and I am surely no fan of either, but this puzzled me. So he voted for the communist party in the US, without any awareness it was a lost vote? With 21?

Ok, for some reason I trust Zerohedge in limited ways as a source on the right that may do its homework or Tyler, Durden, was it?

In this context it may make sense, but what is the meta-message concerning the meeting between Putin and Trump? Ok, maybe I should NOT have listed Putin first.

So what are the facts? Well John Brennan was accepted into the CIA in 1980 even though he admitted voting Communist in 1976. This is something inexplicable and astounding for any thinking person to understand of itself.

Brennan, who by then had been appointed President Obama's CIA chief, first publicly revealed this at the Annual Legislative Conference of the Congressional Black Caucus, on 15 September 2016, in Washington DC. There, he said that when he had applied in 1980 to join the CIA, he admitted to them that in the 1976 Presidential election, at the height of the Cold War against the "Godless" Soviet Union, when a strong Christian presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter was running against Gerald Ford, Brennan had voted instead for the candidate of the US Communist Party, Gus Hall, and that he was then greatly relieved to find that this information didn't cause rejection of his CIA application. One must ask why, as it happened 11 years before the "end of the Cold War" in 1991.

widely reported in media, beyond first Google sight by Rush Limbaugh?

Mightypeon -> Snow Flake , 6 hours ago
My guess would be that he was a CIA informer/asset on the CPUSA, but apparently wasnt very good at it. Why this resulted in him being effectively promoted to agent, well, no idea.

My understanding is that promoting assets to actual agents is not a very common thing, but could perhaps be done with people of very marginal asset value.

The somewhat paranoid explanation is that the KGB had a cunning plan of hindering US IC by trying to make them recruit morons. Imagine not-Stirlitz, who is CIA/DIA HR but actually KGB, carefully perusing different candidates and trying to figure out who would likely do the most damage if ever employed by the respective agency.

The bog standard explanation is that he knew someone who knew someone, and this was sufficient.

The last possible explanation was that someone in the hiring process thought it was a good joke. Spies have quirky senses of humor.

blue peacock , a day ago
Can't imagine the meltdown in the media and the Democrats if any of these Deep State characters get indicted? So, the big question is will Trump go for broke?
Keith Harbaugh , 7 hours ago
Apropos of your comments and opinions about Clapper: I have suggested before (without evident result) and now suggest again that you review, in SST, Clapper's 2018 memoir "Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence" .

I did read it, but do not have the expertise to review most of it. However, I will mention, from memory, several things in it that impressed me:

1. Regarding the firing of Michael Flynn as DIA Director, Clapper said that, in his view, the justification for the firing was primarily that Flynn had not handled the civilian DIA workforce properly. Essentially, that he did not coddle them as they wanted/needed to be coddled. He thought he could/should give them orders on how he wanted things to be done, and it was their duty to obey. And if they did not, that that was their fault, not his.

2. He definitely saluted the flag of political correctness.

a) He praised practically to the skies the abilities of the women who supported him. He finished his remarks about them by saying something like:"I hope when they (the women) take over the world that they will remember me kindly."

b) As to homosexuals and the gender insane (that's my, non-professional, term for what many call "transgenders"), he could see no reason whatsoever for discrimination against them. With regard to the gender insane, the job of the government was to protect them against prejudice and hostility.

c) He emphasized his opposition to any discrimination against African-Americans.

I could give my own view on these social/political issues, but that would be a distraction. Let the focus be on his views.

With regard to Clapper's less than accurate response to Senator Wyden, Clapper goes into great detail to give the background to that, and discuss it.
I, although no expert on how IC leaders should answer questions from Congressmen, find his explanation of his action to be satisfying.
Was there a better answer? I do not know. But without further argument, I do not see his answer as a crime.

Anyhow, Colonel, I am sure you are eminently qualified to review his book, from the points of view of intelligence, foreign policy, and IC management, and from your comments above would seem to have the motivation. I hope you do so.

Pat Lang Mod -> Keith Harbaugh , 7 hours ago
I will NEVER read or comment on his wretched book. He is and has always been a leftist who penalized straight, white men for being such when he was director of DIA without regard to talent or experience issuing a directive to HR that no such could be hired or promoted without his permission in each case. Brennan was a communist sympathizer but Clapper was a proponent of identity politics before it was fashionable. BTW, I am supposed to obey you?
Keith Harbaugh -> Pat Lang , 6 hours ago
"BTW, I am supposed to obey you?" Of course not. But if I refrained from mentioning that this was the second time I had suggested it, I would open myself up to criticism for not mentioning the earlier time. Either approach can be criticized.

I certainly respect your choice to not review the book, but I hope you will not feel me too much of a pain if I state that I hope, sometime in the future, you change your mind. Few, if any, people, have the insights into Clapper that you do.

Pat Lang Mod -> Keith Harbaugh , 5 hours ago
F--k Clapper.
Harlan Easley , a day ago
Another election stolen by the Democrats. A House of Representative seat in New Mexico. CNN, Fox, MSNBC declared the Republican the winner the night of the election. This is before 8,000 ballots out of 203,000 citizens showed up. Of course the Democrat Secretary of State informed the Republican candidate she lost after counting these 8,000 votes.

https://www.thegatewaypundi...

It's over as far as I'm concerned. The Democrat Party has decided to steal elections as they please. No objection from the Democrat Press. I loathe the Paul Ryan agenda but I hate the Democrat Party more for what they have done to this country. There will never be another election where either side will believe fair. Due to made up conspiracies such as Russian collusion and heaven forbid have to show your id to vote.

Hillary runs in 2020 and this is the nail in the coffin of this Republic. Florida is just a test run for her to steal that state.

blue peacock -> Harlan Easley , a day ago
Hillary has to first steal the primary. That may be easier said then done.
Bill H -> blue peacock , a day ago
She did it in 2016, and there was no negative outcome even when the theft was revealed and acknowledged. Why would it not be just as easy to do it again in 2020, given that the theft has the blessing of the Democratic Party?
PeterVE , a day ago
I hope their new best friends in the Democratic "Russia! Russia! Russia!" Party are happy with them. Why do they (if I remember correctly) still have their security clearances?
Pat Lang Mod -> PeterVE , a day ago
Most people retain security clearance after they leave government, so that the can do contract work for the government.
Mightypeon -> Pat Lang , 6 hours ago
My understanding is that leaving government in other countries may well result in a degradation (but iirc not a total revocation) of any held security clearance.

My impression, which is a guess and by no means authoritative or anything, is that the US tends to classify too much information (much of it would not or only barely merit being classified), and is then by necessity too lax in handing out clearances (as many clearance owning individuals are needed to handle all the classified data). This results in situations like Manning and Snowden, who iirc had some type of clearance and worked this to gain information considerably above their actual legitimate clearance. Such as "escalation" of clearance privileges will likely be far easier to achieve (and quite a bit harder to detect) then stealing secrets without any clearance at all.

Classification is a bit like defending, if one attempts to defend everything, by classifying everything, one may well end up defending nothing at all.

Pat Lang Mod -> Mightypeon , 6 hours ago
Ho Hum. Who cares what they do in other countries?

[Nov 12, 2018] Obama s CIA Secretly Intercepted Congressional Communications About Whistleblowers

Highly recommended!
So the USA Congress operates under CIA surveillance... Due to CIA access to Saudi money the situation is probably much worse then described as CIA tried to protect both its level of influence and shadow revenue streams.
Notable quotes:
"... The idea that the CIA would monitor communications of U.S. government officials, including those in the legislative branch, is itself controversial. But in this case, the CIA picked up some of the most sensitive emails between Congress and intelligence agency workers blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing. ..."
"... I am not confident that Congressional staff fully understood that their whistleblower-related communications with my Executive Director of whistleblowing might be reviewed as a result of routine [CIA counterintelligence] monitoring." -- Intelligence Community Inspector General 2014 ..."
"... The disclosures from 2014 were released late Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). "The fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading Congressional staff's emails about intelligence community whistleblowers raises serious policy concerns as well as potential Constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly," wrote Grassley in a statement. ..."
"... According to Grassley, he originally began trying to have the letters declassified more than four years ago but was met with "bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Brennan and Clapper." ..."
"... Back in 2014, Senators Grassley and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had asked then-Director of National Intelligence Clapper about the possibility of the CIA monitoring Congressional communications ..."
"... CIA security compiled a report that include excerpts of whistleblower-related communications and this reports was eventually shared with the Director of the Office of Security and the Chief of the Counterintelligence Center" who "briefed the CIA Deputy Director, Deputy Executive Director, and the Chiefs of Staff for both the CIA Director and the Deputy Director ..."
"... During Director Clapper's tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance," said Wyden upon Clapper's retirement in 2016. ..."
Nov 02, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Sharyl Attkisson,

Newly-declassified documents show the CIA intercepted sensitive Congressional communications about intelligence community whistleblowers.

The intercepts occurred under CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The new disclosures are contained in two letters of "Congressional notification" originally written to key members of Congress in March 2014, but kept secret until now.

In the letters, then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough tells four key members of Congress that during "routing counterintelligence monitoring of Government computer systems," the CIA collected emails between Congressional staff and the CIA's head of whistleblowing and source protection. McCullough states that he's concerned "about the potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent 'chilling effect' that the present [counterintelligence] monitoring system might have on Intelligence Community whistleblowing."

The idea that the CIA would monitor communications of U.S. government officials, including those in the legislative branch, is itself controversial. But in this case, the CIA picked up some of the most sensitive emails between Congress and intelligence agency workers blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing.

"Most of these emails concerned pending and developing whistleblower complaints," McCullough states in his letters to lead Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees at the time: Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia); and Representatives Michael Rogers (R-Michigan) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland). McCullough adds that the type of monitoring that occurred was "lawful and justified for [counterintelligence] purposes" but

"I am not confident that Congressional staff fully understood that their whistleblower-related communications with my Executive Director of whistleblowing might be reviewed as a result of routine [CIA counterintelligence] monitoring." -- Intelligence Community Inspector General 2014

The disclosures from 2014 were released late Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). "The fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading Congressional staff's emails about intelligence community whistleblowers raises serious policy concerns as well as potential Constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly," wrote Grassley in a statement.

According to Grassley, he originally began trying to have the letters declassified more than four years ago but was met with "bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Brennan and Clapper."

Grassley adds that he repeated his request to declassify the letters under the Trump administration, but that Trump intelligence officials failed to respond. The documents were finally declassified this week after Grassley appealed to the new Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson.

History of alleged surveillance abuses

Back in 2014, Senators Grassley and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had asked then-Director of National Intelligence Clapper about the possibility of the CIA monitoring Congressional communications. A Congressional staffer involved at the time says Clapper's response seemed to imply that if Congressional communications were "incidentally" collected by the CIA, the material would not be saved or reported up to CIA management.

"In the event of a protected disclosure by a whistleblower somehow comes to the attention of personnel responsible for monitoring user activity," Clapper wrote to Grassley and Wyden on July 25, 2014, "there is no intention for such disclosure to be reported to agency leadership under an insider threat program."

However, the newly-declassified letters indicate the opposite happened in reality with the whistleblower-related emails:

"CIA security compiled a report that include excerpts of whistleblower-related communications and this reports was eventually shared with the Director of the Office of Security and the Chief of the Counterintelligence Center" who "briefed the CIA Deputy Director, Deputy Executive Director, and the Chiefs of Staff for both the CIA Director and the Deputy Director."

Clapper has previously come under fire for his 2013 testimony to Congress in which he denied that the national Security Agency (NSA) collects data on millions of Americans. Weeks later, Clapper's statement was proven false by material leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

"During Director Clapper's tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance," said Wyden upon Clapper's retirement in 2016.

"Top officials, officials who reported to Director Clapper, repeatedly misled the American people and even lied to them."

Clapper has repeatedly denied lying, and said that any incorrect information he provided was due to misunderstandings or mistakes.

Clapper and Brennan have also acknowledged taking part in the controversial practice of "unmasking" the protected names of U.S. citizens - including people connected to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump - whose communications were "incidentally" captured in US counterintelligence operations. Unmaskings within the US intelligence community are supposed to be extremely rare and only allowed under carefully justified circumstances. This is to protect the privacy rights of American citizens. But it's been revealed that Obama officials requested unmaskings on a near daily basis during the election year of 2016.

Clapper and Brennan have said their activities were lawful and not politically motivated. Both men have become vocal critics of President Trump.

* * *

Order the New York Times bestseller "The Smear" today online or borrow from your library


Keter , 5 hours ago link

"ah, ah, ah, em, not intentionally." Clapper - ROFL

numapepi , 9 hours ago link

Can you imagine what kind of place the US would have been under Clinton?!!!!!!

All the illegality, spying, conniving, dirty tricks, arcancides, selling us out to the highest bidder and full on attack against our Constitution would be in full swing!

Chaotix , 9 hours ago link

When intel entities can operate unimpeded and un-monitored, it spells disaster for everyone and everything outside that parameter. Their operations go unnoticed until some stray piece of information exposes them. There are many facilities that need to be purged and audited, but since this activity goes on all over the world, there is little to stop it. Even countries that pledge allegiance and cooperation are blindsiding their allies with bugs, taps, blackmails, and other crimes. Nobody trusts nobody, and that's a horrid fact to contend with in an 'advanced' civilization.

numapepi , 9 hours ago link

Almost sounds like the Praetorian guard?

The real power behind the throne.

Rhys12 , 10 hours ago link

Forget the political parties. When the intelligence agencies spy on everyone, they know all about politicians of both parties before they ever win office, and make sure they have enough over them to control them. They were asleep at the switch when Trump won, because no one, including them, believed he would ever win. Hillary was their candidate, the State Department is known overseas as "the political arm of the CIA". They were furious when she lost, hence the circus ever since.

iAmerican10 , 11 hours ago link

From its founding by the Knights of Malta the JFK&MLK-assassinating, with Mossad 9/11-committing CIA has been the Vatican's US Fifth Column action branch, as are the FBI and NSA: with an institutional hiring preference for Roman Catholic "altared boy" closet-queen psychopaths "because they're practiced at keeping secrets."

Think perverts Strzok, Brennan, and McCabe "licked it off the wall?"

Smi1ey , 11 hours ago link

We need to bring back FOIA.

Too much secrecy.

And how is that Pentagon audit doing, btw?

Chaotix , 9 hours ago link

I agree with you 100%. Problem is, tons of secret technology and information have been passed out to the private sector. And the private sector is not bound to the FOIA requests, therefore neutralizing the obligation for government to disclose classified material. They sidestepped their own policies to cooperate with corrupt MIC contractors, and recuse themselves from disclosing incriminating evidence.

archie bird , 12 hours ago link

Everyone knows that spying runs in the fam. 44th potus Mom and Gma BOTH. An apple doesn't fall from the tree. If ppl only knew the true depth of the evil and corruption we would be in the hospital with a heart attack. Gilded age is here and has been, since our democracy was hijacked (McCain called it an intervention) back in 1963. Unfortunately it started WAY back before then when (((they))) stole everything with the installation of the Fed.

Dornier27 , 15 hours ago link

The FBI and CIA have long since slipped the controls of Congress and the Constitution. President Trump should sign an executive order after the mid terms and stand down at least the FBI and subject the CIA to a senate investigation.

America needs new agencies that are accountable to the peoples elected representatives.

greasyknees , 16 hours ago link

Not news. The CIA likely has had access to any and all electronic communication for at least a decade.

Lord JT , 19 hours ago link

what? clapper and brennan being dirty hacks behind the scenes while parading around as patriots? say it aint so!

Racin Rabitt , 20 hours ago link

A determined care has been used to cultivate in D.C., a system that swiftly decapitates the whistleblowers. Resulting in an increasingly subservient cadre of civil servants who STHU and play ostrich, or drool at what scraps are about to roll off the master's table as the slide themselves into a better position, taking advantage to sell vice, weapons, and slaves.

Westcoastliberal , 21 hours ago link

What the hell does the CIA have to do with ANYTHING in the United States? Aren't they limited to OUTSIDE the U.S.? So why would they be involved in domestic communications for anything? These clowns need to be indicted for TREASON!

5onIt , 22 hours ago link

Clapper and Brennan, Brennan and Clapper. These two guys are the damn devil.

It makes me ill.

MuffDiver69 , 22 hours ago link

I'll take " Police State" for five hundred Alex

[Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There is something very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies. There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to testify before congress. ..."
"... Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary. ..."
"... "Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it." ..."
"... "While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the Ł4 billion annual license fee." - BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women ..."
"... The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it. ..."
"... While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE. ..."
"... Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony." ..."
"... In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another 'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage] ..."
"... The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945 ..."
"... I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months. The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war. We are in an age of new mccarthyism ..."
"... What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told to! ..."
"... Yes, the "New Pearl Harbour" called for and carried out by the authors of the "Project for a New American Century" worked as planned. ..."
"... Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called it as soon as the buildings imploded! ..."
"... Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form a "Political Revolution against Empire" ..."
"... While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is concerned. ..."
"... As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood. ..."
Feb 20, 2018 | www.wsws.org

Wnt1a month ago

This is one of the most sensible editorials on the Russia issue I've seen, and it is true, insofar as it goes. There is something very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies. There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to testify before congress.

That said, I wouldn't dismiss the effect of the Russian involvement, or the relevance of the charges against Trump and his people. Bear in mind that the Party of McCarthy has been all about spying on its opponents from the days of HUAC. Nixon's break-in at the Watergate Hotel didn't singlehandedly decide the election ... but who would believe that was the only underhanded tactic he used? Republicans believe that if you're not cheating, you're not trying -- holding out for any ethical standard makes you inherently disloyal and unworthy of support. Something like Kavanaugh's involvement in the hacking of Democrats in 2003 ( http://www.foxnews.com/poli... ) should be no surprise; neither should the "Guccifer" hack that put the Democrats' data in the hands of Wikileaks. (Their subsequent attempts to demand Wikileaks not publish such a newsworthy leak, of course, is the sort of thing that undermines their position with me!)

Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary.

But if you go back in your house after the Republicans were minding it, don't be surprised if together with the missing couch change you notice some missing silverware, your kitchen tap has been sawed off, and the laptop is short half its RAM. By the time you've catalogued everything missing, the stolen brass part from the gas main downstairs might have blown you to smithereens.

Greg8 months ago
"Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it."

There are many reasons the bourgeoisie is unfit to rule. Each one of them is bound up with the lies required to enforce its rule. The greater its unfitness, "the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it.

"While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the Ł4 billion annual license fee." - BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women

The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it.

Alan MacDonald8 months ago
While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE.

Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony."

In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another 'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage]

Ambricourt -> Alan MacDonald8 months ago
The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945. It is time radical critiques of its values, power and methods should call it by its right name.
Bob Marley8 months ago
I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months. The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war. We are in an age of new mccarthyism
michaelroloff8 months ago
What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told to!
Terry Lawrence -> michaelroloff8 months ago
Yes, the "New Pearl Harbour" called for and carried out by the authors of the "Project for a New American Century" worked as planned.
michaelroloff -> Terry Lawrence8 months ago
don't tell me that you think that the blow-back that was 9/11 is a conspiracy - if you do, be so kind as to mention specific conspirators!
Terry Lawrence -> michaelroloff8 months ago
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, are a few obvious ones, . . . and that famous CIA asset, Bin Laden, to recruit the expendable hijackers.
michaelroloff -> Terry Lawrence8 months ago
just because it was a convenient act for them to do what they wanted in conquering iraq is not reason that idiots like that are capable of planning and concealing the numerous co-conspirators to arrange something like 9..11. imperialism can always count on blowback to have occasion for further crimes. there is the slim chance that they knew what was being planned and that they let it happen - except that none of those folks is evil enough for that. not even dick cheney. what i love about all conspiracy theories of the american kind is that they never nam or show an actual conspirator conspiring. look at one of the truly great failed conspiracy, that of the 20th july 1944 in germany that was meant to kill hitler and how many people were arrested in no time at all and executed..
Terry Lawrence michaelroloff8 months ago
A "conspiracy" is just any two or more people getting together to discuss something affecting one or more other people without them being party to the discussion. Like a surprise birthday party, for instance. Obviously the "official" version of the 9/11 events is also a "conspiracy theory" that 19 mostly Saudi Arabians led by a guy hiding in a cave in Afghanistan conspired to carry out co-ordinated attacks that just happened to coincide with most of the USAF being conveniently off in Alaska and northern Canada on an exercise that day, and another "coinciding exercise" simulating a multiple hijacking being carried out in the northeast US thereby confusing the Air Traffic Controllers as to whether the hijackings were "real world or exercise", significantly delaying the response, among other things.

Do you really believe that WTC 7, a steel frame building which was not adjacent to WTC 1 & 2, and was NOT hit by any airplanes, coincidentally collapsed due to low temperature paper and furniture office fires? Something that has never happened before or since? Or that such low temperature fires would cause the massive heavily reinforced concrete central core/elevator shaft to collapse first, pulling the rest of the building inward onto it in classic controlled demolition technique?

It is getting more difficult to find the videos showing that now as Google, as with WSWS articles, is pushing them off the front pages of results, while Snopes has put out a some very misleading reports that set up false "straw man" claims and then "disprove" them. Even the "disproofs" are false.

For instance, a Snopes report on the WTC 7 collapse states: "relied heavily on discredited claims, none of which were new, including:

Jet fuel cannot melt steel beams (This claim is misleading, as steel beams do to not need to melt completely to be compromised structurally).

A sprinkler system would have prevented temperatures from rising high enough to cause to cause structural damage. (This claim ignores the fact that a crash from a 767 jet would likely destroy such a system.)

The structural system would have been protected by fireproofing material (similarly, such a system would have been damaged in a 767 crash). "

Jet fuel, which is Kerosene, burns at around 575ş in open air, which was the case in WTC buildings 1 & 2. Most of it was vaporized by the impact with the buildings and burned of within minutes. At any rate, 575ş is far below the point at which structural steel specifically designed to withstand high temperature fires like that used in the World Trade Centre buildings is weakened.

All of which is irrelevant, as are the other "points" made by Snopes, because Building 7 was not hit by an airplane and there was no jet fuel involved. Something conveniently "overlooked" by Snopes and other similar misleading "disproofs". Not to mention that the Intelligence establishment is busy putting out false trails constantly which use, for instance, obviously faked photos or videos of the three WTC buildings collapsing to discredit the real videos and photos by setting up "straw men" they can then "disprove" and point to as "evidence" that people who don't believe the official version are "creating fake news".

liz_imp Terry Lawrence8 months ago
Brilliant points!! :)
Carolyn Zaremba Terry Lawrence8 months ago
Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called it as soon as the buildings imploded!
Terry Lawrence michaelroloff8 months ago
"The perpetrators and their conspiracy is not a theory since it has been proved."

By "proved" I assume you are referring to "proofs" such as the fantastical claim that Mohammed Atta's passport was allegedly and fortuitously "found" when it supposedly survived the 600 mph impact of the 767 he was supposedly piloting with a huge steel and concrete building, survived the huge fireball it was supposedly in the middle of unscorched, and conveniently fluttered to the ground intact to land at the feet of an FBI agent who immediately realized it must have belonged to one of the hijackers!

Even Hans Christian Andersen couldn't invent Fairy Tales like that.

Carolyn Zaremba michaelroloff8 months ago
See my comment above. It is the "official" explanation that is a fantasy.
michaelroloff Carolyn Zaremba8 months ago
the best that conspiracy theorist can do is, invariably, to call proven facts "just another theory " which only proves that they are actually aware that they are full of hot air! zarembas father as a structural engineer unless a fantasy is certainly better off among the dead than among the living and perpetrating his ignorance of steel and weight and fire onto the world!
clubmarkgirard michaelroloff8 months ago
Just because all the details aren't known as to who conspired and why there's enough holes in the "official conspiracy theory" of 19 hijackers to conclude that this could not have been pulled off without some conspiring on the American side. Certainly the the neocons benefited greatly from these attacks. So motive is there for sure.
Alan MacDonald michaelroloff8 months ago
Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form a "Political Revolution against Empire"
Kalen8 months ago
While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is concerned.

There is nothing to win in global nuke war, all know it while the outcome would be surely the current global oligarchy loosing grip on population destroying the system that works for them so well giving chance to what they dread socialist revolution they would have been much weaker to counter.

Regional conflicts are just positioning of oligarchy for management of global oligarchic country club while strict class morality is maintained.

What I do not we are conditions for war (split of global ruling elites) while what I see is broad propaganda of war as a excuse to clamp down on fake enemy in order to control respective populations while there is factual unity among world oligarchy.

As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood.

She died abandoned by those on the left who embraced the war for their political aspirations, she was murdered for her true internationalism i.e. No war fought between working people of one country and working people of another country.

Alan MacDonald Kalen8 months ago
Kalen, it's only effective to use the correct and understandable term 'Empire' in exposing, warning, and motivating average Americans --- since very few even know what words like; oligarchy, plutocracy, fascism, authoritarianism, corporate-state, or Wolin's 'inverted totalitarianism' mean --- let alone could ever serve as rallying cries for the coming essential Second American Revolution against EMPIRE.

As Pat would have shouted if Tom had taken the Paine to edit his call, "Give me Liberty over EMPIRE, or Give me Death!"

Carolyn Zaremba Alan MacDonald8 months ago
Do you really believe that average Americans are that stupid? Shame on you!
Alan MacDonald Carolyn Zaremba8 months ago
"Sweet Carolyn" OH OH OH --- Yes, only a very small percentage of Americans understand that our former country, the U.S. of America, is categorically, provably, and absolutely a new form of Empire, and is inexorably the first in world history an; 'effectively-disguised', 'truly-global', 'dual-party Vichy', and 'capitalist-fueled' EMPIRE --- an EMPIRE, really just an EMPIRE!

Just do an honest survey, "Sweet Carolyn", yourself, and if you're not a "Sweet Liarlyn", you will have to admit that essentially ZERO of the first 1000 people you ask, will say --- "Oh ya, Carolyn, of course I know that this whole effin 'system' that others less informed may still be so stupid that they think they live in a real country, when I (enter their name) do solemnly swear is just an effin EMPIRE, which is so well disguised, that these few idiots who don't understand that they are just citizen/'subjects' of this monsterous EMPIRE."

Do the survey, "Sweet Carolyn" and if you don't lie to yourself --- which maybe you do, because HELL, your job is to lie to others (so it's quite likely that you'll lie about anything) --- you'll find that exactly zero average Americans have the effin slightest idea in the world that their great 'country' is actually an effin EMPIRE.

HELL, Carolyn, almost half the Americans repeatedly yell, "We're number ONE", "We're number ONE", that their brains would rather rattle themselves to death than even let logic, history, knowledge, or anything into their addled and propaganda filled heads!

liz_imp Alan MacDonald8 months ago
Personal attacks are not allowed on this site.
Alan MacDonald liz_imp8 months ago
Sorry, Liz-imp, are you a friend of "Sweet Carolyn" --- or some other relation? Perhaps working together?
dmorista8 months ago
Excellent article, and it did a particularly good job of tying together the foreign policy and domestic policy stratagems of a major faction of the U.S. ruling class. I, for one, do not doubt that the Russians conduct some sort of cyber warfare against the U.S.; but that must be understood by considering the fact that every major governmental, political, military, and business organization on the face of the Earth must now operate in this manner. A friend of mine's son, who was in the Army, pointed out that the big players, by a wide margin, in spying on and to some degree interfering in the U.S. domestic scene are China and Israel. Kevin Barrett has written and said on various radio shows that much of what is attributed to the "Russians" are actually the actions of Russian/Israeli dual citizens, many of whom move freely between the U.S., Russia, and Israel. And, of course, the U.S. runs major spy and manipulation operations in more countries than any other nation of Earth, and U.S. based corporations are busy both inside the U.S. and in foreign places in similar activities.

It is clearly a desire of significant sectors, of the Capitalist rulers of the U.S., to repress dissent and political activities that oppose their agendas. It took them a few years to realize that their old methods using TV, hate radio, magazines, direct mail, and newspapers were losing their effectiveness. They have been increasing their attacks on leftist websites, hacking into websites, closing websites using phonied-up "national security" justifications, employing numerous trolls, and establishing and funding more far right websites, such as Breitbart and Infowars. These efforts are most effective when they are not overpowering and heavy handed.

The classic book on this was the 1988 book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann. Rob Williams has updated the concept for the internet age in
<http: www.vermontindependent.org ="" the-post-truth-world-reviving-the-propaganda-model-of-news-for-our-digital-age=""/>.

The strategy is nothing new, the methods are merely updated and use the latest technologies.

Maxwell dmorista8 months ago
Superb post.

I guess the lesson to be learned here is that rigging elections through byzantine electoral laws and billion dollar corporate slush funds is a thing of the past. All you need now is 13 amateur IT goomba's with a marketing scheme and twitter accounts. Well, sure is a fragile "World's Sole Superpower" we got here. Go Team?

[Nov 12, 2018] DEA And ICE Hiding Secret Cameras In Streetlights

Modern technology makes many things possible, but it does not make them cheap... The camera needs to work in pretty adverse conditions (think about the temperature inside the light on a hot summer day, and temperature at winter) and transmit signal somewhere via WiFi (which has range less then 100m) , or special cable that needs to be installed for this particular pole. With wifi there should be many collection units which also cost money. So it make sense only for streetlights adjacent to building with Internet networking. And there are already cameras of the highway, so highways are basically covered. Which basically limits this technology to cities. Just recoding without transmission would be much cheaper (transmission on demand). Excessive paranoia here is not warranted.
Nov 12, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

According to new government procurement data, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have purchased an undisclosed number of secret surveillance cameras that are being hidden in streetlights across the country.

Quartz first reported this dystopian development of federal authorities stocking up on "covert systems" last week. The report showed how the DEA paid a Houston, Texas company called Cowboy Streetlight Concealments LLC. approximately $22,000 since June for "video recording and reproducing equipment." ICE paid out about $28,000 to Cowboy Streetlight Concealments during the same period.

"It's unclear where the DEA and ICE streetlight cameras have been installed, or where the next deployments will take place. ICE offices in Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio have provided funding for recent acquisitions from Cowboy Streetlight Concealments; the DEA's most recent purchases were funded by the agency's Office of Investigative Technology, which is located in Lorton, Virginia," said Quartz.

Below is the list Of contract actions for Cowboy Streetlight Concealments LLC. Vendor_Duns_Number: "085189089" on the Federal Procurement Database:

Christie Crawford, who co-owns Cowboy Streetlight Concealments with her husband, said she was not allowed to talk about the government contracts in detail.

"We do streetlight concealments and camera enclosures," Crawford told Quartz. "Basically, there's businesses out there that will build concealments for the government and that's what we do. They specify what's best for them, and we make it. And that's about all I can probably say."

However, she added: "I can tell you this -- things are always being watched. It doesn't matter if you're driving down the street or visiting a friend, if government or law enforcement has a reason to set up surveillance, there's great technology out there to do it."

Quartz notes that the DEA issued a solicitation for "concealments made to house network PTZ [Pan-Tilt-Zoom] camera, cellular modem, cellular compression device," last Monday. According to solicitation number D-19-ST-0037, the sole source award will go to Obsidian Integration LLC.

On November 07, the Jersey City Police Department awarded Obsidian Integration with "the purchase and delivery of a covert pole camera." Quartz said the filing did not provide much detail about the design.

It is not just streetlights the federal government wants to mount covert surveillance cameras on, it seems cameras inside traffic barrels could be heading onto America's highways in the not too distant future.

And as Quartz reported in October, the DEA operates a complex network of digital speed-display road signs that covertly scan license plates. On top of all this, Amazon has been aggressively rolling out its Rekognition facial-recognition software to law enforcement agencies and ICE, according to emails uncovered by the Project for Government Oversight.

Chad Marlow, a senior advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU, told Quartz that cameras in street lights have been proposed before by local governments, typically under a program called "smart" LED street light system.

"It basically has the ability to turn every streetlight into a surveillance device, which is very Orwellian to say the least," Marlow told Quartz. "In most jurisdictions, the local police or department of public works are authorized to make these decisions unilaterally and in secret. There's no public debate or oversight."

And so, as the US continues to be distracted, torn amid record political, social and economic polarization, big brother has no intention of letting the current crisis go to waste, and quietly continues on its path of transforming the US into a full-blown police and surveillance state.


wuffie , 9 minutes ago link

I previously worked for one of these types of federal agencies and to be fair, $50,000 doesn't buy a lot of video surveillance equipment at government procurement costs. The contractor doesn't just drill a hole and install a camera, they provide an entirely new streetlight head with the camera installed.

SantaClaws , 36 minutes ago link

It would be nice if they put some of this technology to work for a good cause. Maybe warning you of traffic congestion ahead. Or advising you that one of your tires will soon go flat.

Obviously that won't happen, so in the meantime, I can't wait to read next how the hackers will find a way to make this government effort go completely haywire. As if the government can't do it without any help. At least when the hackers do it, it will be funny and thorough.

21st.century , 56 minutes ago link

Besides the creepy surveillance part, some of the street light tech is interesting . lights that dim like the frozen food section - when no one is in front of the case --- RGB lighting that shows the approximate location for EMS to a 911 call ( lights that EMS can follow by color)

basic neighborhood street lights are being replaced by LED -- lights in this article.

Hey, I have street lights AND cameras on the same poles at the shop/mad scientist lab/ play house.

but- surveillance -- the wall better have these lights -- light up the border !

Oldguy05 , 1 hour ago link

This is yesteryears news. Shot Spotter has microphones that can pick up whispered conversations for 300 feet for a long time now, while triangulating any gunshot in a city...

[Nov 10, 2018] It is quite possible that Pentagon hack was a false flag operation too

Notable quotes:
"... Which gets you to the astronomical 21 to 50 trillion in missing funds identified by the U of Mich professor and the further work of a woman financier 0T.extrapolated that the total sum missing from the Budget office is over 50T. ..."
"... The MIC is all about sucking the teat dry, and the US taxpayer is rewarded by the biggest uncontrolled defense budget ever, believe to be 1,3 trillion dollars. ..."
Nov 10, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Anton Worter | Nov 9, 2018 10:59:52 PM

I$I$ developed sophisticated videos and propaganda tools in Britain. It is absurd to claim that a state-less group somewhere in MENA created these materials and engaged in sophisticated hacking attacks from some cave in Tora Bora. My guess is the 'sophisticated Jack's of the CIA in 2011 and 2012 and of the Pentagon in 2012 and 2013, which revealed ALL the personal and banking identity of every employee, agent, soldier and contractor were Korea-China origin, and China treats I$I$ by mass detention, force-feeding pork and vodka, and mass chanting Long Live PRC.

frances , Nov 10, 2018 1:13:21 PM | link

@Anton Worter | Nov 9, 2018 10:59:52 PM | 18

"My guess is the 'sophisticated Jack's of the CIA in 2011 and 2012 and of the Pentagon in 2012 and 2013, which revealed ALL the personal and banking identity of every employee, agent, soldier and contractor were Korea-China origin."

I think the theft was a false flag, did anyone ever see any of those records? IMO the purpose of the FF was to then use all of that data to create phony invoices which as the Pentagon et al are never audited would never be questioned.

Which gets you to the astronomical 21 to 50 trillion in missing funds identified by the U of Mich professor and the further work of a woman financier 0T.extrapolated that the total sum missing from the Budget office is over 50T.

The articles below mention that the supporting documentation is now missing from the Budget office website. The professor had copied all the data before contacting the budge office and when the budget office didn't return his calls and their website deleted the information he made the info public.

www.rt.com/usa/413411-trillions-dollars-missing-research and www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2017/12/08/has-our-government-spent-21-trillion-of-our-money-without-telling-us

( b- I hope I copied these links properly)

IMO someones somewhere are doing a yeoman's job of tanking the US govt and the dollar.

Den Lille Abe , Nov 10, 2018 11:15:09 AM | link
Posted on Ars Tech in response to the evergrowing militaristic US and demonisation of Russia:

"Beware of the Greeks , when they bring gifts"

I find it rather comical that a representative of the MIC lauds cost saving in the federal government and their own policies.

The MIC is all about sucking the teat dry, and the US taxpayer is rewarded by the biggest uncontrolled defense budget ever, believe to be 1,3 trillion dollars.

The US must have some mighty enemies, surely, at this spending. Americans must live in daily fear; fear of some bogeyman (China, Russia) will invade and pillage; pillage exactly what?

... ...

[Nov 09, 2018] Khashoggi Was No Critic of Saudi Regime

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... A writer in Okaz, a daily in Jeddah, accused him of meeting with the Emir of Qatar at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York and of having ties to "regional and international intelligence services." If true it may have sealed his fate. Qatar is now the number one enemy of the Saudi regime -- arguably worse than Iran. ..."
Nov 09, 2018 | neznaika-nalune.livejournal.com

...Khashoggi was a loyal member of the Saudi propaganda apparatus. There is no journalism allowed in the kingdom: there have been courageous Saudi women and men who attempted to crack the wall of rigid political conformity and were persecuted and punished for their views. Khashoggi was not among them.
...
By historical contrast, Nasir As-Sa`id was a courageous secular Arab Nationalist writer who fled the kingdom in 1956 and settled in Cairo, and then Beirut. He authored a massive (though tabloid-like) volume about the history of the House of Saud. He was unrelenting in his attacks against the Saudi royal family.

For this, the Saudi regime paid a corrupt PLO leader in Beirut (Abu Az-Za`im, tied to Jordanian intelligence) to get rid of As-Sa`id. He kidnapped As-Sa`id from a crowded Beirut street in 1979 and delivered him to the Saudi embassy there. He was presumably tortured and killed (some say his body was tossed from a plane over the "empty quarter" desert in Saudi Arabia). Such is the track record of the regime.
...
Khashoggi distinguished himself with an eagerness to please and an uncanny ability to adjust his views to those of the prevailing government. In the era of anti-Communism and the promotion of fanatical jihad in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Khashoggi was a true believer. He fought with Osama bin Laden and promoted the cause of the Mujahideen.

The Washington Post's David Ignatius and others want to embellish this by implying that he was an "embedded" reporter -- as if bin Laden's army would invite independent journalists to report on their war efforts. The entire project of covering the Afghan Mujahideen and promoting them in the Saudi press was the work of the chief of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki, Khashoggi's principal patron-prince.

Western media coverage of Khashoggi's career (by people who don't know Arabic) presents a picture far from reality. They portray a courageous investigative journalist upsetting the Saudi regime. Nothing is further from the truth: there is no journalism in Saudi Arabia; there is only crude and naked propaganda.
...
Khashoggi was a reactionary: he supported all monarchies and sultanates in the region and contended they were "reformable." To him, only the secular republics, in tense relations with the Saudis, such as Iraq, Syria and Libya, defied reform and needed to be overthrown. He favored Islamization of Arab politics along Muslim Brotherhood lines.

Khashoggi's vision was an "Arab uprising" led by the Saudi regime. In his Arabic writings he backed MbS's "reforms" and even his "war on corruption," derided in the region and beyond. He thought that MbS's arrests of the princes in the Ritz were legitimate (though he mildly criticized them in a Post column) even as his last sponsoring prince, Al-Walid bin Talal, was locked up in the luxury hotel. Khashoggi even wanted to be an advisor to MbS, who did not trust him and turned him down.
...
A writer in Okaz, a daily in Jeddah, accused him of meeting with the Emir of Qatar at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York and of having ties to "regional and international intelligence services." If true it may have sealed his fate. Qatar is now the number one enemy of the Saudi regime -- arguably worse than Iran.

Khashoggi was treated as a defector and one isn't allowed to defect from the Saudi Establishment. The last senior defections were back in 1962, when Prince Talal and Prince Badr joined Nasser's Arab nationalist movement in Egypt.

Khashoggi had to be punished in a way that would send shivers down the spine of other would-be defectors.

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/10/15/khashoggi-was-no-critic-of-saudi-regime/

See also: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/07/03/its-time-to-divide-syria

[Nov 08, 2018] Ed Snowden Infamous Israeli Spyware 'Pegasus' Helped Kill Khashoggi

Nov 08, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Via MiddleEastMonitor.com,

US whistle-blower Edward Snowden yesterday claimed that Saudi Arabia used Israeli spyware to target murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi .

Addressing a conference in Tel Aviv via a video link, Snowden claimed that software made by an Israeli cyber intelligence firm was used by Saudi Arabia to track and target Khashoggi in the lead up to his murder on 2 October inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

Snowden told his audience:

"How do they [Saudi Arabia] know what his [Khashoggi's] plans were and that they needed to act against him? That knowledge came from the technology developed by NSO," Israeli business daily Globes reported.

Snowden accused NSO of "selling a digital burglary tool," adding it "is not just being used for catching criminals and stopping terrorist attacks, not just for saving lives, but for making money [ ] such a level of recklessness [ ] actually starts costing lives," according to the Jerusalem Post .

Snowden – made famous in 2013 for leaking classified National Security Agency (NSA) files and exposing the extent of US surveillance – added that "Israel is routinely at the top of the US' classified threat list of hackers along with Russia and China [ ] even though it is an ally".

Snowden is wanted in the US for espionage, so could not travel to Tel Aviv to address the conference in person for fear of being handed over to the authorities.

The Israeli firm to which Snowden referred – NSO Group Technologies – is known for developing the "Pegasus" software which can be used to remotely infect a target's mobile phone and then relay back data accessed by the device. Although NSO claims that its products "are licensed only to legitimate government agencies for the sole purpose of investigating and preventing crime and terror," this is not the first time its Pegasus software has been used by Saudi Arabia to track critics.

In October it was revealed that Saudi Arabia used Pegasus software to eavesdrop on 27-year-old Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz, a prominent critic of the Saudi government on social media.

The revelation was made by Canadian research group Citizen Lab , which found that the software had been used to hack Abdulaziz' iPhone between June and August of this year. Citizen Lab's Director Ron Deibert explained that such actions by Saudi Arabia "would constitute illegal wiretapping".

A separate report by Citizen Lab in September found a "significant expansion of Pegasus usage in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in the Middle East," in particular the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Citizen Lab added that in August 2016, Emirati human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor was targeted with the Pegasus spyware.

Snowden's comments come less than a week after it emerged that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked the United States to stand by Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman (MBS) in the wake of the Khashoggi case. The revelation was made by the Washington Post , which cited information from US officials familiar with a series of telephone conversations made to Jared Kushner – senior advisor to President Donald Trump and Trump's son-in-law – and National Security Adviser John Bolton regarding the Khashoggi case. The officials told the Post that:

In recent days, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have reached out to the Trump administration to express support for the crown prince, arguing that he is an important strategic partner in the region, said people familiar with the calls.

Bin Salman has come under intense scrutiny in the month since Khashoggi first disappeared , with many suspecting his involvement in ordering the brutal murder. Yet while several world leaders have shunned the crown prince, it is thought that Israel would suffer from any decline in Saudi influence in the region in light of its purportedly central role in the upcoming " Deal of the Century ".

[Nov 06, 2018] Edward Snowden Says a Report Critical To an NSA Lawsuit Is Authentic

Nov 06, 2018 | yro.slashdot.org

(techcrunch.com) 36 BeauHD on Monday November 05, 2018 @07:30PM from the he-said-she-said dept. An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: An unexpected declaration by whistleblower Edward Snowden filed in court [last] week adds a new twist in a long-running lawsuit against the NSA's surveillance programs. The case, filed by the EFF a decade ago , seeks to challenge the government's alleged illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of Americans, who are largely covered under the Fourth Amendment's protections against warrantless searches and seizures. It's a big step forward for the case, which had stalled largely because the government refused to confirm that a leaked document was authentic or accurate. News of the surveillance broke in 2006 when an AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that the NSA was tapping into AT&T's network backbone. He alleged that a secret, locked room -- dubbed Room 641A -- in an AT&T facility in San Francisco where he worked was one of many around the U.S. used by the government to monitor communications -- domestic and overseas. President George W. Bush authorized the NSA to secretly wiretap Americans' communications shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

Much of the EFF's complaint relied on Klein's testimony until 2013, when Snowden, a former NSA contractor, came forward with new revelations that described and detailed the vast scope of the U.S. government's surveillance capabilities, which included participation from other phone giants -- including Verizon (TechCrunch's parent company). Snowden's signed declaration, filed on October 31 , confirms that one of the documents he leaked , which the EFF relied heavily on for its case, is an authentic draft document written by the then-NSA inspector general in 2009 , which exposed concerns about the legality of the Bush's warrantless surveillance program -- Stellar Wind -- particularly the collection of bulk email records on Americans. "I read its contents carefully during my employment," he said in his declaration. "I have a specific and strong recollection of this document because it indicated to me that the government had been conducting illegal surveillance."

[Nov 05, 2018] Papadopoulos Details Alleged Entrapment Scheme By Undercover Deep State Agents

Notable quotes:
"... "I am more than happy to deliver the $10,000 in cash I received, as part of what I believe was a sting operation to frame me in summer 2017, to your committee to examine for marked bills. This is in the interest of me being fully transparent," he wrote last week on Twitter to North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows and Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe. ..."
"... Afraid he might be killed if he didn't accept the money, Papadopoulos took the funds and later contacted Tawil - who allegedly told Papadopoulos he didn't want it back. From there, Papadopoulos gave the cash to his attorney in Greece. Upon his return to the United States several days later, Papadopoulos was arrested on July 28, 2017 at Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C., by agents who he believes were looking for the cash. ..."
"... And then when Papadopoulos landed back in America, he was arrested at Dulles International Airport on July 27th. Strangely, he wasn't shown the warrant for his arrest when arrested, and didn't know the reason why until the next day. The $10,000 that Tawil paid Papadopoulos in cash is interesting in this context, as it would be the exact amount of money one would be required to declare at customs. Papadopoulos didn't recall if he was arrested before or after he filled out a customs slip (but didn't have the money on him). - Bongino.com ..."
Nov 04, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

George Papadopoulos - a central figure and self-admitted dupe in the Obama administration's targeted spying on the Trump campaign, gave a wide-ranging interview to Dan Bongino on Friday, detailing what he claims to have been a setup by deep state operatives across the world in order to ultimately infiltrate the Trump campaign.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/45m5DP1xfRg

Reviewing events

In March 2016 , Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud told Papadopoulos - an energy consultant who had recently joined the Trump campaign - that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, a claim which Papadopoulos repeated in May 2016 to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in a London bar . Of note, former FBI Assistant Director of counterintelligence, Bill Priestap, reportedly traveled to London directly before Downer met with Papadopoulos, while a few months later former FBI agent Peter Strzok met with Downer in London directly before the DOJ officially launched their investigation into the Trump campaign.

The alleged admission about Clinton's emails officially sparked the Obama administration's counterintelligence operation on Trump on July 31, 2016 - dubbed Operation Crossfire Hurricane. In September 2016, the FBI would send spy Stefan Halper to further probe Papadopoulos on the Clinton email allegation, and - according to his interview with Dan Bongino, Papadoplous says Halper angrily accused him of working with Russia before storming out of a meeting.

Halper essentially began interrogating Papadopoulos, saying that it's "obviously in your interest to be working with the Russians" and to "hack emails." " You're complicit with Russia in this, isn't that right George " Halper told him. Halper also inquired about Hillary's hacked emails, insinuating that Papadopoulos possessed them. Papadopoulos denied knowing anything about this and asked to be left alone. - Bongino.com

There are two schools of thought on Papadopoulos and his relationship with Mifsud - the first link in the chain regarding the Clinton email rumor. Notably, Mifsud claimed last November to be a member of the Clinton Foundation, and has donated to the charity.

The first theory is that Mifsud and Papadopoulos are Russian agents, and that Papadopoulos was used to try and establish a backchannel to Putin. Papadopoulos admits he tried to set up a Trump-Putin meeting - which was flatly rejected by the Trump campaign. Papadopoulos, however, claims the Putin connection was a woman Mifsud introduced him to claiming to be Putin's niece, who was present at a March 24, 2016 meeting.

The second theory regarding Mifsud is that he was a deep state plant working with the FBI; convincing Papadopoulos that he could arrange a meeting with members of the Russian government and then seeding Papadopoulos with the Clinton email rumor. From there, as the theory goes, the "deep state" attempted to pump Papadopoulos for information and set up a case against him - beginning with Alexander Downer and the "drunken" confession in London.

Papadopoulos told Bongino that he wasn't drunk during his meeting with Downer, and that he was being recorded . Papadopoulos noted during the Bongino interview that transcripts of his meetings with Mifsud and Dower reportedly exist - which he says proves that he was set up. According to Papadopoulos, Mifsud's lawyer said that he's not a Russian asset and was instead working for Western intelligence.

Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying the FBI about his interactions with Mifsud, and was sentenced to 14 days in federal prison and a $9,500 fine.

$10,000 cash

Papadopoulos also told Bongino about $10,000 in cash that he was given in an Israel hotel room in July 2017 - which he claims was another attempt to set him up. He says that he believes the bills were marked, and is looking for a way to bring the cash into the United States for Congressional investigators to analyze. The cash is currently with his attorney in Greece.

"I'm actually trying to bring that money back somehow so that Congress can investigate it because I am 100 percent sure those are marked bills, and to see who was actually running this operation against me," Papadopoulos gold Bongino.

"I am more than happy to deliver the $10,000 in cash I received, as part of what I believe was a sting operation to frame me in summer 2017, to your committee to examine for marked bills. This is in the interest of me being fully transparent," he wrote last week on Twitter to North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows and Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe.

The two Republicans are members of a congressional task force investigating the FBI's investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The task force interviewed Papadopoulos on Oct. 25.

Papadopoulos acknowledged in his interview with Bongino that his claims about his encounters with an Israeli-American businessman named Charles Tawil were "an incredible, insane story."

"But it's true," he asserted.

Papadopoulos told Bongino the he believes that Tawil "was working on behalf of Western intelligence to entrap me."

Papadopoulos does not have direct evidence that Tawil was working on behalf of a Western government when they met in March and July 2017. Instead, Papadopoulos is speculating based on what he says is the peculiar circumstances of his encounters with Tawil as well as his meetings with at least one known FBI informant. - Daily Caller

Afraid he might be killed if he didn't accept the money, Papadopoulos took the funds and later contacted Tawil - who allegedly told Papadopoulos he didn't want it back. From there, Papadopoulos gave the cash to his attorney in Greece. Upon his return to the United States several days later, Papadopoulos was arrested on July 28, 2017 at Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C., by agents who he believes were looking for the cash.

And then when Papadopoulos landed back in America, he was arrested at Dulles International Airport on July 27th. Strangely, he wasn't shown the warrant for his arrest when arrested, and didn't know the reason why until the next day. The $10,000 that Tawil paid Papadopoulos in cash is interesting in this context, as it would be the exact amount of money one would be required to declare at customs. Papadopoulos didn't recall if he was arrested before or after he filled out a customs slip (but didn't have the money on him). - Bongino.com

At minimum, one should set aside an hour for the Bongino-Papadopoulos interview if only to hear his version of events.

Perhaps the biggest mystery of all is how George was able to end up with such a hot Italian (not Russian) wife:

[Nov 05, 2018] Stay In That Good Fight Retired Green Beret Urges Americans To Stand Up To The Globalists

Nov 05, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFplan.com,

The actions that are taken are a three-pronged attack in order to foster in global governance, and they are as such:

  1. Create ubiquitous electronic surveillance with unlimited police power
  2. Throw the entire earth into an economic tailspin
  3. Destroy all nationalism, national borders, and create chaos among all nations prior to an "incendiary event" or series of actions that leads to a world war.

The world war is the most important part of it all, in the eyes of the globalists. The Great Depression culminated in a world war, and periods of economic upheaval are always followed by wars.

... ... ...

Every word here is recorded by XKeyscore mine and yours and stored in the NSA database in Utah, under a file for "dissenters," "agitators," and every other descriptive label that can be thought of for those who champion critical thought and independent thinking. Every conservative-minded journalist or writer who dares to espouse these views and theories is being recorded and kept under some kind of watch. You can be certain of it . Many are either shutting down or "knuckling under" and complying.

The globalists are getting what they wish: consolidating the resources while they "tank" the fiat economies and currencies of the nations. They are destroying cultures who just a mere two centuries ago would have armed their entire male populaces with swords and sent invaders either packing or in pieces.

They are destroying cultures by making them question themselves ! The greatest tactic imaginable!

I submit this last for your perusal. Do you know who you are? The question is not just as simple as it seems. Let's delve deeply. Do you really know who you are, where your family originates? Your heritage, and its strengths and weaknesses? Is that heritage yours, along with your heritage as an American citizen? It is not important that I, or others should know of these strengths not at this moment in time. The world war is yet to come. As Shakespeare said, "To thine own self be true." This is important for you to know it and hold fast to it. We are in the decline of the American nation-now-empire.

When the dust settles, you'll know who will run with the ball even with three blockers against them and will manage to slip the tackles or forearm shiver them in the face, outside of the ref's eye, to run that ball in. The Marquis of Queensbury is dead, and those rules will go out the window. When the dust settles, those who had the foresight and acted on it will be the ones who will be given a gift: a chance to participate in what is to come. Stay in that good fight, and fight it to win each day.

[Nov 02, 2018] By Way Of Deception - False Flag Terror Acts Press Europe To Sanction Iran by B

Looks like Iran was "Skripaled". Intelligence agencies are now capable to perform false flag operation in thier home countries and blame other government with absolute impunity.
Notable quotes:
"... Israels secret service Mossad, with the CIA behind it, is framing Iran with alleged assassination plots in Europe. ..."
"... It is unlikely that Iran would take action in Europe, which it urgently needs to reduce the damage of U.S. sanction, over an incident for which it already punished the Islamic State. ..."
"... The Danish claims are allegedly based on information provided by Mossad. That only increases the suspicion that the assassination plot is a false flag operation similar to a recent one in Belgium. More likely though is that the CIA is behind such false flag incidents. ..."
"... Bahram Ghasemi, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Iran "re-emphasized" to the diplomats a previous warning about the presence in their respective countries of members of a group that Iran classifies as a terrorist group and wants arrested and prosecuted. ..."
"... On October 30 Denmark suddenly accused Iran of an assassination plot against a leader of the ASMLA group ..."
"... It indeed seems that Danish government, led by the rightwing Venstre party, is collaborating with the U.S. and Britain to sabotage the European position against U.S. sanctions on Iran ..."
"... The former Secretary General of NATO and U.S. stooge Anders Fogh Rasmussen is the predecessor of the current Venstre party leader and Danish premier Lars Lřkke Rasmussen. Both are hawks. ..."
"... Yesterday Israeli journalist reported that the information on which Denmark acted came from Israel ..."
"... Iran's foreign minister accuses Israel of running false flag operations to frame Iran ..."
"... Times of Israel ..."
"... Iran has no interest in causing any upheaval with Europe shortly before the second round of U.S. sanctions, which threaten its economic well being, come into place early this month. Iran already took revenge for the Ahvaz attack. It has no need to tackle some unrelated separatist who resides in Denmark. Iran needs Europe to work around the U.S. sanctions. That aim prohibits any such operations. ..."
"... Both, the MEK plot as well as the case in Denmark, smell of false flag incidents. In both case no one was hurt. In both cases some stooges with no current relation to Iran were caught. Both cases came to light after information was allegedly provided by Mossad ..."
"... "Both, the MEK plot as well as the case in Denmark, smell of false flag incidents. In both case no one was hurt." Just like with the "bombs" shipped to a few US "liberals" recently. ..."
"... It was only going to be a matter of time until Iran got Skripalled. Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif Tweets a list : "Incredible series of coincidences. Or, a simple chronology of a MOSSAD program to kill the JCPOA?" ..."
Nov 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Israels secret service Mossad, with the CIA behind it, is framing Iran with alleged assassination plots in Europe.

In September a terror attack killed some 30 people in Iran. Two entities, an Arab separatist movement as well as the Islamic State terror group ISIS, took responsibility. After an investigation Iran found that it was ISIS which was responsible. It took revenge against the identified culprits.

Six weeks later Denmark claims, without providing evidence, that Iran tried to assassinate a leader of the Arab separatist movement over the incident. Iran denies any such attempt. The right wing Danish government uses the claim to urge other European countries to sanction Iran.

It is unlikely that Iran would take action in Europe, which it urgently needs to reduce the damage of U.S. sanction, over an incident for which it already punished the Islamic State.

The Danish claims are allegedly based on information provided by Mossad. That only increases the suspicion that the assassination plot is a false flag operation similar to a recent one in Belgium. More likely though is that the CIA is behind such false flag incidents.

The details:

On September 22 gunmen killed 29 and wounded more than 70 participants and onlookers of a veterans day parade in Ahvaz, Iran:

Three of the attackers were gunned down during clashes with the security forces and one other was arrested, news agencies reported.
...
"The terrorists disguised as Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and Basiji (volunteer) forces opened fire to the authority and people from behind the stand during the parade," the governor of Khuzestan, Gholam-Reza Shariati, said, according to IRNA.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert also referred to the attack as terrorism. Nauert said on Saturday, "We stand with the Iranian people against the scourge of radical Islamic terrorism and express our sympathy to them at this terrible time".

The Islamic State as well as an Arab separatist movement claimed responsibility :

On 22 September 2018, Yaqoob Al-Ahvaz claimed responsibility for the 2018 Ahvaz military parade attack in comments to UK-based Iran International TV. He said that his group Ahvaz National Resistance, a part of Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz, has "no choice but to resist." On 23 September, a statement made in The Hague, Netherlands, on the ASMLA website, denied responsibility for the attack, saying that the claim was made by a "group that was expelled from the organization since 2015."

After Yaqoob Al-Ahvaz claimed responsibility Iran accused Saudi Arabia of involvement in the attack:

IRGC spokesman Ramezan Sharif said the attackers were affiliated with a terrorist group supported by Saudi Arabia, Iran's state-run Press TV said.

"The individuals who fired at the people and the armed forces during the parade are connected to the al-Ahvaziya group which is fed by Saudi Arabia," Sharif said. Saudi Arabia has yet to respond to the allegations.

The UK-based Iran International TV, where Yaqoob Al-Ahvaz claimed responsibility, is funded by a firm with ties to Prince Mohammed bin Salman .

Several years ago ASMLA aka Al-Ahvaziya committed several terror attacks in Iran. Its leaders live in the Netherlands and Denmark.

Iran immediately reminded those countries of their duties:

Iran's Foreign Ministry summoned the ambassadors of the Netherlands and Denmark, along with a senior British diplomat on Saturday to issue a strong protest the attack, Iran's state-run media reports.

Bahram Ghasemi, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Iran "re-emphasized" to the diplomats a previous warning about the presence in their respective countries of members of a group that Iran classifies as a terrorist group and wants arrested and prosecuted.

According to IRNA, Ghasemi said "it is unacceptable" that members of a terrorist group be allowed in those countries and not be included on the European Union's terror list only because they have not committed crimes on European soil.

A few days later though, Iran concluded that the attack was not committed by the Ahvaz movement, but by the Islamic State. On October 1 it responded with a missile salvo that hit Islamic State facilities in Syria:

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) announced they have bombed a site in eastern Syria in retaliation to the terrorist attack against a military parade in Iranian Ahvaz 10 days ago.

...

The IRGC confirmed that the targeted terrorist group was behind the terror attack that killed over a dozen and injured many more in the city of Ahvaz.

An additional operation against the planers of the attack took place on October 15 in Iraq:

Iran's Revolutionary Guards said on Tuesday they had killed the "mastermind" behind an attack on a military parade in the Iranian city of Ahvaz last month which left 25 people dead, nearly half of them members of the Guards.

The Guards said in a statement published on state media their forces had killed a man named Abu Zaha and four other militants in Diyala province in Iraq. One news website run by Iran's state television said Abu Zaha was a member of Islamic State.

That closed the issue for Iran.

On October 30 Denmark suddenly accused Iran of an assassination plot against a leader of the ASMLA group:

Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen described the alleged planned assassination by Iran of an exiled separatist leader in Denmark as "totally unacceptable"

The Iranian ambassador to Copenhagen was summoned to the foreign ministry over the allegations. A Norwegian citizen of Iranian origin was arrested in Sweden on 21 October in connection with the alleged plan. The man denies the charges. Authorities conducted a massive manhunt on 28 September which led to road closures, trains and ferries being cancelled, and bridges being shut across Denmark.

On Tuesday, Danish intelligence chief Finn Borch Andersen confirmed the measures had been taken to prevent the alleged plot.

The Danish intelligence accused the Norwegian citizens of taking pictures of a house where one of the ASMLA leader lives. It provide no evidence for its claims. Iran rejected the accusations:

An Iranian foreign ministry spokesman said such "biased reports" and allegations pursued " the enemy's plots and conspiracies" to harm the developing relations between Iran and Europe , according to Tasnim news agency.

It indeed seems that Danish government, led by the rightwing Venstre party, is collaborating with the U.S. and Britain to sabotage the European position against U.S. sanctions on Iran:

Mr Rasmussen said, after a meeting with his British counterpart Theresa May in Oslo, that he appreciated her support. "In close collaboration with UK and other countries we will stand up to Iran," he tweeted. Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen said Denmark would discuss further actions with European partners in the coming days.

The US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, congratulated Denmark on arresting "an Iranian regime assassin".

The former Secretary General of NATO and U.S. stooge Anders Fogh Rasmussen is the predecessor of the current Venstre party leader and Danish premier Lars Lřkke Rasmussen. Both are hawks.

Yesterday Israeli journalist reported that the information on which Denmark acted came from Israel:

Barak Ravid @BarakRavid - 10:12 utc- 31 Oct 2018

BREAKING: Israeli Mossad gave Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) the information about the assassination attempt planned by Iranian intelligence service against the leader of the Iranian opposition organization ASMLA, Israeli official tells me

Well - if Israeli officials says Iran did something bad that will surely be true. (Not.)

Iran's foreign minister accuses Israel of running false flag operations to frame Iran :

Javad Zarif @JZarif - 20:15 utc - 31 Oct 2018

Mossad's perverse & stubborn planting of false flags (more on this later) only strengthens our resolve to engage constructively with the world. [...]

The Times of Israel notes :

Denmark's accusations against Iran followed the unveiling of another suspected Iranian plot to target a Paris rally by an opposition group in June. According to Israeli reports, the Mossad helped thwart that attack as well , which led to the arrest of several Iranians in Europe, including a diplomat.

The earlier plot involved two members of the anti-Iranian terror cult MEK in Belgium who were caught with explosives that they allegedly wanted to use to blow up a MEK conference in Paris:

The allegation that an Iranian operative plotted an attack on French soil is jeopardizing Europe's support for the accord. As U.S. and Israeli officials ramp up pressure on Europe to sever ties with Tehran, they have cited it as a reason why Mr. Macron and other leaders should end their support for the deal.

On Tuesday, Denmark announced it had foiled an Iranian operation to kill a dissident, turning up the pressure on Europe to harden its posture toward Tehran. A spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry said Iran had no involvement in the case.

The most interesting question about such plots is always "Cui bono?". Who benefits from these incidents?

Iran has no interest in causing any upheaval with Europe shortly before the second round of U.S. sanctions, which threaten its economic well being, come into place early this month. Iran already took revenge for the Ahvaz attack. It has no need to tackle some unrelated separatist who resides in Denmark. Iran needs Europe to work around the U.S. sanctions. That aim prohibits any such operations.

Both, the MEK plot as well as the case in Denmark, smell of false flag incidents. In both case no one was hurt. In both cases some stooges with no current relation to Iran were caught. Both cases came to light after information was allegedly provided by Mossad .

But is it really Israel who set up these incidents? Both serve U.S. interest just as much. It is no secret that the U.S. wants to prevent European subversion of U.S. sanctions on Iran.

In June 2017 the Trump administration installed a new CIA group to plot and launch undercover operations against Iran. It is led by its most ruthless operator:

He is known as the Dark Prince or Ayatollah Mike, nicknames he earned as the Central Intelligence Agency officer who oversaw the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the American drone strike campaign that killed thousands of Islamist militants and hundreds of civilians.

Now the official, Michael D'Andrea, has a new job. He is running the C.I.A.'s Iran operations, according to current and former intelligence officials, an appointment that is the first major sign that the Trump administration is invoking the hard line the president took against Iran during his campaign.

Mr. D'Andrea's new role is one of a number of moves inside the spy agency that signal a more muscular approach to covert operations under the leadership of Mike Pompeo, the conservative Republican and former congressman, the officials said.

A year later the same Mike Pompeo, now Secretary of State, created the Iran Action Group within the State Department. It is a complementary entity to the CIA group. Little has been published about the action both groups have taken so far. What has Ayatollah Mike done since he set up shop 18 month ago?

It is likely that the false flag operations in Europe, like the ones in Belgium and Denmark, are run by the CIA with the Mossad only in an auxiliary role. The U.S. can hardly admit that it is faking terrorist incidents in Europe while the overrated Mossad loves to take credit for everything that happens on this world.

Europe has no interest in supporting or escalating Trump's war on Iran. EU countries should demand hard evidence from Denmark and other accusers of Iran and should not act on the basis of only vague accusations.

Posted by b on November 1, 2018 at 10:30 AM | Permalink

Comments Iran should sue the puppet state Denmark. End of story

worldblee , Nov 1, 2018 10:59:28 AM | link

Israel is regarded as a beneficent country with no ulterior motives by western governments and media. Every time, you can count on like clockwork, no matter how outrageous or self serving the claim.
Occidentosis , Nov 1, 2018 11:08:14 AM | link
@mark2 about yemen you should read peter konig's Khashoggi versus 50,000 Slaughtered Yemeni Children Peter Koenig
https://thesaker.is/khashoggi-versus-50000-slaughtered-yemeni-children-peter-koenig-26-october-2018/
james , Nov 1, 2018 11:17:21 AM | link
thanks b.. i agree with your analysis here.. the usa needs to keep its puppet states. on a string... cia has a long history of these types of actions.. i am surprised at how easily or convenient it is for the puppets to continue as puppets.. and of course as we approach the nov 5 th financial santion bs from the evil empire that claims equality for all (after usa and israel are cared for) will be trying to alienate the rest of the world to iran as much as possible.. the timing here is in line with that goal post.. very predictible, just like our local shill who will claim it is iran as opposed to usa-israel-ksa and etc, that pull this shit regularly.. the same ugly crew responsible for supporting terrorism as witnessed in syria, yemen and etc further back are at work here... predictible..

i suspect more bs to come from these same state sponsored liars....

Mark2 , Nov 1, 2018 11:50:38 AM | link
And just take a look at Britain's disgusting priority's money is more important than preventing / stopping US/UK genacide !
https://mobile.twitter.com/BaFana3/status/1057698127623438336/photo/1
Gary Weglarz , Nov 1, 2018 11:57:22 AM | link
The complete and utter amorality of the West on display yet again, as if we needed any more examples. There is certainly compelling evidence that a group of "extremists" are endangering all of humanity and the entire planet, the only problem for Western MSM in reporting on this is that those "extremists" are in fact the ruling elites of the West and their "allies" in Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Clueless Joe , Nov 1, 2018 11:59:44 AM | link
"Both, the MEK plot as well as the case in Denmark, smell of false flag incidents. In both case no one was hurt." Just like with the "bombs" shipped to a few US "liberals" recently.
WJ , Nov 1, 2018 12:01:42 PM | link
I thought the War on Terror dictated that the whole world was the battlefield. What's the difference between Iran trying to take down a terrorist in Denmark and the US trying to take one down in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Africa?
karlof1 , Nov 1, 2018 12:16:51 PM | link
It was only going to be a matter of time until Iran got Skripalled. Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif Tweets a list : "Incredible series of coincidences. Or, a simple chronology of a MOSSAD program to kill the JCPOA?"

Please note the last listed "coincidence."

Also on Zarif's Twitter is a video segment of his interview with Face The Nation and other important announcements. This is what he said about the Pittsburg attack:

"Extremism and terrorism know no race or religion, and must be condemned in all cases. The world deserves better than to have to live with weaponized demagoguery. Thoughts and prayers with victims of terrorist attack on Pittsburgh synagogue and their loved ones." [My Emphasis]

The nations of the world have had the following choice to make for awhile now, and I'd say the choice can no longer be kicked down the road:

Either blindly follow the two prevaricating Outlaw Nations--United States and Israel--or stand with Russia, China, and others in supporting proven truths and upholding the fundamental principles of International Law as expressed via the UN Charter. In other words, it's past time to review GW Bush's dicta: Either you're with us or against us--abet the lawbreakers or join the posse to contain them.

b , Nov 1, 2018 12:17:18 PM | link
@Mark2 - NO MORE ONE-LINERS FROM YOU or I will ban you.

Every time you come up to this site you disrupt all discussions here by posting 10+ one-line comments.

All those have the same characteristic. They are useless.

Stop this nonsense. Write decent comments that are on the subject of the post or just go away.

ben , Nov 1, 2018 12:19:24 PM | link
The evil empire and their bought minions are infecting the globe. They will never stop until their domination by organised $ brings surfs everywhere under their control.

These forces do not believe in a "middle class", they believe the wealthiest should rule because it creates a more stable and predictable society..

A society Charles Dickens wrote about. Wonderful...

Ger , Nov 1, 2018 12:29:25 PM | link
One needs a high level of stupid among the western population to sell bull s... by the buckets. But then again, that is US and allies. As was said: Too stupid to realize they are stupid. In the US the most trusted institution is the military. Proof enough?
Mark2 , Nov 1, 2018 12:35:54 PM | link
'B' that's o k i'll Just go away good bye good luck, and thanks for having me.
james , Nov 1, 2018 1:34:01 PM | link
about MEK, the terrorist group... our shithead exprime minister steven harper was singing the praises of them the past month.... apparenlty stevie just can't do enough for israel and zionism, and if the canuck media which is essentialy bought and paid for by the same interests has its way, we will get a similar insane gov't after trudeau light is finished his term... apparently canucks are one cycle behind the usa in electing its leaders... it will be a trump type israel subservient toad for next pm of cauckistan... i sure wish the western political players weren't so beholden to neoliberalism. and we had someone even half the leader putin is.... but, we don't....
Vitaliy , Nov 1, 2018 2:12:05 PM | link
East by not responding strongly to West provocations is begging for war.
East by crying for West for cooperation is begging for war.
And since East and West are controlled by the same same cabal - war is inevitable.
Just ask Mr. Kissinger...
hans , Nov 1, 2018 2:19:10 PM | link
The Edomites, who after Rome's extermination of the remnant of the House of Israel at Jerusalem began calling themselves "Jews" for "controlled opposition" for "the real Anti-Christ" "engine for enslaving mankind" we founded God's America to escape, become sex perverts, including incesting Sabbatean Frankists - hence the Manchu-baldness, as a consequence of their satanic cult's ritual sodomy of innocent toddlers while being rabbinically inculcated as "gods chosen by God to rule the world."

It is, in fact, the Synagogue of Satan.

notheonly1 , Nov 1, 2018 2:25:25 PM | link
Wow. Thank You for this one. After reading this excellent assessment of the present situation, of which we might only know the most shallow facts, I had to do a search (DDG) about Iran during the time of the first openly Fascist Europe - being described as having emanated from 3rd-Reich-Germany and Italy.
I was unaware that there was an Anglo-Soviet Invasion of Iran , because of the alleged sympathy of the Shah's Iran with Nazi-Germany. The Brits and the Russians were buddies then and wanted to prevent that Iranian oil is accessible to Nazi-Germany.

All over sudden I am confused that the Brits invaded shoulder to shoulder with Soviet forces Iran - while now, besides delivering the political ham theater of saber rattling against Russia, supporting terror and instigating sanctions against Iran again.

To make things much worse to comprehend, one is to wonder how many European countries actually did join Nazi Germany without much ado at the time, based on the fact that the Scandinavians and the Netherlands are now as Fascist as Nazi Germany was during its short 1000 years of glory. Does anybody else get the impression that this was always this way? That we have been lied to about everything regarding Fascism? That it was never Fascism that was the problem in Europe - as it appears to do very well there - but a strong Germany that could have easily governed its territory via effective 'bureaucracy'. All of Europe.

The truth is, that the stench of Fascism today, was already stinking badly in the 20th century, but was never really a problem. The problem were the Germans. And somehow, the Germans want to continue to have economic ties with Iran. Is this how history repeats itself - minus the marching Soviet/Russian and British buddy forces?

Quite ludicrous the whole theater.

Vitaliy , Nov 1, 2018 2:38:54 PM | link
19
Earth been damned and given to Worldmaster to rule - what else one needs to know?
craigsummers , Nov 1, 2018 2:48:11 PM | link
How many false flag operations have been invoked to explain unpopular events in recent years? The British government was behind the attempted murder of Skripal. All of the chemical attacks launched against the opposition in Syria were false flag operations to bring the US into the war (which amounted to nothing burgers anyway). Ray McGovern hypothesized the US used the Vault 7 tools as a false flag to blame Russia for the DNC hack. Is there any end to false flag speculation?

Who cares if the Iranians deny the charge? That means absolutely nothing. Russia has been lying and denying for years. Additionally, that Mossad would have provided the information to Denmark and France is completely logical since they have been collecting intelligence on Iran for years - and have been dealing with Iranian-supported terrorists for decades.

There is no evidence for a false flag operation. Sure it's a possibility (it's always a possibility), but the current evidence points toward Iranian plans to murder dissidents. The British were right about Skripal. The Dutch were right about MH17. Ray McGovern was wrong about the CIA hacking the DNC - and the likely result of this investigation is that Iran planned to murder a couple of dissidents. In lieu of the stupidity exhibited by the Saudis in the Khashoggi murder, it's completely believable.

With all of that said, this is a well thought out attempt to blame the US.

Red Ryder , Nov 1, 2018 3:00:44 PM | link
Denmark has become another UK, willing to perform any act and light any fuse against Russia, Iran or any nation that challenges the hegemony of US, EU and NATO.

Just a subservient vassal, self-degradating. I would compare Denmark to a whore, but that defames those poor souls.

The Danes are like Brits. There, I said it. Nothing worse than the official scumbags of Britain. Pity the good folks of both countries.

Such a little country desperately trying to hide their true Nazi soul, fabricating events and promulgating Fake News and bogus Intel.
In service to big Hegemon and little hegemon (Israel).

Just disgusting.

b , Nov 1, 2018 3:07:09 PM | link
@craig - With all of that said, this is a well thought out attempt to blame the US.

Thanks for acknowledging my geniality, and for the amusement. Shall we make you the house buffoon of the bar?

pretzelattack , Nov 1, 2018 3:10:54 PM | link
thanks for the analysis. we all see the pattern, but i guess it's still important to debunk the bullshit--it just never seems to stop the predetermined goals. it was widely seen that saddam's alleged wmd's didn't exist, but the invasion went on. now the u.s. wants war with iran. unless russia or china intervenes, what can stop it?
DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , Nov 1, 2018 3:15:48 PM | link
@10 - WJ: Difference is, USA has drones and some 19 yo teen can kill you with his joystick. ;)
I think false flag seems likely, but i also have some doubts about ISIS claiming to be resposible. The Iranian state is also pretty complex, with many different actors and power centers. So it cant be ruled out that those arab seperatists are resposible and that some rouge IRGC faction took action against reason of the state as a whole.
Like B said, the EU should demand evidence. Like with Skripal.. Not trust the Danish NATO proxys.
Nick Baam , Nov 1, 2018 3:33:01 PM | link
craigsummers:

The Dutch were not right about MH17, and neither are the Danes. Almost certainly another anti-Iranian false flag coming -- this on American soil -- w war soon to follow.

https://southfront.org/summing-up-russian-military-briefing-on-mh17-incident-missiles-serial-numbers-fake-videos-and-intercepted-radio-communications/

'The Russian military traced the Buk missile [9M38 missile], which shot down the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine in 2014, using serial numbers found on missile fragments showcased by an international team of investigators led by the Netherlands.

'Using the serial number of the nozzle cluster 9D13105000 No. 8-30-113 and the engine of the missile 9D131 with the serial number 8869032, the Russian military identified this missile as one produced by the Dolgoprudny plant – a Soviet/Russian designer and mass producer of surface-to-air missiles located in the city of Dolgoprudny, Moscow Oblast.

'The military said that the documentation for the aforementioned missile is still stored at the plant – the missile with the aforementioned engine and nozzle cluster has the manufacturing serial number of 8868720.

'According to the provided documents, the nozzle cluster was installed in the missile on December 24, 1986. The engine was installed to the missile on the same day.'

karlof1 , Nov 1, 2018 3:38:31 PM | link
Outlaw US Empire attacks Iran with new version of Stuxnet virus.

About the only difference between Trump and Hillary I can judge is he's not quite as reckless. Otherwise, their policy goal remains the same: Full Spectrum Dominance by any means necessary. The attack proves yet again the Outlaw US Empire would rather have destabilization and war in the region than peace, still thinking it remains the World's Boss.

Lozion , Nov 1, 2018 4:01:11 PM | link
@22 Nah, better make him the corner spit bowl..
sejomoje , Nov 1, 2018 4:12:36 PM | link
Thanks b, this is Journalism. Poor craigsummers appears to be in shock. It's ok craig.

We're in a really strange place vis a vis "Mossad" in the west. The average person on the street doesn't know whether to idolize them as superhuman kickass kravmaga-inventing Jason Bourne types, or diabolical creeps like Weinstein's "former Mossad" minions. Then Sacha Baron Cohen comes around and makes them funny again. Are they scary? Funny? When they appear in official media, it's usually in a display of mindblowing incompetence or fraud. So you can see how we're confused.

Bart Hansen , Nov 1, 2018 5:01:13 PM | link
25 - "USA has drones and some 19 yo teen can kill you with his joystick."

Yes, from a safe place in some place in the U.S. desert, but I wonder how the pilots of the aircraft refueling the KSA bombing runs to Yemen feel as they finish and do a 180 to return to base. Do they first look to see what their evil has done before heading back?

Kalen , Nov 1, 2018 5:31:34 PM | link
More likely it is Iran conveniently concluded that ISIS was responsible, only to get off the hook of EU countries that harbor terrorists not only anti Iran by anti Russia, so they closed the case not to wreck meek EU attempt to find the way around US sanctions with trade with Iran. Mossad did not like that and hence used another Russia Gate like provocation to stop EU Iran accommodation, this time claiming new Iranian terrorism issue Orwelian style blame victims.
Peter AU 1 , Nov 1, 2018 5:59:37 PM | link
karlof1 27 "About the only difference between Trump and Hillary I can judge is he's not quite as reckless."

I would agree with that, but I also think he will be willing to take big risks to see his plan through. He may well be like Putin's cornered rat if his plans are blocked.

Jen , Nov 1, 2018 6:14:52 PM | link
One question we should be asking is why all of a sudden is Denmark taking a leading role in accusing Iran of supporting terrorism and terrorist cells in Europe. Is Denmark's action as much to pressure Sweden and Finland into joining NATO as it is to pressure the EU into following the US in sanctioning Iran and tearing up the nuclear treaty the EU still adheres to?
Jen , Nov 1, 2018 6:20:00 PM | link
B @ 23, Lozion @ 28:

Craig's ambitions are rather more lofty than what you both have proposed. He aspires to be the President Trump of MoA.

Peter AU 1 , Nov 1, 2018 6:59:40 PM | link
This crap by the Danes is not without precedent. They were in on the US attack against the SAA at Deir Ezzor. US, UK, Australia and Denmark all took part in that attack.
hans , Nov 1, 2018 7:00:12 PM | link
One question we should be asking is why all of a sudden is Denmark taking a leading role

the danes swede and norway,netherlands folks have all been anglo zion borged.
the man leading this charge is a mr samuel son a proud son of a son i am sure he believes what he says i'm sure he has good reason.
wait for future headlines involving norways trillion dollar sovreign wealth fund vanishing just like gadaffi libya or ukraines gold..

country control via epstein lolita express blackmail.
young boys and girls in ritual cctv horror show as a form of soft power persuasion

Ninel , Nov 1, 2018 7:17:39 PM | link
I'm not entirely convinced b. The Iranian government has a long history of assassination attempts. And Denmark is not exactly a war mongering nation so your claims seem a bit shaky. I have never been impressed by analyses of Iran on this blog, as I think both b and many commentators here totally ignorant of the IRI's crimes against its own citizens. I am very knowledgable when it comes to Iran and so incidents like these do not surprise me. Of course I should make clear that it is possible to be against the IRI and western war mongering nations at the same time.
Circe , Nov 1, 2018 7:21:09 PM | link
I just can't stand responding to cs21 hasbara garbage; nothing is more annoying than hasbara. To quote Irish Nobel laureate GB Shaw: never wrestle with pigs, you both get dirty and the pig loves it!

Mossad used the MEK and another terrorist group, Jundallah in Iran when they didn't do the dirty job themselves to assassinate Iranian scientists extra-judicially. Imagine if JFK had done same when Israel was developing its nuclear weapons on the sly?

That's not all, Mossad used these terrorists like they used terrorists in Syria to foment manufactured revolution, specifically, in Iran, the Green Revolution and as for example what was done in Ukraine, terrorist snipers masquerading as basiji fired into the crowd of green protestors and killed a young women who the Western media elevated as the face of the Revolution hoping it would incite anger that would spread exponentially and trigger riots everywhere then civil war like in Syria and Ukraine, but they were very disappointed. This is playbook Mossad/CIA revolution engineering. All constituted criminal acts against sovereign nations, except in Iran their plan fizzled.

Mossad also used false flag against Gadaffi in Libya and years earlier against Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran that preceded the Shah. The Lavon Affair was a false flag comprised of multiple terrorist attacks that Israel planned and plotted to execute and blame on the Muslim Brotherhood and other Egyptian groups.

Mossad has assassinated what it considered to be terrorists in Europe, Syria, Lebanon, UAE, Jordan and on and on with total impunity. Some of these so-called terrorists were political leaders recent example Arafat, and attempted murder of Meschal, at least one or more were false flag to trigger civil war, i.e. in Lebanon, and some were what South African Apartheid victims would consider resistance and freedom fighters.

Israel also attacked the USSLiberty and no doubt had a hand in U.S. military sabotage in Lebanon not to mention murdering American journalists and activists.

ALL this was done with impunity. So in regards to these foiled terrorist attacks I have no doubt Mossad is up to no good and Israel has everything to gain in this dirty business they have executed many times before.

The truth lies in who benefits most and who has exhibited the most egregious pattern of behaviour. ISRAEL.

AriusArmenian , Nov 1, 2018 7:29:41 PM | link
Yes, it certainly smells like a false flag operation.
The CIA, MI6, and Mossad have been doing such operations in Europe since the end of WW2.
No surprise.
Ninel , Nov 1, 2018 7:30:56 PM | link
For those interested in the IRI, especially those uncritical, naive supporters, here is some light reading:


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_executions_of_Iranian_political_prisoners

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evin_Prison

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_murders_of_Iran

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_labor_law

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicate_of_Workers_of_Tehran_and_Suburbs_Bus_Company

Circe , Nov 1, 2018 8:16:27 PM | link
IRAN must be a hasbara trigger word. The Zionist web army recruits have arrived. Everything you pulled out of wiki I can double, triple, quadruple for Isra-hell. For starters, let's talk about Prison facility 1391 - torture, murder, perpetual isolation--dark ages stuff.

Let's talk about the kidnapping, imprisonment, even torture of children. Perhaps, the worst human rights record against children. 8000 Palestinian children arrested since 2000.

What about the two-tier justice system in Isra-hell?

Shall we discuss the murder of activists, journalists and protestors? What about political prisoners in Isra-hell? What about administrative detention. Detention without trial.

This is the tip of the iceberg regarding Isra-hell's human rights abuses. Don't get me started.

ben , Nov 1, 2018 8:34:13 PM | link
cs @ 21 said;"With all of that said, this is a well thought out attempt to blame the US."

For your perusal cs. Gee, I can't imagine why anyone would be suspicious of the U$A's motives
https://truthout.org/video/overthrow-100-years-of-us-meddling-and-regime-change-from-iran-to-nicaragua-to-hawaii-to-cuba/

craigsummers , Nov 1, 2018 9:27:36 PM | link
b @23
"......Thanks for acknowledging my geniality, and for the amusement. Shall we make you the house buffoon of the bar?......"

What ever suits you. I just appreciate you not deleting my account!

Thanks.

bokin , Nov 1, 2018 11:41:15 PM | link

As we approach the end of the year the big questions facing Europe are:

(1) Which country will win the prize for the most decapitations or slit throats? France or Germany?

With dozens of horrific crimes recently these two competitors are running neck and neck, however with Macron's France averaging close to one slit throat per day, France is probably going to win this contest

Which leaves us with the big question Germans are asking

(2) Which city will earn the distinction of being 2018's Rape Capital of Germany?

For a long time it seemed that the winner would surely be Berlin, but then Freiburg lurched into the lead a few weeks ago.

And now, with a 15-year-old being gang-raped by Afghan asylum seekers, Munich is hustling to take the title.

This crime and subsequent arrests were kept out of the media for a few weeks

-- coincidentally, until just after the recent local elections in Bavaria

The article below from Bild, also translated into English, contains additional details:

Suspects in Custody: Six Men Allegedly Raped Girl (15)

October 30, 2018

Munich -- The Munich police have arrested five Afghan refugees; according to Bayerischer Rundfunk another alleged perpetrator is on the run.

The allegation: They reportedly raped a 15-year-old girl.

The Munich public prosecutor confirmed to BILD upon request that there is an investigation involving a sexual assault and several people have been arrested. The spokesman did not want to comment further.

The case: The girl, who is being psychologically cared for, according to BILD's information, had filed charges against her "partner" at the end of September. The asylum seeker is said to have verbally threatened her and thereby forced her to have intercourse.

Also, he forced her to have intercourse with several his friends. She was so intimidated that she had to endure being abused by them all for several days. Each case is to be handled individually. Physical violence had played no role in the incidents.

In addition to the alleged victim's partner, four other refugees (all between 20 and 25 years old) were arrested. The alleged perpetrators are registered asylum seekers.

In the meantime, warrants have been issued against them on suspicion of rape. They are in custody.

The assaults are said to have occurred at the end of September. The first arrests were made four weeks ago.

Some interrogations remain to be conducted to substantiate the allegations made by the alleged victim, which is one explanation for why the authorities have not made the case public.

Some of the detainees admitted that they had intercourse with the minor, but said that it had taken place by mutual agreement."

Got that?

According to Bild, "Physical violence played no role in the incidents"

snedly arkus , Nov 2, 2018 12:43:12 AM | link
First their is money laundering charges by the US against Denmark's largest bank and now we have Denmark joining the Trump stomp on Iran project. Could it be the US cut a deal with Denmark to limit their investigations and penalties into this bank and maybe others, or possible involvement of Danish government officials, and the Dane's jumped at the chance to limit the damage to the country and it's economy and keep sanction happy Trump from sanctioning them into the poor house.
Steve , Nov 2, 2018 4:49:42 AM | link
Denmark, like Sweden and Norway are the biggest enablers of USA's imperial efforts more than any other nations in the whole world. I think it is only Russia which gets that fact. Nobel prizes are nothing but tooks of the US empire
james , Nov 2, 2018 4:54:55 AM | link
42 ben, ditto... cs has never heard of the cia and the past countless years of there horrors... in fact as far as cs is concerned, they never had any role to play in ghouta 2011 and afterwards either...cs thinks the letters stand for charity international association...usaid is another benevolent org as far as cs is concerned... if cs was ever to read john perkins 'confessions of an economic hit man' he would fall out of his chair and have his world turned upside down.... cs really needs to hang over at pat langs site where some of his love and ignorance of the usa's covert history has a place of acceptance.. it ain't here..
Laguerre , Nov 2, 2018 6:06:55 AM | link
44 bokin. German far-right propaganda reaches MoA.
Laguerre , Nov 2, 2018 7:24:45 AM | link
"It is likely that the false flag operations in Europe, like the ones in Belgium and Denmark, are run by the CIA with the Mossad only in an auxiliary role."

Very difficult to distinguish the two. Israel declared its campaign to internally destabilise Iran last spring (evidently having quailed at the risks of the open military attack), the US has been fruitlessly attempting the same for forty years. I suppose the new Israeli campaign has revived US efforts.

By the way, I was interested by Alastair Crooke's recent remark that Israeli air superiority has been broken by the S300s. Crooke's views are to take seriously.

https://www.rt.com/shows/rt-interview/442703-lavelle-crooke-middle-east/

That could be very grave for Israel, if so, and a context for what's happening.

Mina , Nov 2, 2018 7:51:49 AM | link
No one has picked up on this ?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/jamal-khashoggi-latest-news-saudi-arabia-turkey-embassy-washington-dc-a8601961.html
Did Khalid bin Salman return because might be accused of being part of the plot? There was a phonecall to the US apparently right after the killing.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11120629/Saudi-prince-and-Emirates-first-female-fighter-pilot-take-part-in-Syria-air-strikes.html
It is getting closer to Kushner.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/world/middleeast/with-saudi-prince-holding-on-to-power-us-seen-standing-by-him.html
"Two people close to the Saudi royal court said Mr. Kushner and Prince Mohammed communicate often, including by text message, and multiple times since Mr. Khashoggi's disappearance. A White House spokesman declined to comment about those communications."

The guy is said to have participated in some coalition attacks in Yemen and Syria
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11120629/Saudi-prince-and-Emirates-first-female-fighter-pilot-take-part-in-Syria-air-strikes.html
(I can't find anymore the recent paper where Yemen was mentioned).
Is this the new bigger than screen playstation for Saudi psychopaths? What about the enquiry into the non-identified plane that bombed civilians during an exchange of prisoners in northern Syria? Could it be a Saudi plane? How many of them have been used in Syria and Yemen?

Bandit , Nov 2, 2018 8:02:39 AM | link
Steve, how could you overlook the all time top lap dog: the UK? The UK would be first on most people's list of sycophant enablers of US terrorism, regime change, and false flag operations. Sometimes Macron tries to run ahead of the pack, but gets slapped back by Trump, but when all is said and done, the whole NATO crew are self-serving idiots and assholes.
mali , Nov 2, 2018 8:13:19 AM | link
Denmark, like Sweden and Norway are the biggest enablers of USA's imperial efforts more than any other nations in the whole world. I think it is only Russia which gets that fact. Nobel prizes are nothing but tooks of the US empire

Posted by: Steve | Nov 2, 2018 4:49:42 AM | 46
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well said!

I totally agree with you after saw the ghastly bully behaviour of Denmark on 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, who was actively trying to force down the throat of BRICS (EPS. China & India) and developing countries the schemes that US & Co wanted: 1): to strangle the development chance of third world and 2). to escape the accountability/ownership of the big messy pollution the Western countries has been emitted into the air and the world for centuries.

Another aggressive Dane who was in full swing to propagate the Empire's interests/schemes is Anders Fogh Rasmussen, ex-NATO Secretary General, who was so belligerent that I sometimes question how the peace-love Denmark can produce such an aggressive person......

Rhisiart Gwilym , Nov 2, 2018 8:43:10 AM | link
b, is there any way to highlight a 'Craig Summers' post at the top, so we can skip over his/her/their lying rubbish unread. Bad enough having to wade through the effusions of the sprinkling of religious loonies who seem to be posting now, without wasting time on this bellingcrap-style hasbarollocks.
Jormaaja , Nov 2, 2018 8:48:51 AM | link
Is Denmark going to "stand up to Turkey" also?

"In the beginning of 2017 the Danish Security Service PET had received information about planned political murder of individuals in Denmark who oppose the Turkish government. The PET acted on the information and put the would be targets in safety. This is revealed by Swedish Radio Ekot.
https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=83&artikel=6975341

And is Denmark going to stop doing this:"Denmark's foreign minister has for the first time acknowledged that the government allowed the sale of surveillance technology to authoritarian Arab governments, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE." "Mass surveillance during and after the Arab Spring was used to facilitate the mass incarceration of dissidents, leading to the eventual crushing of popular movements, the report alleged."

https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2017/8/21/danish-fm-admits-selling-mass-surveillance-technology-to-saudi-arabia

And what are the Syro-Ahwazian pro-FSA dudes up to in Denmark:"One battalion of the rebel Free Syrian Army is called the "Ahwaz Brigade", although the group says there are no foreign fighters in its ranks.

"We have relations with different factions of the (Syrian) rebels," said Habib Nabgan, the former head of a coalition of Ahwazi parties whose armed wing carried out last week's pipeline attack.
"They need information, which we give them, and we need some of their expertise, so there is cooperation and that is developing," he told Reuters via telephone from Denmark, where he took refuge in 2006."
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-iran-arabs-insight-idUKBRE97E0O620130815


Ahwazians in Syria:"Before the Syrian uprising, the Ahwazi community in Damascus was living in fear, but is now fully behind the revolutionary struggle.There have been frequent demonstrations in Syria by Ahwazi Arabs flying the opposition flag alongside their own."

https://www.alahwaz.info/en/?p=4642

EtTuBrute , Nov 2, 2018 9:26:51 AM | link
Interesting, the first time i heard of this story my instinct immediately was, why on earth would Iran conduct such risky and rather pointless operations where the downside would greatly outweigh any benefit if they were caught?? Add to that, no one was harmed, they got "caught".. and Mossad involved.. seems pretty clear to anyone who actually understands what's going on in the world.. but there aren't many of us who actually think when we read the news.. thanks again MR B for another insightful piece on analysis :)
Circe , Nov 2, 2018 10:24:00 AM | link
@43

Why? Because you think your Zionist propaganda claptrap is actually convincing and working to bring down surviving bastions of independent thought? It's laughable how hasbara-scripted you read; delivering superficially well-constructed neoliberal brainwash, whitewash material. Your disingenuous ilk courting the Left with liberal goodies, in one hand while unleashing double-standard neoconservative righteous destruction with the other is the main reason we now suffer Trump's fascist right-wing version of same. People protest vote neoliberalism and end up in the arms of the hard right-wing version. It's a no choice choice; an affront to real democracy. You play the desperation of the Left against the Right and then deliver it into the same neoconstruct. You're two sides of the same cult and neither can stand independent thought. After I read your Zionist-contrived claptrap, I feel like my mind has been abused and my time wasted. Once you're wise to the trap, you never go back to falling for whichever charismatic puppet is going to save us from the other side.

The goal becomes helping others break free of the vicious, cyclical no-choice duopoly to viably challenge and destroy it for good! You pretend at righeousness, but you're on the side of status quo darkness.

Circe , Nov 2, 2018 10:39:58 AM | link
Uh, just one more point, I still believe in GW Shaw's wisdom that you shouldn't wrestle with ignorance, ie pigs, but I just intended @56 as a Reader Beware CS for anyone who's out there only reading.
Peter AU 1 , Nov 2, 2018 11:31:43 AM | link
Laguerre 49

Perhaps of more importance was Crooke's remark on US debt. He said in August the cost of servicing the debt, for the first time, exceeded tax revenue. On top of that, the US must sell over a trillion of new debt each year for the next three years.

Laguerre , Nov 2, 2018 12:06:57 PM | link
Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Nov 2, 2018 11:31:43 AM | 58

Yes I too thought that was interesting. But Israel's problem is more fatal, in a permanent sense. Air superiority once lost won't be recovered, but the US could, if it wanted to, live more within its means.

Yul , Nov 2, 2018 12:13:06 PM | link
@b

Do you remember the Green revolution of 2009 that went pfttttt?
Well here is an edifying article wrt the CIA :

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cias-communications-suffered-catastrophic-compromise-started-iran-090018710.html?.tsrc=fauxdal

As usual, some former official has to include : Israeli intelligence tipped off the CIA that Iran had likely identified some of its assets, said the same former official.

james , Nov 2, 2018 12:24:36 PM | link
thanks b wise words as usual thanks for soft shoe shuffle i will of course let you know when you cross the antisemenetic line.
by the way
i love you
karlof1 , Nov 2, 2018 1:11:54 PM | link
58&59--

Regarding US Debt as a problem, Bolton sees it as a threat to national security:

"Bolton, speaking Wednesday at an event hosted by the Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington, said he expects U.S. defense spending "to flatten out" in the near term. He said he didn't anticipate major cuts to entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security.

""It is a fact that when your national debt gets to the level ours is, that it constitutes an economic threat to the society," Bolton said. "And that kind of threat ultimately has a national security consequence for it.""

Of course, he wants to cut support for citizens instead of support for the Deep State and its massively corrupt MIC. The massive cut in revenues caused by Trump's giveaways to corporations and the 1% were designed to exacerbate the problem and create an artificial crisis in discretionary spending. Most from all sides of the political spectrum can see this for what it is and are already pushing back, which will be the fundamental reason Trump won't get a 2nd term--his policies are proving to be a fiscal nightmare.

David Hollander , Nov 2, 2018 1:21:29 PM | link
The evidence provided by the author that the CIA was the primary driving agent in these incidents is not compelling. In fact, the US government under Obama supported the JCPOA against the wishes of the Netanyahu government. Thus the statement that "US interests" are necessarily defined by sanctions against Iran seems to me to be unfounded. Had the author replaced "US interests" with "Trump administration policies", which are clearly much more aligned with the interests of the Likud and Netanyahu the statement might be more supportable.
Laguerre , Nov 2, 2018 1:22:55 PM | link
re Yul

"Do you remember the Green revolution of 2009 that went pfttttt?"

Very interesting article, but the Green Revolution didn't go pfft because of that. 2009 failed because the middle class aren't very good at revolutions. They aren't the majority, and they didn't have popular support.

[Oct 28, 2018] It's interesting that Jamal Khashoggi, who wrote that Jews will have to die by force, is a media darling.

Oct 28, 2018 | heavy.com

Dana Tufts October 27th, 2018

It's interesting that Jamal Khashoggi, who wrote that Jews will have to die by force, is a media darling. Robert Bowers said something very similar today, and is rightly demonized. We could do with a lot less hagiography of Khashoggi, as well.

(Now in case you made the mental leap to thinking I don't wan't Khashoggi's killers held accountable, let me be clear: they should be held accountable.)

Reply

[Oct 28, 2018] Skripal and Khashoggi West Manufactures Absurd Fantasy to Pin on Russia, Lets Saudi Get Away With Chopping up WaPo Journalist by Finian Cunningham

Oct 28, 2018 | russia-insider.com

Two disappearances, and two very different responses from Western governments, which illustrates their rank hypocrisy.

When former Russian spy Sergei Skripal went missing in England earlier this year, there was almost immediate punitive action by the British government and its NATO allies against Moscow. By contrast, Western governments are straining with restraint towards Saudi Arabia over the more shocking and provable case of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The outcry by Western governments and media over the Skripal affair was deafening and resulted in Britain, the US and some 28 other countries expelling dozens of Russian diplomats on the back of unsubstantiated British allegations that the Kremlin tried to assassinate an exiled spy with a deadly nerve agent. The Trump administration has further tightened sanctions citing the Skripal incident.

London's case against Moscow has been marked by wild speculation and ropey innuendo. No verifiable evidence of what actually happened to Sergei Skripal (67) and his daughter Yulia has been presented by the British authorities . Their claim that President Vladimir Putin sanctioned a hit squad armed with nerve poison relies on sheer conjecture.

All we know for sure is that the Skripals have been disappeared from public contact by the British authorities for more than seven months, since the mysterious incident of alleged poisoning in Salisbury on March 4.

Russian authorities and family relatives have been steadfastly refused any contact by London with the Skripal pair, despite more than 60 official requests from Moscow in accordance with international law and in spite of the fact that Yulia is a citizen of the Russian Federation with consular rights.

It is an outrage that based on such thin ice of "evidence", the British have built an edifice of censure against Moscow, rallying an international campaign of further sanctions and diplomatic expulsions.

Now contrast that strenuous reaction, indeed hyper over-reaction, with how Britain, the US, France, Canada and other Western governments are ever-so slowly responding to Saudi Arabia over the Khashoggi case.

After nearly two weeks since Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, the Saudi regime is this week finally admitting he was killed on their premises – albeit, they claim, in a "botched interrogation".

... ... ...

Source: Strategic Culture

[Oct 28, 2018] WikiLeaks' Legacy of Exposing US-UK Complicity by Mark Curtis

Notable quotes:
"... Save WikiLeaks is vilified by governments (and increasingly by journalists) for its exposures, including of the U.S.-UK "special relationship" in running a joint foreign policy of deception and violence that serves London and Washington's elite interests, says Mark Curtis. ..."
"... Middle East Eye ..."
"... A cable the following year shows the lengths to which Whitehall goes to defend the special relationship from public scrutiny. Just as the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War was beginning in 2009, Whitehall promised Washington that it had "put measures in place to protect your interests". ..."
"... The Wikileaks cables are rife with examples of British government duplicity of the kind I've extensively come across in my own research on UK declassified files. In advance of the British-NATO bombing campaign in Libya in March 2011, for example, the British government pretended that its aim was to prevent Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's attacks on civilians and not to overthrow him. ..."
"... However, Wikileaks files released in 2016 as part of its Hillary Clinton archive show William Burns, then the U.S. deputy secretary of state, having talked with now Foreign Secretary Hague about a "post-Qaddafi" Libya . This was more than three weeks before military operations began. The intention was clearly to overthrow Gaddafi, and the UN resolution about protecting civilians was simply window dressing. ..."
"... (U.S. Air Force photo) ..."
"... Cables show the US spying on the Foreign Office and collecting information on British ministers. Soon after the appointment of Ivan Lewis as a junior foreign minister in 2009, U.S. officials were briefing the office of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about rumors that he was depressed and had a reputation as a bully, and on " the state of his marriage. " ..."
"... In addition, Wikileaks cables reveal that journalists and the public are considered legitimate targets of UK intelligence operations. In October 2009, Joint Services Publication 440 , a 2,400-page restricted document written in 2001 by the Ministry of Defence, was leaked. Somewhat ironically, it contained instructions for the security services on to avid leaks of information by hackers , journalists and foreign spies. ..."
"... (New Media Days / Peter Erichsen) ..."
Oct 28, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

WikiLeaks' Legacy of Exposing US-UK Complicity October 27, 2018 • 7 Comments

Save WikiLeaks is vilified by governments (and increasingly by journalists) for its exposures, including of the U.S.-UK "special relationship" in running a joint foreign policy of deception and violence that serves London and Washington's elite interests, says Mark Curtis.

By Mark Curtis
Middle East Eye

Twelve years ago this month, WikiLeaks began publishing government secrets that the world public might otherwise never have known. What it has revealed about state duplicity, human rights abuses and corruption goes beyond anything published in the world's "mainstream" media.

After over six months of being cut off from outside world, on 14 October 14 Ecuador has partly restored Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's communications with the outside world from its London embassy where the founder has been living for over six years. (Assange, however, later rejected Ecuador's restrictions imposed on him.)

The treatment – real and threatened – meted out to Assange by the U.S. and UK governments contrasts sharply with the service Wikileaks has done their publics in revealing the nature of elite power, as shown in the following snapshot of Wikileaks' revelations about British foreign policy in the Middle East.

Conniving with the Saudis

Whitehall's special relationship with Riyadh is exposed in an extraordinary cable from 2013 highlighting how Britain conducted secret vote-trading deals with Saudi Arabia to ensure both states were elected to the UN human rights council. Britain initiated the secret negotiations by asking Saudi Arabia for its support.

Hague: 'World needs pro-American regime' in Britain. (Chatham House)

The Wikileaks releases also shed details on Whitehall's fawning relationship with Washington. A 2008 cable , for example, shows then shadow foreign secretary William Hague telling the U.S. embassy that the British "want a pro-American regime. We need it. The world needs it."

A cable the following year shows the lengths to which Whitehall goes to defend the special relationship from public scrutiny. Just as the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War was beginning in 2009, Whitehall promised Washington that it had "put measures in place to protect your interests".

American Influence

It is not known what this protection amounted to, but no U.S. officials were called to give evidence to Chilcot in public. The inquiry was also refused permission to publish letters between former U.S. President George W. Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair written in the run-up to the war.

Also in 2009, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised the prospect of reducing the number of British nuclear-armed Trident submarines from four to three, a policy opposed in Washington. However, Julian Miller, an official in the UK's Cabinet Office, privately assured U.S. officials that his government "would consult with the U.S. regarding future developments concerning the Trident deterrent to assure there would be 'no daylight' between the U.S. and UK." The idea that British decision-making on Trident is truly independent of the U.S. is undermined by this cable.

The Wikileaks cables are rife with examples of British government duplicity of the kind I've extensively come across in my own research on UK declassified files. In advance of the British-NATO bombing campaign in Libya in March 2011, for example, the British government pretended that its aim was to prevent Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's attacks on civilians and not to overthrow him.

However, Wikileaks files released in 2016 as part of its Hillary Clinton archive show William Burns, then the U.S. deputy secretary of state, having talked with now Foreign Secretary Hague about a "post-Qaddafi" Libya . This was more than three weeks before military operations began. The intention was clearly to overthrow Gaddafi, and the UN resolution about protecting civilians was simply window dressing.

Another case of British duplicity concerns Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, which is now a major U.S. base for intervention in the Middle East. The UK has long fought to prevent Chagos islanders from returning to their homeland after forcibly removing them in the 1960s.

A secret 2009 cable shows that a particular ruse concocted by Whitehall to promote this was the establishment of a " marine reserve " around the islands. A senior Foreign Office official told the US that the "former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve."

A B-1B Lancer unleashes cluster munitions. The B-1B uses radar and inertial navigation equipment enabling aircrews to operate without the need for ground-based navigation aids. (U.S. Air Force photo)

A week before the "marine reserve" proposal was made to the U.S. in May 2009, then UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband was also conniving with the U.S., apparently to deceive the public. A cable reveals Miliband helping the U.S. to sidestep a ban on cluster bombs and keep the weapons at U.S. bases on UK soil, despite Britain signing the international treaty banning the weapons the previous year.

Miliband approved a loophole created by diplomats to allow U.S. cluster bombs to remain on UK soil and was part of discussions on how the loophole would help avert a debate in Parliament that could have "complicated or muddied" the issue. Critically, the same cable also revealed that the U.S. was storing cluster munitions on ships based at Diego Garcia.

Spying on the UK

Cables show the US spying on the Foreign Office and collecting information on British ministers. Soon after the appointment of Ivan Lewis as a junior foreign minister in 2009, U.S. officials were briefing the office of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about rumors that he was depressed and had a reputation as a bully, and on " the state of his marriage. "

Washington was also shown to have been spying on the UK mission to the UN, along with other members of the Security Council and the UN Secretary General.

In addition, Wikileaks cables reveal that journalists and the public are considered legitimate targets of UK intelligence operations. In October 2009, Joint Services Publication 440 , a 2,400-page restricted document written in 2001 by the Ministry of Defence, was leaked. Somewhat ironically, it contained instructions for the security services on to avid leaks of information by hackers , journalists and foreign spies.

Millions worldwide are demanding the release of Wikileaks founder Assange after six years of what the UN calls "arbitrary detention." (New Media Days / Peter Erichsen)

The document refers to investigative journalists as "threats" alongside subversive and terrorist organizations, noting that "the 'enemy' is unwelcome publicity of any kind, and through any medium."

Britain's GCHQ is also revealed to have spied on Wikileaks itself – and its readers. One classified GCHQ document from 2012 shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly collect the IP addresses of visitors to the Wikileaks site in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines such as Google.

Championing Free Nedua

The British government is punishing Assange for the service that Wikileaks has performed. It is ignoring a UN ruling that he is being held in " arbitrary detention " at the Ecuadorian embassy, while failing, illegally, to ensure his health needs are met. Whitehall is also refusing to offer diplomatic assurances that Assange will not be extradited to the US – the only reason he remains in the embassy.

Smear campaigns have portrayed Assange as a sexual predator or a Russian agent, often in the same media that have benefitted from covering Wikileaks' releases.

Many journalists and activists who are perfectly aware of the fake news in some Western media outlets, and of the smear campaign against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn , are ignoring or even colluding in the more vicious smearing of Assange.

More journalists need to champion the service Wikileaks performs and argue for what is at stake for a free media in the right to expose state secrets.

This article originally appeared on Middle East Eye.

Mark Curtis is an historian and analyst of UK foreign policy and international development and the author of six books, the latest being an updated edition of Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam.

[Oct 27, 2018] Everytime I think of the Khashogi hit...

Oct 27, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

Not Henry Kissinger

I think of Goodfellas:

For most of the guys, killings got to be accepted. Murder was the only way that everybody stayed in line. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everybody knew the rules. But sometimes, even if people didn't get out of line, they got whacked. I mean, hits just became a habit for some of the guys. Guys would get into arguments over nothing and before you knew it, one of them was dead. And they were shooting each other all the time. Shooting people was a normal thing. It was no big deal.

We had a serious problem with Billy Batts Jamal Khashoggi. This was really a touchy thing. Tommy'd MbS killed a made guy. Batts Khashoggi was part of the Gambino Neocon crew and was considered untouchable. Before you could touch a made guy, you had to have a good reason. You had to have a sitdown, and you better get an okay, or you'd be the one who got whacked.

Khashoggi was a made man in DC. Nobody in Yemen is.

[Oct 27, 2018] The Horrified Hypocrites

Notable quotes:
"... @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal ..."
"... @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal ..."
"... The Last Battle ..."
"... @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal ..."
Oct 26, 2018 | graysinfo.blogspot.com

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/10/25/the-khashoggi-affair-and-the-futur...

Stephen J.
October 26, 2018 at 11:19 am
The "power structure" is filled with:
-- -
"The Horrified Hypocrites"

Anybody with a spark of human decency is surely horrified at the latest murderous Saudi atrocity. But to see the so-called international community, the corporate media, business leaders and all the other political elites and establishment members all rightly upset over the horrific murder of Jamal Khashoggi is, I believe, to see selective hypocrisy in action.

Where were these "pillars of society" when the Saudis murdered schoolchildren travelling in a school bus in Yemen? Did that get blanket coverage in the newsrooms of the "investigative media"? Did any of them speak out daily? Oh, I forgot, some of these "honourable people" sell arms to the Saudis, do sword dances with them, kiss their cheeks, [1] and call them "allies." Now they pretend to be outraged at their Saudi friends. Therefore, I ask:

What kind of "people" slaughter children in a school bus in Yemen?
What kind of army guides the missiles into the school bus?
What kind of "democratic governments" support this slaughter?
What kind of governments sells weapons to the killers of children?
What kind of politicians call selling weapons "creating jobs"?
What kind of politicians vote for illegal wars?

Furthermore, what kind of media covers up the crimes of the war criminals [1a] [1b] in our midst that have supplied the weapons to the Saudis and joined their "Coalition of Carnage" [2] that is destroying and committing "Genocide in Yemen"? [2a]
[read more at link below]
http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-horrified-hypocrites.html

Submitted by dkmich on Sat, 10/27/2018 - 7:44am dkmich's picture Thanks for the link. Thanks for the link. Interesting news. Good to know those ruling elites are all alike. Greedy as all hell and indifferent to how they murder people and how many. Some just like to hide their atrocities, others don't.

But if the Saudi power structure were ever to crumble in the wake of the Khashoggi scandal, there would likely be chaos because there is no alternative to replace it.

Since when do we care about that? All we care about is oil and money. It is very possible that it could be a good thing. Maybe the globe would dump oil for energy, and bomb makers would have to blow up the US or build our infrastructure instead. up 6 users have voted. --

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

Submitted by Cant Stop the M... on Sat, 10/27/2018 - 10:45am Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture @dkmich Apparently bin Salman has @dkmich @dkmich @dkmich Apparently bin Salman has done something that fiddled with the elite's plans.

Huh. I googled "bin Salman" and look at one of the first things that came up:

How Mohammed bin Salman Turned Saudi Arabia Into an Investment Wasteland

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/26/how-mohammed-bin-salman-turned-saud...

Some gems from this article:

"From 2016 to 2017, foreign direct investment in Saudi Arabia plummeted by an astonishing 80 percent, from about $7.5 billion to about $1.4 billion, according to the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development. Net capital outflows were also way up -- largely because wealthy Saudis were moving money abroad, noted Phillip Cornell, an expert in the Saudi economy at the Atlantic Council ."

"...both savvy outside investors and many Saudi businessmen no longer had faith in the kingdom, considering "the crown prince's authoritarian tendencies" and "capricious economic policy choices," Cornell said."

Since obviously authoritarianism abounds, and neither the Atlantic Council nor anybody else in real power in this country gives a shit, I'm guessing the real problem lay in the "economic policy choices."

Digging through the article to find actual information on those policy choices, I come up with this:

"For example, the swift outflow of money has forced Mohammed bin Salman's government to put in some informal capital controls -- but that only made foreign money even more reluctant to come in. The Saudi government has cost itself credibility by promising to balance the budget and reduce unemployment to 9 percent only to back away from those pledges."

Anybody know what those "informal capital controls" are?

Any reason the elites would give a shit whether Saudi Arabia's governmental budget was balanced, or how many of their people are unemployed?

EDIT: On re-reading, the "informal capital controls" seem to have followed the exodus of foreign money, not preceded it, so, although clearly the elites don't like those controls (as Mr. Cornell of the Atlantic Council said), that couldn't have been the impetus for the global financial elites to try to spank bin Salman and stand him in a corner.

What did he do (probably in late 2016 or 2017) that pissed them all off?

Submitted by sny on Sat, 10/27/2018 - 1:41pm @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

What did he do (probably in late 2016 or 2017) that pissed them all off?

MBS was appointed crown prince/heir in June 2017, but then the article doesnt say exactly when the dropoff happened either. I can certainly see the Saudi royals seeing the writing on the wall and moving their money out before MBS' appointment, but did MBS have enough power to make decisions affecting external investors then (or would they know that he was a future tyrant, given how the west fawned over him then)? My understanding is that his primary responsibilities in 2016 were Vision 2030, which doesn't seem to me to have a bearing on this.

In short, more information is needed before accepting this article's conclusions.

Submitted by Cant Stop the M... on Sat, 10/27/2018 - 2:21pm Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture @sny Given that its main @sny Given that its main (read only) source is that guy from the Atlantic Council, your point is well taken.

Submitted by The Liberal Moonbat on Sat, 10/27/2018 - 7:41pm The Liberal Moonbat's picture Stop calling plutocrats/military-industrialists "elites" @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal They're not. They're not "TPTB", either. They're neither godlings nor Ubermenschen.

They're just rich, and only as "powerful" as people believe they are.

It should go without saying that the measure of a man cannot possibly be determined in dollars and cents.

Gods and heroes do walk among us - but they're not these macro-mediocrities. Everyone's got to stop validating what is nothing more than, shall we call it, 'grand theft ego.'

I keep thinking of the Shift the Ape from The Last Battle , the final book of The Chronicles of Narnia - people can't (or won't) see past the various specific offensive allegories, but if one does, that character actually strikes me as one of the most underrated villains in all of English literature: A contemptible mediocrity who, in a benighted age, presumes to hijack a mantle of greatness he doesn't understand, only to sour people on the very idea of greatness, when that is precisely what the world needs most. When the cats are away, the mice will play.

#2 #2 #2 Apparently bin Salman has done something that fiddled with the elite's plans.

Huh. I googled "bin Salman" and look at one of the first things that came up:

How Mohammed bin Salman Turned Saudi Arabia Into an Investment Wasteland

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/26/how-mohammed-bin-salman-turned-saud...

Some gems from this article:

"From 2016 to 2017, foreign direct investment in Saudi Arabia plummeted by an astonishing 80 percent, from about $7.5 billion to about $1.4 billion, according to the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development. Net capital outflows were also way up -- largely because wealthy Saudis were moving money abroad, noted Phillip Cornell, an expert in the Saudi economy at the Atlantic Council ."

"...both savvy outside investors and many Saudi businessmen no longer had faith in the kingdom, considering "the crown prince's authoritarian tendencies" and "capricious economic policy choices," Cornell said."

Since obviously authoritarianism abounds, and neither the Atlantic Council nor anybody else in real power in this country gives a shit, I'm guessing the real problem lay in the "economic policy choices."

Digging through the article to find actual information on those policy choices, I come up with this:

"For example, the swift outflow of money has forced Mohammed bin Salman's government to put in some informal capital controls -- but that only made foreign money even more reluctant to come in. The Saudi government has cost itself credibility by promising to balance the budget and reduce unemployment to 9 percent only to back away from those pledges."

Anybody know what those "informal capital controls" are?

Any reason the elites would give a shit whether Saudi Arabia's governmental budget was balanced, or how many of their people are unemployed?

EDIT: On re-reading, the "informal capital controls" seem to have followed the exodus of foreign money, not preceded it, so, although clearly the elites don't like those controls (as Mr. Cornell of the Atlantic Council said), that couldn't have been the impetus for the global financial elites to try to spank bin Salman and stand him in a corner.

What did he do (probably in late 2016 or 2017) that pissed them all off?

up 1 user has voted.

Submitted by Cant Stop the M... on Sat, 10/27/2018 - 10:48am Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture My question's not rhetorical; I hope somebody on here knows more about foreign policy than I do. Nobody's been more surprised than me that the Saudi Arabians have begun to be actually held accountable for anything, given that we accepted it without a murmur when a bunch of Saudis came over here and murdered a few thousand of our civilians.

Submitted by Linda Wood on Sat, 10/27/2018 - 11:32am I'm hoping @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
all the disconnects are happening now because the 9/11 Victims' lawsuit may finally be allowed to take place against the Saudi princes named in the suit, one of whom is the current king.

One of the last things to happen in the Obama administration was JASTA, The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, passed by Congress, narrowing the scope of the legal doctrine of foreign sovereign immunity.

Submitted by Not Henry Kissinger on Sat, 10/27/2018 - 1:50pm Not Henry Kissinger's picture Everytime I think of the Khashogi hit... I think of Goodfellas:

For most of the guys, killings got to be accepted. Murder was the only way that everybody stayed in line. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everybody knew the rules. But sometimes, even if people didn't get out of line, they got whacked. I mean, hits just became a habit for some of the guys. Guys would get into arguments over nothing and before you knew it, one of them was dead. And they were shooting each other all the time. Shooting people was a normal thing. It was no big deal.

We had a serious problem with Billy Batts Jamal Khashoggi. This was really a touchy thing. Tommy'd MbS killed a made guy. Batts Khashoggi was part of the Gambino Neocon crew and was considered untouchable. Before you could touch a made guy, you had to have a good reason. You had to have a sitdown, and you better get an okay, or you'd be the one who got whacked.

Khashoggi was a made man in DC. Nobody in Yemen is.

[Oct 27, 2018] Scary Halloween Bombs to Scare Voters: Is this CIA democrats way to campaign for election?

Notable quotes:
"... They had to assemble a number of these devices and no one knows if the idea was to scare these political operatives or was a true false flag operation. ..."
"... When yet another 'explosives expert' was introduced to explain the procedure, I burst out laughing. When I looked around at the several disapproving faces in the dining area, I shrugged my shoulders and remarked: "It reminds me of Pro Wrestling." One other older man laughed. The rest were perplexed. ..."
"... I am inclined at this point to think that this is a campaign organized from the left intended to move the needle before the elections. I would look for college students in the NY City area where "bombs" have been hand delivered. Try NYU or Columbia first. ..."
Oct 27, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Whoever cooked up the scheme to send fake bombs to Democrat politicians on the eve of the 2018 mid-term election, you have to give them credit for creativity. The so-called "bombs" sent to the likes of the Clintons, Obama, Soros and Joe Biden are made to appear like real bombs but lack the detonator and other key components that one would normally find with a real Improvised Explosive Device. Friends in ATF and the FBI tell me that these "devices" are to explosives what the little kid dressed as Pocohontas is to real American Indians. Costumed theater.

The audience for this theater is the voting public. The Democrats want you to believe that Donald Trump has stirred up a culture of hate and that some acolyte of Trump has now embarked on his own personal jihad. Of course, those pushing this nonsense ignore Madonna's call to blow up the White House. They ignore Kathy Griffin's decapitation of the President's effigy. They ignore the Bernie Sanders supporter who shot up the Republicans practicing for a softball game. They ignore the mob attacks on Sarah Sanders, Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell and others in the Trump Administration. They ignore the multiple Antifa attacks that have shutdown conservative Republicans. They ignore the cacophony of epithets hurled by former Obama officials, like John Brennan and Jim Clapper, against Donald Trump.

Nope. It is all Donald Trump's fault. What a crock!!!

[Oct 26, 2018] Germany bans arms sales to SA

Notable quotes:
"... If the United States imposed sanctions on Saudi Arabia, other major arms exporters such as Britain would probably also be forced to take similar measures. ..."
"... Who knew this would happen? This should be an example for all the neocons and hyper-nationalists in the US. The wahabbiyeen ..."
"... So can the rest of NATO. If the Russians and/or the Chinese really want to be stuck with this Tar Baby, let them try it on! But! But! The Iranian threat! The Iranian threat! Threat to what? Israel? ..."
"... It's not the petro, but the "petrodollar" system. Now if India, Japan, China, or most any country, I suppose, want to buy Saudi oil it must use US Dollars. This goes back to deals made by Simon & Kissinger with the K of Saudi Barbaria when Nixon took the US off the gold standard and the Near East was awash with money after the oil shock following the Arab Oil Embargo. ..."
"... First of all, the system of petrodollars, which basically requires nearly all purchases of petroleum to be paid in dollars, is underwritten by the Saudis. ..."
"... Petrodollars in turn enable the United States to print money for which there is no backing knowing that there will always be international demand for dollars to buy oil. The Saudis, who also use their own petrodollars to buy U.S. treasury bonds, could pull the plug on that arrangement ..."
"... Whenever a medium size country has taken steps to wean itself from the petrodollar, it has been taken out: Saddam Hussein taking steps to move to the Euro; Qaddafi talking about creating a pan-African currency for trade. It was no accident that Obama had to ship hundreds of millions of dollar bills to Iran for his nuke deal. It was their own money in T bills and bank deposits that had been frozen and because of sanctions they wanted cold hard cash. ..."
"... If the Saudis attempt to carry out their threat to move away from the petrodollar or start seriously liquidating their US treasury holdings, the KSA government would be de-legitimized, overthrown, the oil fields seized, and the country carved up. This is what Nixon would have done in 1973 if they hadn't agreed to the petrodollar deal ..."
"... There are pros & cons in having the reserve currency. The pro is naturally the ability to exchange paper for real goods. The con is that we have to run trade deficits to export dollars and then provide deep & liquid asset markets for those dollars to return. There's many reasons why the Chinese Yuan can't easily supplant the USD as a reserve currency. First, they don't have a fully convertible currency. Then their asset markets are neither open nor deep & liquid. China would also have to reverse their mercantilist policy to have the Yuan as a world reserve currency. ..."
"... China & Russia have sold hundreds of billions of Treasury bonds over the past few years. For crying out loud, the Fed is selling $600 billion annually now to normalize their balance sheet. Add to the over $1 trillion in fresh borrowing by the Treasury and you can see interest rates edge up to attract buyers. In any crisis most investors around the world still prefer US government backed securities. ..."
"... Two problems w Afghanistan. First, We shouldn't have interfered w the Soviets bringing modernity to them. That was the beginning of weaponized Wahhabism and the worldwide spread of Saudi financed madrassas. It pushed out Sufi and secular minded Muslims in favor of Takfiri Jihadists. Second, we should have declared victory after the fall of Kabul and left. ..."
"... Problem w/Iraq. It was the wrong country to invade, none of the 9/11 Islamist thugs on the airplanes were from secular Iraq ..."
"... Nixon provoked the 73 oil embargo with his resupply of the Israelis w/ Operation Nickel Grass ..."
"... I speculate he went off the gold standard in order to print enough money to finance the Vietnam war -- just speculation. ..."
"... FB Ali had a link to an article on the extent of Saudi money flowing into Silicon Valley. ..."
Oct 23, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

"In the United States, a bipartisan group of senators triggered global Magnitsky Act sanctions procedures two weeks ago, forcing Trump to determine possible punishments against Saudi Arabia or Saudi officials over Khashoggi's killing.

If the United States imposed sanctions on Saudi Arabia, other major arms exporters such as Britain would probably also be forced to take similar measures.

But in Berlin, top officials hope that their move to suspend future sales could pressure other European allies into following suit, even if the United States refrained from doing so. Germany's export stop will have little impact "if at the same time other countries fill this gap," Merkel's ally Altmaier acknowledged Monday."

--------------

Germany has gone "anti-medieval" on Saudi Arabia.

Who knew this would happen? This should be an example for all the neocons and hyper-nationalists in the US. The wahabbiyeen are playing them for suckers over the promised contracts. So far the "contracts" are just promises of contracts. That is not an unusual way to proceed in big business contracting; first the promise, then the contract, but nevertheless, the contracts do not exist as yet. We can survive without Saudi money.

So can the rest of NATO. If the Russians and/or the Chinese really want to be stuck with this Tar Baby, let them try it on! But! But! The Iranian threat! The Iranian threat! Threat to what? Israel? pl

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/10/22/germany-its-allies-well-halt-future-arms-sales-saudi-arabia-until-we-have-clarity-khashoggi-so-should-you/?utm_term=.58c7030d046b

Wally Courie , 9 hours ago

It's not the petro, but the "petrodollar" system. Now if India, Japan, China, or most any country, I suppose, want to buy Saudi oil it must use US Dollars. This goes back to deals made by Simon & Kissinger with the K of Saudi Barbaria when Nixon took the US off the gold standard and the Near East was awash with money after the oil shock following the Arab Oil Embargo. PHILIP M. GIRALDI explains it better than I could:

"Saudi Arabia, for its part, has a couple of cards to play also even if it did kill and dismember Khashoggi under orders from the Crown Prince. First of all, the system of petrodollars, which basically requires nearly all purchases of petroleum to be paid in dollars, is underwritten by the Saudis.

Petrodollars in turn enable the United States to print money for which there is no backing knowing that there will always be international demand for dollars to buy oil. The Saudis, who also use their own petrodollars to buy U.S. treasury bonds, could pull the plug on that arrangement. "

https://www.strategic-cultu...

Whenever a medium size country has taken steps to wean itself from the petrodollar, it has been taken out: Saddam Hussein taking steps to move to the Euro; Qaddafi talking about creating a pan-African currency for trade. It was no accident that Obama had to ship hundreds of millions of dollar bills to Iran for his nuke deal. It was their own money in T bills and bank deposits that had been frozen and because of sanctions they wanted cold hard cash.

If the Saudis attempt to carry out their threat to move away from the petrodollar or start seriously liquidating their US treasury holdings, the KSA government would be de-legitimized, overthrown, the oil fields seized, and the country carved up. This is what Nixon would have done in 1973 if they hadn't agreed to the petrodollar deal.

blue peacock -> Wally Courie , 7 hours ago
"...if India, Japan, China, or most any country, I suppose, want to buy Saudi oil it must use US Dollars."

Wrong. It is whatever Saudi Arabia is willing to accept for its crude. It could be Euro, Japanese Yen, Chinese Yuan or Russian Rubles. Or even soybeans, wheat or coffee. Note that most crude are sold on long-term bilateral agreements and not on spot markets.

There are pros & cons in having the reserve currency. The pro is naturally the ability to exchange paper for real goods. The con is that we have to run trade deficits to export dollars and then provide deep & liquid asset markets for those dollars to return. There's many reasons why the Chinese Yuan can't easily supplant the USD as a reserve currency. First, they don't have a fully convertible currency. Then their asset markets are neither open nor deep & liquid. China would also have to reverse their mercantilist policy to have the Yuan as a world reserve currency.

The petrodollar analysis that many promote including the article you linked by Phil Giraldi show they don't know much about trade finance. Saudi Arabia doesn't have to hold dollars that they gain from selling their oil in dollars. They can sell those dollars to those that want it like a Cayman Island hedge fund that wants to go long dollars. The USD fx markets are deep and very liquid.

China & Russia have sold hundreds of billions of Treasury bonds over the past few years. For crying out loud, the Fed is selling $600 billion annually now to normalize their balance sheet. Add to the over $1 trillion in fresh borrowing by the Treasury and you can see interest rates edge up to attract buyers. In any crisis most investors around the world still prefer US government backed securities.

Pat Lang Mod -> Wally Courie , 8 hours ago
I lunched with Giraldi the day before his article on this was published. i questioned his economic argument. As you say, he says that the need for enough US dollars in foreign circulation to make foreign transactions for petroleum possible under the present system and that, as you say, that causes the US to create enough dollars for that system to work. That is essentially unconnected from most functions of the US economy since the dollars stay overseas.

This is not true when the petrodollars are used by Saudi Arabia as funny money to buy US securities or US government sales of heavy equipment like civilian or military aircraft. The Saudis now have their surrogate "Zillim" (slaves) on TV making preposterous claims that a move away from denominating petro currency sales in dollars would collapse the US economy. Are you buying into that? I am not and told Giraldi that.

The obverse of that argument is what you are advocating which is that if the Saudi try to tank our economy by selling their US assets, then we should "coalition" them out of existence. Know that this would result in an occupation for decades accompanied by incessant guerrilla war in what is now Saudi Arabia. This would be another Afghanistan or Iraq. Perhaps it would e worth it.

Wally Courie -> Pat Lang , 8 hours ago
The Holy Cities are in the Hejaz. Hussein of Jordan would love to get them back and the Turks would back him. The oil fields are in the Shia East. (Shades of the NeoCon Lt Col Ralph Peters Blood Map. Zykes!) The KSA and UAE have been making enemies all over the place. Even Kuwait is afraid of a Saudi invasion.

Two problems w Afghanistan. First, We shouldn't have interfered w the Soviets bringing modernity to them. That was the beginning of weaponized Wahhabism and the worldwide spread of Saudi financed madrassas. It pushed out Sufi and secular minded Muslims in favor of Takfiri Jihadists. Second, we should have declared victory after the fall of Kabul and left.

Problem w/Iraq. It was the wrong country to invade, none of the 9/11 Islamist thugs on the airplanes were from secular Iraq. No, not advocating an invasion, but believe the House of Saud would be overthrown if they start messing with the petrodollar. Nixon provoked the 73 oil embargo with his resupply of the Israelis w/ Operation Nickel Grass

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

I guess he figured if they were on the ropes they would break out their nukes? I speculate he went off the gold standard in order to print enough money to finance the Vietnam war -- just speculation.

I would not be surprised if the Saudis and Gulfies don't hold an amount of US debt in the order of Trillions. I read that foreigners own some 47% of the US public debt of some $13 trillion or so. But others here surely have more expertise on this matter.

Pat Lang Mod -> Wally Courie , 7 hours ago
You really want the US to invade Saudi Arabia. What an awful idea! Do you think the populace would greet us with open arms? They would not! American son and daughters would fight there for generations. Who would govern the place, the Israeli agent neocons?

Would Kushner be governor of the Eastern Province? The Hashemites could only govern the Hijaz (Mecca and Medina) as agents of Turkey. Hussein is long dead.

Jack , 12 hours ago
Sir

You are correct. We, the USA as a nation can easily survive even prosper without the Saudi and Gulfie oil and money. But can our political, governmental and media classes survive the loss of their easy path to riches?

FB Ali had a link to an article on the extent of Saudi money flowing into Silicon Valley. What would Masayoshi Son and his Softbank Vision Fund do without the $45 billion committed by the Saudis. Just the management fees on this gigantic venture fund pays some hefty salaries and expenses.

[Oct 26, 2018] The Saudi s have been using precision guided munitions in a most imprecise manner to murder thousands of men, women and children in Yemen too a very muted western outcry

The level of commentary in NYT is incredibly low... Several better comments are reproduced below. It looks like most are from foreigners.
Oct 23, 2018 | www.nytimes.com

Peter J. New Zealand Oct. 23

Does bring to mind Stalin's observation that "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." The Saudi's have been using precision guided munitions in a most imprecise manner to murder thousands of men, women and children in Yemen too a very muted western outcry.

It has taken the, albeit particularly gruesome, murder of Mr Khashoggi to elicit widespread outage. The arms deals that Trump talks about are not producing weapons to kill the Mr Khashoggi's of this world, but rather to render wholesale destruction of a mass enemy.

Frederick Kiel Jomtien, Thailand Oct. 23

The killing was outrageous, but so many commenters seem as if they don't know that Saudi executions are beheadings by sword carried out in public (after Friday prayers) before hundreds of onlookers. Videos are available everywhere. The condemned are forced to kneel on the ground, no blind fold, having seen the swordsman standing a few feet away.

Saudi Arabia carried out 48 public beheadings in the first four months of this year, half for non-violent crimes, with women as well losing their heads. ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/26/saudi-arabia-criticised-ov...

This country has been "our best Arab friend" dating back to FDR. Knowing all this, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama and now Trump have all embraced the royal Saudis.
top U.S. universities. Back in 2005, the Saudi gov't gave $20 million each to Harvard and Georgetown ( https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=1402008) .

In the years since, the Saudi govt has pumped tens of millions of dollars into other U.S. universities ( https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/articles/2007/saudis-give-big-to-u-... .

I've read no outraged pundits calling on these schools to return the money. Matter of fact, I haven't heard any Harvard denunciations of this horrendous act of murder. Wonder why?

Moe Def Oct. 22

Why did Mr. Khashoggi risk his life, and lose it, by entering that Consulate knowing he was "an enemy of the state "with a price on his head? It makes no sense. Certainly not over some routine paperwork that could have been done in, say, The Washington D.C. Embassy with security!

Chris UK Oct. 23

Why are people and the press pretending that the US is a paragon of virtue and morality. Do people believe that US bodies don't "neutralise" people, even their own citizens, who represent threats? Executions still happen in certain states; the "humaneness" of it is merely a distraction, as if the penalty for murder would be any less severe if the victim was treated well before the action.

Tangentially, if you think that the US isn't violating its own nuclear proliferation treaties, I have a bridge in London to sell you...

Krishna Maringanti Hyderabad, India Oct. 23

Unfortunate for Ms Cengiz, but the timing of their meeting May 2018 & quick decision to marry is a bit suspicious. Qahtani and several others have been trying to lure Khashoggi to Saudi since past several months, offering protection, top Govt jobs etc., It is also in the public domain that MBS put up the so called directive to lure Khashoggi back to Saudi. Whether Cengiz is used to honey trap Khashoggi - because, it seems he never trusted the offers from Riyad. Police protection to Cengiz rises several doubts - Is Riyad trying to assassinate Cengiz 0r Istanbul put Cengiz in a protective custody for being an accessory to the murder of Khashoggi?

[Oct 25, 2018] Alastair Crooke on the JK murder

Oct 25, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Olga , October 23, 2018 at 5:52 pm

Alastair Crooke on the JK murder:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/10/23/khashoggi-murder-complex-intersection-three-points-inflection.html
"When a single additional, undifferentiated, snowflake can touch off a huge slide whose mass is entirely disproportionate to the single grain that triggers it. Was Khashoggi's killing just such a trigger? Quite possibly yes – because there are several unstable accumulations of political mass in the region where even a small event might set off a significant slide. These dynamics constitute a complex nexus of shifting dynamics."

[Oct 25, 2018] Surveillance Capitalism Crosses The Line Privacy Expert Abandons Google-Backed Smart-City Project by Joseph Jankowsk

Surveillance Capitalism is nice term for STASI=line regime which became the "new normal". When we say Google we mean CIA.
Notable quotes:
"... Being touted as "the world's first neighborhood built from the internet up," the Google designed smart city is set to deploy an array of cameras and sensors that detect pedestrians at traffic lights or alert cleanup crews when garbage bins overflow, reports The Globe and Mail . Robotic vehicles will whisk away garbage in underground tunnels, heated bike lanes will melt snow and a street layout will accommodate a fleet of self-driving cars. ..."
"... Such an account could potentially work with facial recognition "and allow for example a repairman to get into a home to perform his duties and firefighters to have access a building when a fire alarm is triggered." ..."
"... The project's critics included former BlackBerry CEO Jim Balsillie who referred to the development as "a colonizing experiment in surveillance capitalism attempting to bulldoze important urban, civic and political issues." ..."
"... Ann Cavoukia's decision to walk away from the project was made just weeks after Waterfront Toronto's Digital Strategy Advisory Panel member, Saadia Muzaffar, resigned over concerns about how Google will collect and handle data collected from people within the smart city. ..."
"... "We are at a point where a secretive, unelected, publicly funded corporation with no expertise in IP, data or even basic digital rights is in charge of navigating forces of urban privatization, algorithmic control and rule by corporate contract." ..."
Oct 25, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Joseph Jankowski via PlanetFreeWill.com,

A privacy expert tasked with protecting personal data within a Google-backed smart city project has resigned as her pro-privacy guidelines would largely be ignored by participants.

"I imagined us creating a Smart City of Privacy, as opposed to a Smart City of Surveillance," Ann Cavoukian, the former privacy commissioner of Ontario, wrote in a resignation letter to Google sister company Sidewalk Labs.

"I felt I had no choice because I had been told by Sidewalk Labs that all of the data collected will be de-identified at source," she added.

Cavoukian was an acting consultant involved in the plan by Canada's Waterfront Toronto to develop a smart city neighborhood in the city's Quayside development. She had created an initiative called Privacy by Design that aimed to ensure citizens' personal data would be protected.

Once it became apparent that citizen privacy could not be guaranteed, Cavoukian decided it was time to leave the project:

But then, at a Thursday meeting, Cavoukian reportedly realized such anonymization protocols could not be guaranteed. She told the Candian news outlet that Sidewalk Labs revealed at that meeting that their organization could commit to her guidelines, but other involved groups would not be required to abide by them.

Cavoukian realized third parties could possibly have access to identifiable data gathered through the project. "When I heard that, I said, 'I'm sorry. I can't support this. I have to resign because you committed to embedding privacy by design into every aspect of your operation,'" she told Global News. – Gizmodo

Being touted as "the world's first neighborhood built from the internet up," the Google designed smart city is set to deploy an array of cameras and sensors that detect pedestrians at traffic lights or alert cleanup crews when garbage bins overflow, reports The Globe and Mail . Robotic vehicles will whisk away garbage in underground tunnels, heated bike lanes will melt snow and a street layout will accommodate a fleet of self-driving cars.

The city will also provide each citizen a "user account" which will allow access to "the various online services of the neighborhood and improve participatory democracy."

Such an account could potentially work with facial recognition "and allow for example a repairman to get into a home to perform his duties and firefighters to have access a building when a fire alarm is triggered."

The project's critics included former BlackBerry CEO Jim Balsillie who referred to the development as "a colonizing experiment in surveillance capitalism attempting to bulldoze important urban, civic and political issues."

In an October op-ed, Balsillie describes smart cities as the new battlefront for big tech and warned that the commercialization of IP and data within the city would mean that personal information would just be another target of corporate digital-gold mining.

Balsillie writes :

The 21st-century knowledge-based and data-driven economy is all about IP and data. "Smart cities" are the new battlefront for big tech because they serve as the most promising hotbed for additional intangible assets that hold the next trillion dollars to add to their market capitalizations. "Smart cities" rely on IP and data to make the vast array of city sensors more functionally valuable, and when under the control of private interests, an enormous new profit pool. As Sidewalk Labs' chief executive Dan Doctoroff said : "We're in this business to make money." Sidewalk also wants full autonomy from city regulations so it can build without constraint.

You can only commercialize IP or data when you own or control them. That's why Sidewalk, as a recent Globe and Mail investigation revealed , is taking control to own all IP on this project. All smart companies know that controlling the IP controls access to the data, even when it's shared data. Stunningly, when Waterfront Toronto released its "updated" agreement, they left the ownership of IP and data unresolved, even though IP experts publicly asserted that ownership of IP must be clarified up front or it defaults to Sidewalk. Securing new monopoly IP rights coupled with the best new data sets creates a systemic market advantage from which companies can inexorably expand.

A privately controlled "smart city" infrastructure upends traditional models of citizenship because you cannot opt out of a city or a society that practises mass surveillance. Foreign corporate interests tout new technocratic efficiencies while shrewdly occluding their unprecedented power grab. As the renowned technologist Evgeny Morozov said : "That the city is also the primary target of big tech is no accident: If these firms succeed in controlling its infrastructure, they need not to worry about much else."

Ann Cavoukia's decision to walk away from the project was made just weeks after Waterfront Toronto's Digital Strategy Advisory Panel member, Saadia Muzaffar, resigned over concerns about how Google will collect and handle data collected from people within the smart city.

Saadia Muzaffar specifically pointed to "Waterfront Toronto's astounding apathy and utter lack of leadership regarding shaky public trust and social licence."

Local residents remain concerned over the lack of transparency in regards to the project as many believe the deal has been shrouded in secrecy. As Jim Balsillie described it:

"We are at a point where a secretive, unelected, publicly funded corporation with no expertise in IP, data or even basic digital rights is in charge of navigating forces of urban privatization, algorithmic control and rule by corporate contract."

Barry McBear, 2 hours ago
Getting rid of facebook was easy, but de-googling my life is going to be a real pain in the ***. One that clearly must be done though.

[Oct 24, 2018] It does seem that the murder allowed the war and killing in Yemen to move to the foreground

Oct 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Nemesiscalling , Oct 23, 2018 2:37:45 PM | link

B, it does seem that the k affair has risen the crisis in Yemen to the foreground just as many predicted. Thank goodness.

You are correct in that many are looking too far into this as some kind of conspiracy. I am reminded by this of many who put forth that it made no difference as to who won the prez election. It did make a difference to the military as well as Hillary's backers in the cIa and fbI.

The Saudis screwed up and they will get their comeuppance it seems. Russia might be able to wiggle their way into the middle then, filling the vacuum of uncle Sam at the circle jerk. The Saudis will have to curtail their operation in Yemen and no quarter will be given to wahhabi-terrorists by ksa who wish retribution against Russia. Win-win.

m , Oct 23, 2018 3:11:58 PM | link

Interesting take by Ghassan Kadi on the Saker's blog, for those who still sense a conspiracy in this. https://thesaker.is/insights-into-the-khashoggi-ordeal-who-and-why/ Goes back to this 'fiance', but adds Gullen to the mix and makes Erdy out to be an instigator. Good to have a viewpoint from someone who has lived in Sawdi land.

[Oct 24, 2018] Neoliberal MSM flenzy over the this murder (and silence about systematic murders of Yemen children by KSA) reflects the split of the USA elite and desire of the "old guard" to cut Trump; that why called for "regime change is KSA are so laud

Oct 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Oct 23, 2018 4:26:52 PM | link

Not a 'conspiracy theory' - just an observation

Some goals are difficult to accomplish directly but can be easy with cunning and patience. To wit:

How do you move a society to the right?
By allowing 'radicals' on the left to act up via a Potemkin 'resistance'.
'Open Borders' and gender are fluff compared to issues like Cold War II and inequality (which the Democratic Party is silent about)

How do you discredit a Movement like #MeToo?
You "invite" them to discredit themselves by prompting them to go too far. Accusations with no substance against Kavanaugh did just that.

How do you take down a King and crown prince?
By indulging his whims and flattery and creating opportunities for him to cross a moral line that was deliberately blurred.

How do you control what people believe to be true?
By controlling narrative and timing. First news reports get the widest audience - subsequent clarifications are mostly ignored. And people believe news sources that align with mythology that they are emotionally invested in.


Peter AU 1 , Oct 23, 2018 4:42:09 PM | link

karlof1 10

Trump has invested a lot in taking control of MBS and with him control of Saudi Arabia. Because of this, I think MBS is important, if not key to Trumps plans in the middle east, the main part of which is war with Iran. With the anti Trump factions riding this for all its worth, the Khashoggi killing is at least a spanner in the works for Trump's plans, if not derailing them completely.

Trump has been and is building the US military up for war with some countries and perhaps trying to bluff others. Going by Trump's actions to date, pulling out of the missile treaty was perhaps inevitable.

uncle tungsten , Oct 23, 2018 4:46:50 PM | link
Eric Zuesse writes 'the eartbhquake ininternational alliances' at off-guardian. It is well worth the time and delves into aspects of sunni schism as the background to current shifts.

Thanks b this khashoggi bone saw massacre and the Palestine and Yemen genocide are most significant stories right now.

Kadath , Oct 23, 2018 4:56:16 PM | link
Re:#22 Circe,

I don't think its strange at all, The Media has received the talking points from their "Deep State" contacts and now their piling on with the allegations against MbS. It's quite possible that the Whitehouse is still trying to craft a deal to minimize the fallout from the murder and save MbS (and their Iran plans), but there are elements within the government that are trying to undermine the deal to get rid of MbS. I wouldn't be surprised if the body parts were found, but the Whitehouse / Turkey is not confirming to prevent the situation from escalating and save the possibility of a deal, but the Deep state elements are leaking details to the Media to keep the pressure on.

Circe , Oct 23, 2018 4:59:29 PM | link
So now that Trump sent Gina Haspell to Turkey he's changing his tune and calling this the worst cover-up in the history of cover-ups! CIA director travels to Turkey to investigate murder of Jamal Khashoggi

Well, let's see what he does about it! He can start by granting K's son and brother asylum. They shouldn't have to endure this threatening farce on top of what they're suffering.

Malletgirl , Oct 23, 2018 5:13:47 PM | link
Very interesting seeing b calling for regime change.
The cycnic , Oct 23, 2018 5:39:38 PM | link
The best insights in this drama can be found (IMHO) at Scott Crieghtons American everyman blog. MbS has reneged on a huge Lockheed Martin Arms deal. That alone can get you in deep shit with the establishment( just ask Sth Korea's Pres.)However, Scott goes on to explain that MbS has committed a even greater sin.
Also... 4 seconds of video and a drip feed of "facts" from Turkeys Prez. Mmmmmm No body as yet.... Put on ya Tin-foil hat boys... something bit fishy bout the whole story.
Pft , Oct 23, 2018 6:08:44 PM | link
Bit o/T but while MSM and alt media have us mesmorized with Khashoggi gate 4 days ago Vladimir Putin said ISIS had taken 700 hostages in the US-controlled area of Syria. The hostages captured in Syria by ISIS terrorists include US and European citizens and are being killed off 10 people a day.

Putin "This is just horrible, it is a catastrophe.....Some US and European citizens are among the hostages....everyone is silent as if nothing has happened."

Cant have that being an issue before elections. Save it for November. MBS saves Trump

Guerrero , Oct 23, 2018 6:14:32 PM | link
Thanks for the wonderful journalism to the estimable owner of this cantina, Mr b. I have no idea how he does it. The quality of investiigation, the quality of writing, the synthesis and pointed questions,
all these are first-rate and deserve applause and attention.

To me the Kashoggi thing is simple, the Skirpal assassins (yes they were involved, amazing as this
may seem) screwed up. They confused Riyad Time with London time; they were still in bed together and
not available to routinely refine orders issued by the young King's secretary, an addict of pep pills

I agree with Mina. It IS a unique world-historical event. Kashoggi's gory death might be the one thing
that saves us. After all, it seems to be a very rare non-staged world-historical event, we have not
seen actual organic accidental purely human events since telephone operators asked: "Number please?

Still Erdowan hit HIS number, with a natural four. Even Erdo could hardly believe it when the casino manager rolled up the rack of his winnings. He had doubled down twenty-four times-in-a-row and the figurative Strip was totally silent as the awed gamblers and their molls saw him hit that fantastic roll.

Putin doesnt gamble. He doesnt smoke or drink. He likes to work and he loves his country like other Russians: from Solzyanetzin, to Sholokhov, to Dostoyevsky, to Chekov, to Tolstoy, to Gogol...
he lets the sharp operators wheel-and-deal, he's otherwise engrossed in the life of his nation.

Like a magician's trick, with Russia's blessing, the Palestinians are given Saudi Arabi as theirs;
so long as they promise to preserve sacred traditions of Mecca and Medina, the Ka'aba and so forth.

Everyone says "wow that was easy!; now that's settled let's relax and get back to building things
and to normal lives with our families..." It's so very easy. There is NO need to force anybody to do that."

The Balfour Document is cited as precedent and everything is solved in a happy way that is not a war.
The Royal family of Arabia becomes a You Tube Channel, with Nancy Pelosi and the Houses of Congress

Evil fights evil. Who loses? Evil loses. That's the only possible chance we good people have: it is
to make it so the worst evil is killed by the less worse evil; that's how human history progresses
and we are all stuck with this moral Universe the way it is, whether it makes sense at first or not.


Greece , Oct 23, 2018 6:35:52 PM | link
@all

Sorry for the mono-thematic posting. I am also working on several other themes and will post those in time. But for now the Khashoggi issue is the event with likely the most consequences and I try to stay on top of it.

Posted by: b | Oct 23, 2018 2:27:46 PM | 1

Khassogi theme has been milked for all that it could deliver, yet the large Russian delegation to Saudi Arabia Direct Investment Fund - headed by Cyril Dmitriev and the following international corporations Trafigura, Total, Hyundai, Norinco, Schlumberger, Halliburton, Baker Hughes.

Total also signed a 15 billion deal with the Saudi's.

Russian-Saudi partnership particularly is about deals being made between corresponding State Funds of each country. This means they are important.

Probably Erdogan and Mossad didn't like that, as the whole Khassogi case seems as an Erdogani-faction, possible pro Mossad Saudi elements from within the closed circle of MbS and the Mossad itself.

There is no Heaven or Hell. There is only the Mossad.
Las Vegas Massacre 1st Octobr 2017
Khassogi assasination October 1st 2018.

Mossad actions are all about dates/numbers/and cabala magic rituals. It's how they roll.

from: Joe Vialls internet investigator research.

Three major investigations

The first major Vialls investigation was into the 1984 murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in St. James's Square . He concluded that the fatal shots had come not from within the embassy but from a penthouse flat next-door-but-one to the Libyan embassy, and were fired by CIA/Mossad agents .[7]
The second investigation concerned the 1988 Lockerbie bombing together with day-by-day summaries of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing trial . Vialls developed his own theory about the true cause of the bombing. Again, Vialls linked the CIA and Mossad to the crime.[8]
The third major investigation was into the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, Australia . Vialls claimed that an intellectually impaired man, Martin Bryant, was wrongly convicted for this crime and did not receive a fair trial. Vialls claimed that this case, also, was an Israeli operation carried out by Mistaravim .[9]

Other controversies

Vialls was a self-proclaimed private investigator dedicated to "exposing media disinformation," and made many claims in his reports disputing official explanations for events. The website thewebfairy.com wrote a comprehensive report, rebutting Vialls' claims regarding the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 . The rebuttal centred mainly on Vialls' comparison of the Pentagon crash with an incident in which an Israeli El Al 747-200F cargo plane, flight 1862 , crashed into a 12-story apartment block in the Amsterdam suburb of Bijlmer on 4 October 1992 .[10]

He also disputed the official explanation for the bombings of the Australian embassy and Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia's capital. Vialls asserted that the explosives that authorities claimed were used in the Indonesian bombings were not powerful enough to have caused the damage and casualties that resulted. He claimed to demonstrate from photographs of the aftermath of each of the bombings, compared to the photographs taken in Northern Ireland where a 1,000 pound IRA bomb did not leave a crater or strip concrete from buildings, that a "micronuke" from Mossad's Dimona research and development facility in the Negev desert had been used. Vialls claims a device similar to the smallest United States nuclear weapon known as the Davy Crockett or M-388 round, a version of the W54 warhead, a very small sub-kiloton fission device, was used in the attacks. The Mk-54 weighed about 51 lb (23 kg), with a selectable yield of 10 or 20 tons, which Vialls claimed was consistent with the damage inflicted in Bali and elsewhere. A complete Mk-54 round weighed 76 lb (34.5 kg). One criticism of Vialls' theory was the absence of any radiation in Bali after the explosion. Vialls explained this flaw by arguing that Geiger counters cannot effectively detect alpha radiation , the most likely radiation to be present after the detonation of a plutonium fission bomb, since alpha particles are large and do not penetrate the walls of the Geiger-Muller tubes adequately enough to register radiation.[11] In his investigation of the first Bali bomb, Vialls cited an opinion article in the Jakarta Post, Indonesia's largest English-language newspaper by circulation, written by an expatriate editor at the Post, which expounded a similar theory.[12]

Vialls' theories have received popular support among leaders of some Muslim factions in Indonesia, who have cited his theories as fact. Indonesian internet forum Swara Muslim ('Muslim voice') wrote an opinion piece stating that Vialls' claim that the bombing of the Australian embassy was conducted by the CIA and Mossad was "based on solid fact."[13] Indonesian Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir told Australia's ABC radio that he believed Vialls' theory regarding the first Bali bomb was a correct one.[14]

Mossad has two parallel structures going through its hierarchy from top to bottom.
One is directly influenced/assisted/funded by the Rothchilds.
They do the ussual hacking/killing/maiming/disposing by the "their magick numbers" principle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Vialls

Greece , Oct 23, 2018 6:50:18 PM | link
The best insights in this drama can be found (IMHO) at Scott Crieghtons American everyman blog. MbS has reneged on a huge Lockheed Martin Arms deal. That alone can get you in deep shit with the establishment( just ask Sth Korea's Pres.)However, Scott goes on to explain that MbS has committed a even greater sin.

Posted by: The cycnic | Oct 23, 2018 5:39:38 PM | 34

I am willing to bet it is plausible it would have to do with these guys:

Lockheed Martin Space Systems

Lockheed Martin Space is one of the four major business divisions of Lockheed Martin. It has its headquarters in Denver, Colorado with additional sites in Sunnyvale, California; Santa Cruz, California; Huntsville, Alabama; and elsewhere in the US and UK. The division currently employs about 16,000 people, and its most notable products are commercial and military satellites, space probes, missile defense systems, NASA's Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, and the Space Shuttle External Tank.[1]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Space_Systems

They are the guys that ussualy go KABOOM or missing because of possible meddling/messing around with cosmic frequencies/energies they shouldn't be messing with, from the days Operation Paperclip ended and so forth.

Greece , Oct 23, 2018 7:01:34 PM | link
So now that Trump sent Gina Haspell to Turkey he's changing his tune and calling this the worst cover-up in the history of cover-ups!

Posted by: Circe | Oct 23, 2018 4:59:29 PM | 26

Just quoting some interesting timing here.
This (as it seems) is high level negotiation and secret ops preps between both sides.
Against whom I wonder.....
To where else our friend Gina has traveled abroad since her inaguration?Is this her first? Her first cup of coffee abroad was at Erdogan's palace in Konstantinople?

Anton Worter , Oct 23, 2018 7:06:31 PM | link
MbS is Caligula?

That's a little over the top, even for smarmy Merkelian arms dealers trying to get their mercantile horns into the hog sty.
Something tells me Marmeladebrüders would hold their noses and sell $100B of German arms to MbS in a NYC Sekunde.

Greece , Oct 23, 2018 7:16:14 PM | link
Trump has been and is building the US military up for war with some countries and perhaps trying to bluff others.

Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Oct 23, 2018 4:42:09 PM | 23

He is changing the configuration and introducing new doctrines for the End Game.
It's goose stepping at Rothchild's orders.
It's for moving the chess pieces on the board before the actual full blown WWIII events in such a way to favor the Rothchild devised plan for the world domination. The actual war is a scheme in order to divide resources and strategic possitioning, while getting rid of the excess poppulations here and there. They have huge plans concerning energy management projects and new technologies. Real energy management like terrawats think about Tesla style technologies, not mundane stuff like oil/gas and pipelines which is only there just for show about controlling the narrative for the masses. They want to become gods. They will suck everything on this plane of existence dry for their purpose to succeed. The war is innevitable. It's a must do for them. We are near the End Game.Prepare accordingly.

Hal Duell , Oct 23, 2018 7:23:22 PM | link
Someone convinced Khashoggi he would be safe entering that Consulate. This was a man who had lived his life next to Middle Eastern power so it must have been a persuasive argument.
MbS did what he did, and the shite hit the fan.
So now what? Turkey doesn't want to leave northern Syria (or Iraq?), and while she doesn't control oil, she does control the water.
Putin (Putin again) emerges as the new best friend to the House of Saud. What would happen if Saudi oil were to start trading in a mix of Yuan/Rouble/gold?
I can't decide if this is all fortuitous or orchestrated, but the waters are roiling.
Jef , Oct 23, 2018 7:39:04 PM | link
Trumps comment; 'worst cover-up ever' even I could have done better.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/10/trump-saudi-handling-khashoggi-killing-worst-cover-181023205449681.html

Donald bin Asshat Trump

karlof1 , Oct 23, 2018 7:42:48 PM | link
Peter AU 1 @23--

Currently, the extraterritorial judgement is to Magnitsky Act those responsible , which amounts to yet another illegal action. Given what Khashoggi promoted--Daesh and the wider aims of Outlaw US Empire designs on the region plus visiting genocide on Yemenis--I applaud his demise as I've written previously. And yes, I wouldn't mind seeing the same fate befall those who killed him along with those who supported him. Much of what we read amounts to deploring the gangland murder of a gangster, and we're supposed to lament that--WHY? And what's worse overall: A recession caused by the removal of Saudi oil from global market or the Climate Crisis generated by burning that oil?

Seems we've reached Through the Looking Glass extremes with no end in sight.

Anton Worter , Oct 23, 2018 7:51:16 PM | link
29

Rodham Sermonizes on I$I$ in MENA ... and Blames Kurd-Iraqi Complacency
La Emperatriz Who Has An Opinion On Everything ... is strangely silent on MbS.

karlof1 , Oct 23, 2018 8:00:42 PM | link
Short vid about Saudi Tiger Squad alleged Saudi Death Squad.
A. Person , Oct 23, 2018 8:07:47 PM | link
The KSA is checkered by moles. Consider: there was a mole on MbS's goon squad.

The mole audio'd and video'd aspects of the the JK killing.

This explains why Haskel is in Istanbul. She's the top spy bitch, cutting deals, asserting dominion over the evidence.

The singing mole explains just about everything.

Don't worry. MbS will be white-washed with/through ex-post facto exculpatory tapes.

I predict very little spanking.

Sabine , Oct 23, 2018 8:10:23 PM | link
you say: The usefulness of Saudi Arabia for the U.S. has been in doubt for some time

does the house of trump and kushner care about what is usefull for the US?

[Oct 24, 2018] Khashoggi - purely MBS stupidity or a trap

Notable quotes:
"... Btw, the CIA knew Riyadh was planning to kidnap the unfortunate guy, if the Turks recorded the slaughter they must have been recording before, too, the same goes for the police who couldn't have missed the team of 15 equipped with the bone saw. No one of these agencies tipped K. Aren;t they complicit in the sickening atrocity? More the point, why didn't they warn him? ..."
Oct 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peter AU 1 , Oct 23, 2018 3:26:17 PM | link

Since the Russian entry into Syria, the self labeled friends of Syria group of countries have taken to infighting and slowly disintegrating. First Turkey then Qatar, Jordan now seems on more diplomatic terms with Syrian government opening border and so forth. Russia's geo-political power has been perhaps more important in saving Syria than its military power. Is it by accident or design that the 'friends of Syria group' have been so affected

Putin is one of the best in setting up and carrying out long term strategy, putting it together in seemingly unconnected steps so that the setting up goes unnoticed.

The Erdogan Russia deal on Idlib seemed odd at the time even with the genuine threat of a US attack. Russia said there where no, and had not been any plans for an offensive on Idlib. Syrian government seemed unhappy with the deal at the time but then a few weeks ago came out publicly in support of what Turkey was trying to achieve in the buffer zone. What is going on here.

Khashoggi - purely MBS stupidity or an easily set trap knowing MBS character.

On Crooke's bit about a snowflake touching of an avalanche, as the same time, an unstable mass can easily be set in motion by a deliberate action. Both Erdogan and Putin would have a sharp eye for these unstable masses.

Baron , Oct 23, 2018 3:33:18 PM | link

Except for the Caligula outcome that cannot be ruled out, the Prince will stay, removing him would suggest the old King's judgement's at fault, a sign of unforgivable weakness in any autocracy that could be exploited by others in the future, the Prince's power may be curtailed for a while, but that's about it.

The Americans should be careful not to get too harsh on the Kingdom, the old King visited Moscow last November, nobody knows why, it may well be the old man's smarter than anyone thinks, he senses the Americans are losing their grip e.g. Syria, the era of the Far East approaches, his timing may be about right. 'The Kingdom must switch alliances before it's too late to secure its future', he may think.

Btw, the CIA knew Riyadh was planning to kidnap the unfortunate guy, if the Turks recorded the slaughter they must have been recording before, too, the same goes for the police who couldn't have missed the team of 15 equipped with the bone saw. No one of these agencies tipped K. Aren;t they complicit in the sickening atrocity? More the point, why didn't they warn him?


[Oct 23, 2018] Leaving aside what President Obama knew about Russiagate allegations against Donald Trump and when he knew it, the question arises as to whether these operations were ordered by President Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) or were rogue operations unknown in advance by the leaders and perhaps even directed against them

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... why would MBS risk a Khashoggi scandal as he was assiduously promoting his image abroad as an enlightened reform-minded Saudi leader? ..."
"... We lack the evidence and official candor needed to study these questions, as is usually the case with covert, secretive, disinforming intelligence operations. But the questions are certainly reason enough not to rush to judgment, as many US pundits do. Saying "we do not know" may be unmarketable in today's mass-media environment, but it is honest and the right approach to potentially fruitful "analysis." ..."
Oct 17, 2018 | www.thenation.com

From Inconvenient Thoughts on Cold War and Other News by Stephen F. Cohen

1. National intelligence agencies have long played major roles, often not entirely visible, in international politics. They are doing so again today, as is evident in several countries, from Russiagate in the United States and the murky Skripal assassination attempt in the UK to the apparent murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Turkey. Leaving aside what President Obama knew about Russiagate allegations against Donald Trump and when he knew it, the question arises as to whether these operations were ordered by President Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) or were "rogue" operations unknown in advance by the leaders and perhaps even directed against them.

There have been plenty of purely criminal and commercial "rogue" operations by intelligence agents in history, but also "rogue" ones that were purposefully political. We know, for example, that both Soviet and US intelligence agencies -- or groups of agents -- tried to disrupt the Eisenhower-Khrushchev détente of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and that some intelligence players tried to stop Khrushchev's formal recognition of West Germany, also in the early 1960s.

It is reasonable to ask, therefore, whether the attacks on Skripal and Khashoggi were "rogue" operations undertaken by political opponents of the leaders' policies at home or abroad, with the help of one or another intelligence agency or agents. Motive is a -- perhaps the -- crucial question. Why would Putin order such an operation in the UK at the very moment when his government had undertaken a major Western public-relations campaign in connection with the upcoming World Cup championship in Russia? And why would MBS risk a Khashoggi scandal as he was assiduously promoting his image abroad as an enlightened reform-minded Saudi leader?

We lack the evidence and official candor needed to study these questions, as is usually the case with covert, secretive, disinforming intelligence operations. But the questions are certainly reason enough not to rush to judgment, as many US pundits do. Saying "we do not know" may be unmarketable in today's mass-media environment, but it is honest and the right approach to potentially fruitful "analysis."

[Oct 23, 2018] Khashoggi Drama - A Deal Is No Longer Possible - Erdogan Demands That MbS Goes

Looks like an intelligence operation to remove MBS was launched after this blunder. BTW was it MBS blunder or a set-up?
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... This death is kabuki "wag the dog" type theatre for the masses while the real geo-political arm wrestling goes on behind the scenes ..."
"... Khashoggi met his fiance (36 year old to his 59) in May 2018. By October 2018, they were looking to get married. One little problem. He is already married and had to arrange a separation. Did he go to the consulate of his own free will or was he 'pushed' (ie he went very reluctantly as he realized he was taking a big risk). His fiancée is documented as a PhD candidate (in what subject? At which institute? What was her background?) They managed to meet at some high level think-tank get-together. That sounds a bit unlikely for some random unconnected outsider. How did she manage to get invited to the meeting? In other circumstances (Assange, Vanunu, etc) a honeypot would come to mind. ..."
"... Qui bono? Trump is negotiating with SWIFT to disconnect Iran from the world economy (an act of war?). Presumably once Iran reacts, it will be used as an excuse for an all out military attack against Iran, using Saudi airspace and ground facilities. Given Saudi has been making nice with Russia (and potentially Iran via Russian mediation), some 'encouragement' seems necessary for that to go ahead. Not so long ago, Trump stated that Saudi wouldn't last two weeks without US support, possibly a not-so-subtle hint. Corrupt leaders desire nothing more than holding on to power and the benefits of said power. ..."
Oct 23, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Sally Snyder , Oct 22, 2018 12:23:08 PM | link
No one seems to care how many Yemeni's Mohammad bin Salman kills each day. There was no harsh reaction when MbS kidnapped the Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri, nor when he incarcerated nearly 400 princes and tortured them to steal their money. Why would anyone care about Khashoggi?

Because that is how human psychology works:

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.
Josef Stalin

We humans care way more for a single persons we know, than for a mass of people we have no relations with.

Khashoggi was a personal friend of Erdogan. He was a columnist at the Washington Post , the CIA's most favored news outlet. Mohammad bin Salman is an enemy of both. Neither the neocon opinion editor of the Post , Fred Hiatt, nor Erdogan have any love for the Saudi clown prince. They would of course raise a ruckus when given such a chance.

They will pile on and air the Saudi's dirty linen until MbS is gone. Yesterday the New York Times exposed the twitter brigades the Saudis hired to manipulate the public. Today the Washington Post has a detailed report of Saudi influence peddling through U.S. stink tanks. The Middle East Institute, CSIS and Brookings get called out. Lobbyists for the Saudis are canceling their contracts. More such reports will come out. Years of lobbying and tens of millions of dollars to push pro-Saudi propaganda have now gone to waste.

The affair is damaging to Trump. He built his Middle East policy on his relations with Saudi Arabia. But he can not avoid the issue and has to call out MbS over the killing. His own party is pressing for it. Yesterday the Republican Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, dismissed the Saudi version of the story on CNN and called (vid) for consequences:

"It is my sense, I don't know yet, but based on the intel I have read, based on the other excerpts that I have read, it is my thinking that MbS was involved in this, that he directed this and that this person was purposefully murdered. "
...
There has to be a punishment and a price paid for that.
...
Do I think he did it? Yes, I think he did it. [...] We obviously have intercepts from the past that point to involvement at a very high level, so let's let play this out.

On Sunday Erdogan was on the phone with Trump. The Turkish readout of the call hints at negotiations over Syria, the lifting of sanctions against Turkey and other issues. But the Khashoggi case has now gone too far to allow for a deal to be made over it.

Erdogan's mouthpiece, the somewhat lunatic columnist Ibrahim Karagül, gives an insight into Erdogan's thinking and sets out his aims:

The real trap was set against Saudi Arabia. Even though a Saudi Arabia-U.S.-Israel rapport was established and discourse about shielding the Riyadh administration from Iran, the objective was to destroy Saudi Arabia through Salman and Zayed. The next front after the Syria war was the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia. They never understood this, they could not understand it. Turkey understood it, but the Arab political mind was blinded.

Now Saudi Arabia is in a very difficult situation. The world collapsed over them. Crown Prince Salman is going through a tough test via Zayed, who has control over him. If the gravity of the situation after the facts revealed with the Khashoggi murder is not comprehended, we will witness a "Saudi Arabia front" in less than a few years.
...
The Riyadh administration must dethrone Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at once . It has no other choice. Otherwise, it is going to pay very heavy prices. If they fail to quash the trap set up targeting Saudi Arabia through bin Zayed, they will be victims of Trump's "You won't last two weeks" statement, and the process is going to start to work in that direction.
...
This duo must be taken out of the entire region and neutralized. Otherwise they are going to throw the region in fire.

Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Mohammed bin Zayed is Mohammad bin Salman's mentor and partner in crime in Yemen. MbZ is smarter than MbS - and will be more difficult to dislodge.

Erdogan announced that he will describe more details of the case on Tuesday in a speech to his party's parliament group. He will probably not yet play the tape from inside the consulate that Turkish intelligence claims to have. But he may well confirm the revealed phone calls and threaten to release their content.

Erdogan's aim seems clear. The chance for deal is gone. MbS has to go. He will try to play the case out until that is achieved.

Posted by b on October 22, 2018 at 11:47 AM | Permalink Here are some cables that Wikileaks released in 2015 showing how the Saudi royal family tries to control the world's media:

https://viableopposition.blogspot.ca/2016/01/how-saudi-arabia-controls-its-own-media.html

The Saudi Royal Family has bottomless pockets when it comes to controlling the negative press coverage.

Circe , Oct 22, 2018 12:27:36 PM | link

It appears like a very ambitious plan to get rid of MbS and MbZ, but I have to agree that it's critical. They along with Netanyahoo are the biggest threat in the ME.
Passer by , Oct 22, 2018 12:39:05 PM | link
"No one seems to care how many Yemeni's Mohammad bin Salman kills each day. There was no harsh reaction when MbS kidnapped the Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri, nor when he incarcerated nearly 400 princes and tortured them to steal their money. Why would anyone care about Khashoggi?

Because that is how human psychology works:

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.
Josef Stalin

We humans care way more for a single persons we know, than for a mass of people we have no relations with."

You are naive person, b, and this section does not belong to MoA articles.

This is not about human psychology. Its about targeted media attention. Media could create a hysteria about Yemen too, but only if the elite wanted that. Then you would see lots outraged people and large protests against the war in Yemen. But elites do not want that. So that is not going to happen.

It is very simple how that works. When elites want, they bring massive media attention to something. When elites do not want, they cover up things and the media is silent.

If elites wanted to adress the issue of the Yemen war, you will see similar media hysteria to the ones about Idlib or Aleppo. Since the elites do not want that, media will be generally silent about the killings in Yemen and will keep things under control.
In this case, there are important western elites behind this, so you are getting lots of media coverage. So this has nothing to do with what Stalin said or with human psychology, and everything to do with the fact that elites control media and public attention.

This is being used as a way of attacking Trump.

For more information, you can check Adam Garrie and Andrew Korybko, it seems that some european, US deep state (behind Trump's back), and of course turkish interests are behind the increased media attention.

Sid2 , Oct 22, 2018 12:47:51 PM | link
Where is the body (or its parts)? Having arrested 18 the Saudis must know the answer to this question. Why the delay on this question?

But as Pieraccini hinted a few days ago the American Congress and its associates want MbS gone because he's a bad business manager. (Look at what happened to the "Vision" thing although Munchkin today indicated business deals more important than anything else.) Trump will need to get over his sentimentalism to go along, and he needs to do this fast with midterms two weeks away.

worldblee , Oct 22, 2018 1:01:26 PM | link
Hmm, it seems there was another nearby ruler that Erdogan also demanded should leave...
karlof1 , Oct 22, 2018 1:10:33 PM | link
Passer by @6--

The same could be said of Palestine as Yemen, along with Zionist manipulation of "Western" policy. Clearly, having to justify his actions is something MbS has seldom faced previously and has failed abysmally when it was actually very simple at the outset. If MbS gets demoted, will he flee or stay and fight? The arms contracts were never signed, so they're likely dead, which I view as a plus. I wonder if a pro-Palestinian/Anti-Zionist non-CIA captured Prince exists within Saudi that Salman might name to replace MbS, or is such a beast wishful thinking?

joeymac , Oct 22, 2018 1:11:02 PM | link
All this proves that the spy-craft of the Saudi assassination team was abysmal. All cellphone networks store records of each call. Any foreign official's phone in Turkey is under surveillance of the country's intelligence service. Only some throw-away phone with an anonymous prepaid card could have given some protection.

Perhaps some, but not much. Even anonymous cellphone connections can be geo-located with a maximum error of a few meters, so calls to Saudi Arabia from within the consulate could be noted. What more, the dim-witted Saudis probably would not have bothered with tack-on encryption devices.

Hal C , Oct 22, 2018 1:12:06 PM | link
The one death is a tragedy quote is often misattributed to Stalin. See here and here and here .

What is apparent, however, is that the large American media outlets suddenly have discovered Yemen as a club to use in retribution for the murder of one of their own.

Hal C

Sid2 , Oct 22, 2018 1:12:30 PM | link
B's point on human psychology is good on the question why this event has attracted so much attention. Obviously in the congress the event is working in two ways: to facilitate removal of MbS, yes, by those annoyed with his and Trump's amateurish bullshit; and to appeal for votes via all the outrage. Even Trump has to play to this sentiment.

But cynical deal-making on the inside aside, the ordinary person is amused and appalled at this naked display of the psychopath with his thuggish sadism as increasingly it becomes apparent Mohammed Been Sawbones has done the deed. Plus trying to excuse it and cover it up, as Trump et al are trying to do, clashes obscenely with the usual rhetoric/propaganda.

So, yes, the specific content here is much easier and clearer to grasp than abstractions and generalities. It's a case for JQ Ordinary of "Got you! And we'll rub your face in it while we can!" In short, it's another reflection of how pissed off people are with the globe's honorable leaders.

Alpi57 , Oct 22, 2018 1:18:50 PM | link
It is obvious that Erdogan didn't get the deal he was hoping for probably due to Trump's arrogance thinking that this one will blow over as well and they can fix it. Gross miscalculation.

MBS is small potatoes. MBZ as mentioned is the target. He is the ambitious one with a brain, at least he thinks so. And he has pissed off most of the gulf monarchies that have no interest in war and hegemony. They want to live quiet and make their money and get along, especially with Iran.

What is interesting here, is that this event seems to have not been a random thing, but a carefully laid out trap they walked right into.

This might be the undoing of Trump, Bolton and the rest, in the midterms first and then in their ME plans. Watch for the Russians to come out as victors, yet again.

Passer by , Oct 22, 2018 1:20:13 PM | link
"B's point on human psychology is good on the question why this event has attracted so much attention."

No, it's not. If elites did not want, there would be zero attention about it. In the same way, there would be huge attention for the killings in Yemen or Palestine, if only the elites wanted that. In fact, it would be number one news story every day and the topic of the year if they wanted that.

Susan Sunflower , Oct 22, 2018 1:30:48 PM | link
All bets are off until we see how the impetuous one in the White House takes the growing "global consensus" and accepts defeat.

I think MBS was "supposed" to be gone 2 weeks ago ... being a well-documented loose-cannon. He was given temporary reprieve (again) as Trump and the money men "negotiated" various terms of his survival and that of the arms deal....

Erdogan may well end up with a "better" deal than he hoped for due to impeccable stage craft and and slam-dunk evidence (we'll see).

I believe I read that MBS personally assured Erdogan that Khasoghogi would be save ... assurances passed on to that gentlment before he entered the compound. If true, that also speaks massively about MBS and his "word" as a gentleman (perhaps part of reason for claims it was a "hot-headed accident")

The Saudis have such an embarassing history of failure at "stealth" like this ... if they'd just managed to abduct Khashoggi like so many others currently disappeared or simply waited. This is also riding the crest of journalist complaints of state-sponsored threats of violence towards journalism under the "fake news claims" internationally and by Donald Trump specifically in the American heart land which is pretty much bled out already when it comes to "keep 'em honest" investigations.

If, when MSB goes, it will be -imho- the first major defeat of the Trump administration, both foreign and domestic.

Passer by , Oct 22, 2018 1:39:35 PM | link
@21

There are some who want that, in the US and especially Europe, as well as medium level ones such as Erdogan. And some who do not want that (the US administration, or Israel).

For Europe, the reaction was relatively harsh, as they use that to hit back at the US admin for its belligerent behavior. In the US, it is used by those who oppose Trump, as well as due to other reasons. Check Adam Garrie and Andrew Korybko for more on this.


As for Erdogan, it is already mentioned in the article here.

S , Oct 22, 2018 1:43:55 PM | link
Meanwhile Haaretz publishes the following in its Opinion section: Why We Should Go Easy on the Saudi Crown Prince .
Piotr Berman , Oct 22, 2018 1:44:54 PM | link
Forget advisors. Seems that in his purge, MbS eliminated everybody with a functioning brain. At least, from the ranks responsible for "special actions". Some princes were kidnapped shortly after he got ministerial portfolios so at that time the art of committing atrocities on kith and kin without raising undue noise was not lost.

"What is interesting here, is that this event seems to have not been a random thing, but a carefully laid out trap they walked right into.

This might be the undoing of Trump, Bolton and the rest, in the midterms first and then in their ME plans. Watch for the Russians to come out as victors, yet again.

Posted by: Alpi57 | Oct 22, 2018 1:18:50 PM | 17"

In retrospect, it seems that Khashoggi was "suicidal", but probably he thought that his government will not be so monumentally stupid to kill him or kidnap in a consulate that is under monitoring of an unfriendly government. Perhaps he was persuaded by his princely mentors who knew that he is a sacrificial pawn. The purge of people with functioning brain could eliminate the threat of assassination by MbS own protecters, but it made him vulnerable in other ways.

Peter AU 1 , Oct 22, 2018 1:50:24 PM | link
Khashoggi may have thought Erdogan was his friend. From what I have read, they worked on a number of the same Muslim Brotherhood projects.

Turkey have the goods on the killing which means Turk intel was most likely watching or listening in real time to what was occurring in the consulate. Erdogan seems quite ruthless when setting a trap.

psychohistorian , Oct 22, 2018 1:52:54 PM | link
I agree with the previous comments by Passer By

This death is kabuki "wag the dog" type theatre for the masses while the real geo-political arm wrestling goes on behind the scenes

The world is being brought to a climax by the real or feigned death of empire and its too early to tell how the elite infighting will work out but the elite still expect to be in control with private finance when it is over.

Blue , Oct 22, 2018 1:54:11 PM | link
The link between Khashoggi and Erdoğan is not "fiendship", but the Muslim Brotherhood. Erdoğan made a similar scene about the Morsi's overthrow in Egypt. This is a Ikhwan vs Wahabbi spat.
Alpi57 , Oct 22, 2018 1:56:02 PM | link
@30

I couldn't imagine with the faux friendship that MBS has developed with Kushner/Mossad that they didn't know about this and allowed him to do something like this. There is a larger play here. Why this and why now? On the surface, this will derail the Iran plan entirely, not to mention a big dent in Trump and the midterms. This a gift to democrats. Why would they risk that over Khashoggi?

Susan Sunflower , Oct 22, 2018 2:05:42 PM | link
well, so far in the "damage control" column we have not seen vast alarms about "targeted assassinations" (of journalists or scientists) or much mention of the large-scale arrests of various Trump / Israel buddies and allies or -- for that matter --- the wholesale slaughter of Mexican journalists (not to mention the usual Putin fingerpointing). There is an intersection between international crime/money laundering and this sort of "pointless" ad hoc killing of the messengers which could also be "ripe" for discussion. The Trump "coverup" has been quite successful in protecting the usual suspects.
the pair , Oct 22, 2018 2:06:58 PM | link
#2 : he gets called "journalist" but his true vocation was professional ass kisser. it's not a huge leap of faith to assume he went from directly kissing saudi royal ass to smooching various high level turkish ones. maybe not a "friend" (but who really is at that level?) but probably a useful acquaintance.

now that we have the silly minutiae out of the way...this is still an increasingly amusing game of "let's you and him fight". the whole "ultimate game of taking down saudi arabia" idea floated by the turkish writer is just silly but it will make the royals slightly more malleable and it distracts from the "OMG iran is teh devul!!!1!!" bullshit we've been force-fed for the last few years (and decades). whether it disrupts the newish israel/saudi axis has yet to be seen but i doubt it.

i also keep thinking of the odd selective outrage - not just when it comes to yemen but going back to 9/11. 15 of those guys (going by the official story here) were saudis. relations barely skipped a beat after they offed ~3,000 of our own folks. 15 saudi guys butcher one saudi stenographer turned bezos/CIA company man and everyone shits their collective pants (including many of the most virulent "STFU trutherz!" establishment idiots and Brennan CIA types who have 9/11 stink all over them). Seems like a good time to dredge up any unfinished 9/11 business. after all, 3K americans = like 9 quadrillion yemenis, amirite?

Hoarsewhisperer , Oct 22, 2018 2:13:53 PM | link
The Khashoggi Affair has been messier than a dog's breakfast from the get go. Is it possible that MBS is using the same team of UK "Intelligence Experts" as the nonchalant and sleazy Theresa (Would I Lie To You) May?
joeymac , Oct 22, 2018 2:18:27 PM | link
@peter | Oct 22, 2018 1:44:39 PM | 28
And what's with this continuing blather about malign forces operating behind Trump's back to make him look bad? He went all in with a psychopath, sidelined all the seasoned diplomats, and left his fucking son-in-law in charge of his entire ME policy.

Birds of feather congregating?

Yonatan , Oct 22, 2018 2:32:51 PM | link
Khashoggi met his fiance (36 year old to his 59) in May 2018. By October 2018, they were looking to get married. One little problem. He is already married and had to arrange a separation. Did he go to the consulate of his own free will or was he 'pushed' (ie he went very reluctantly as he realized he was taking a big risk). His fiancée is documented as a PhD candidate (in what subject? At which institute? What was her background?) They managed to meet at some high level think-tank get-together. That sounds a bit unlikely for some random unconnected outsider. How did she manage to get invited to the meeting? In other circumstances (Assange, Vanunu, etc) a honeypot would come to mind.

Qui bono? Trump is negotiating with SWIFT to disconnect Iran from the world economy (an act of war?). Presumably once Iran reacts, it will be used as an excuse for an all out military attack against Iran, using Saudi airspace and ground facilities. Given Saudi has been making nice with Russia (and potentially Iran via Russian mediation), some 'encouragement' seems necessary for that to go ahead. Not so long ago, Trump stated that Saudi wouldn't last two weeks without US support, possibly a not-so-subtle hint. Corrupt leaders desire nothing more than holding on to power and the benefits of said power.

Lochearn , Oct 22, 2018 2:38:03 PM | link
@ 7

The situation is much more complicated than your rather arrogant comment suggests. The elites in the US are divided and have been since the election of Trump. The Democrats and their media have found an ideal weapon in the brutal demise of Khashoggi with which to bash Trump and bolster their chances in the mid-terms. We are perfectly aware of the hypocrisy involved by all elites. But another section of the elites, namely the military industrials and Wall Street (weapons and petrodollar) do not want any problems with Saudi Arabia, whatever MBS does or does not do. They want the story to go away. If they can get a more placid figure to lead the country all well and good but, if they can't they will stick with "bone saw man."

The situation has maybe come about because Saudi Arabia is concerned about lashing its future so completely to a sinking ship and a young upstart like MBS feels he is able to challenge the US, just as the Philippines' Duterte did when he cursed Obama; just as Turkey and India and indeed the Saudis have done by ordering the S-400 from Russia. Rebellion is in the air as everyone looks East.

GoraDiva , Oct 22, 2018 2:41:30 PM | link
I don't see how this would have any effect on the mid-terms. Most US-ians don't care. Also, pretty sure KSA is no friend to Muslim B-hood, so hard to believe that the sultan and MbS would have worked on any such projects. OTOH, it is "highly likely" that somewhere, MbZ lurks in the background. In some form or shape, he is a part of the trap (including that the trap could turn against him). This was an interesting discussion (and hear what Sharmine Narwani has to say at the end): https://www.rt.com/shows/crosstalk/441490-saudi-murder-journalist-trump/
b , Oct 22, 2018 2:45:08 PM | link
Reuters How the man behind Khashoggi murder ran the killing via Skype
He ran social media for Saudi Arabia's crown prince. He masterminded the arrest of hundreds of his country's elite. He detained a Lebanese prime minister. And, according to two intelligence sources, he ran journalist Jamal Khashoggi's brutal killing at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by giving orders over Skype.
...
Qahtani himself once said he would never do anything without his boss' approval.

"Do you think I make decisions without guidance? I am an employee and a faithful executor of the orders of my lord the king and my lord the faithful crown prince," Qahtani tweeted last summer.
...
According to one high-ranking Arab source with access to intelligence and links to members of Saudi Arabia's royal court, Qahtani was beamed into a room of the Saudi consulate via Skype.

He began to hurl insults at Khashoggi over the phone. According to the Arab and Turkish sources, Khashoggi answered Qahtani's insults with his own.

... ... ...

A Turkish intelligence source relayed that at one point Qahtani told his men to dispose of Khashoggi. "Bring me the head of the dog", the Turkish intelligence source says Qahtani instructed.
...
The Arab source and the Turkish intelligence source said the audio of the Skype call is now in the possession of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan. The sources say he is refusing to release it to the Americans.

Erdogan said on Sunday he would release information about the Turkish investigation during a weekly speech on Tuesday. Three Turkish officials reached by Reuters declined to comment ahead of that speech.

Mina , Oct 22, 2018 2:45:19 PM | link

Yonatan, please read the articles linked by b before asking wrong questions;
he was not married since right after he fled to the US in 2015 (trying to escape what happened to a number of his rich friends) the KSA regime made pressure on his family until his wife filed for divorce.
But Turkish law requests a proof of such a divorce to allow a man marrya Turkish woman.
Some good rants by PLang lately
https://tinyurl.com/yc9fg9xu
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/10/did-the-chihuahua-do-it.html

Posted by: Mina | Oct 22, 2018 2:45:19 PM | link

steven t johnson , Oct 22, 2018 2:57:35 PM | link
Trump has unilaterally begun economic warfare wherever and whenever he wants. He does not conduct foreign policy in consultation with anyone, least of all the Republican Party. If he or his own are taking bribes from Saudi, then he is likely going to retain MbS no matter the whining. It's not like the US is a democracy. If Kashoggi gave up something against Trump, so that Erdogan thinks he has something, Erdogan is overplaying his hand.

Trump is bullet proof politically, and he will almost certainly resort to violence if needed. Although cell phones can be cloned and placed from a car in front of an embassy, it is likely there were nineteen calls to MbS personally. The thing is, this is rather strong evidence the murder either was not premeditate...or the real point was the interrogation. We know nothing about what Kashoggi said. All this blather about the incident is drivel until we know that.

The effects of the midterm elections depend entirely on turnout. The Democrats have been trying to run to the right, which suppresses popular turnout. The centerpiece has been the Kavanaugh nomination, which they lost. Losing depresses turnout. The Republicans are consciously suppressing turnout. If people turn out, yes, there's a blue wave. But every indication is there's not going to be the kind of turnout. If turnout is low, the Democrats may even fracture as the few Democratic Party winners will be anathema to the moderate conservative paymasters. And, after Trump pretends not being massively rejected at the polls means he is massively popular instead of people being in despair at having no one for them, Trump will be even less inclined to dump MbS.

Erdogan is soft on Iran and Russia because the US insists on limiting his slice of the pie, in favor of Israel and Saudi. He's miscalculated the balance of forces.

Susan Sunflower , Oct 22, 2018 3:15:14 PM | link
Tomorrow will be the opening of the Arab Economic Summit (that MBS's was staking KSA's future on) apparently competing with Erdogan's "weekly speech" ... Watch what happens (except KSA/MBS could have scarcely engineered quite as effective a "kick me" sign to affix on the back of their robes.

KSA's economic development/innovation (rather like US infrastructure investment) is decades shopworn with little to show for it (AFAICT) AP Saudi prince's future put to the test at investment forum . Millions of bitterly disappointed over-educated young Saudis could be hard to contain given how long they've been fed empty promises of jobs-jobs-jobs and meaningful lives.

Erdogan has been handed a "golden football" to run with wrt knocking KSA's "dominance" into proportion (American's don't know there are any non-KSA lover's except evil Iran) I'm curious what the summit will produce, from whom ... strange to realize the Saudi's are publicly admitting to need to recruit investment to bankroll their future ...

karlof1 , Oct 22, 2018 3:17:58 PM | link
Agree with GoraDiva @46 that this will have negligible impact on midterms as Trump and 2/3s of Senate aren't on ballot. It may, however, have some impact on Trump's ability to help stump for other Reprehensibles.

Passer by @25--

I disagree with Korybko's take that Russia will be happy to fill the vacuum caused by the Outlaw US Empire's abandonment of its longtime ally if MbS remains. Most important is the media war being waged on Russia--Russia will be further demonized if it befriends MbS, which comes at a time when its image is recovering. IMO, Russia won't launch any new initiatives until the situation eases being content to continue its current policy.

Related to this affair is Caitlyn's latest penetrating essay : The Screens , which complements her earlier essay about narratives.

Christian Chuba , Oct 22, 2018 4:02:47 PM | link
Erdogan should be called Mac the Knife

He eviscerated bin Salman brilliantly. I don't think anyone can take Erdogan on his home turf.

[Oct 23, 2018] Khashoggi murder can be used to discredit the Trump presidency, expose the amorality of his foreign policy and sever his ties to patriotic elements of his Middle American constituency

The problem is the Trump already severed ties with votes who voted for him in a hope that the USA neocon-dominated foreign policy will be changed.
Oct 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Was the assassination of JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald still getting as much media coverage three weeks after his death as it did that first week after Nov. 22, 1963? Not as I recall.

Yet, three weeks after his murder, Jamal Khashoggi, who was not a U.S. citizen, was not killed by an American, and died not on U.S. soil but in a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, consumes our elite press.

The top two stories in Monday's Washington Post were about the Khashoggi affair. A third, inside, carried the headline, "Trump, who prizes strength, may look weak in hesitance to punish Saudis."

On Sunday, the Post put three Khashoggi stories on Page 1. The Post's lead editorial bashed Trump for his equivocal stance on the killing.

Two of the four columns on the op-ed page demanded that the Saudis rid themselves of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the prime suspect in ordering the execution.

Page 1 of the Outlook section offered an analysis titled, "The Saudis knew they could get away with it. We always let them."

Page 1 of the Metro section featured a story about the GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate in Virginia that began thus:

"Corey A. Stewart's impulse to use provocative and evidence-free slurs reached new heights Friday when the Republican nominee for Senate disparaged slain Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi

"Stewart appears to be moving in lockstep with extremist Republicans and conservative commentators engaging in a whisper campaign to smear Khashoggi and insulate Trump from global rebuke."

This was presented as a news story.

Inside the Business section of Sunday's Post was a major story, "More CEOs quietly withdraw from Saudi conference." Featured was a photo of JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon, who had canceled his appearance.

On the top half of the front page of the Sunday New York Times were three stories about Khashoggi, as were the two top stories on Monday.

The Times' lead editorial Monday called for a U.N. investigation, a cutoff in U.S. arms sales to Riyadh and a signal to the royal house that we regard their crown prince as "toxic."

Why is our prestige press consumed by the murder of a Saudi dissident not one in a thousand Americans had ever heard of?

Answer: Khashoggi had become a contributing columnist to the Post. He was a journalist, an untouchable. The Post and U.S. media are going to teach the House of Saud a lesson: You don't mess with the American press!

Moreover, the preplanned murder implicating the crown prince, with 15 Saudi security agents and an autopsy expert with a bone saw lying in wait at the consulate to kill Khashoggi, carve him up, and flee back to Riyadh the same day, is a terrific story.

Still, what ought not be overlooked here is the political agenda of our establishment media in driving this story as hard as they have for the last three weeks.

Our Beltway elite can smell the blood in the water. They sense that Khashoggi's murder can be used to discredit the Trump presidency, expose the amorality of his foreign policy and sever his ties to patriotic elements of his Middle American constituency.

How so?

First, there are those close personal ties between Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, son of the King, and Jared Kushner, son-in-law of the president of the United States.

Second, there are the past commercial connections between builder Donald Trump, who sold a floor of a Trump building and a yacht to the Saudis when he was in financial straits.

Third, there is the strategic connection. The first foreign trip of the Trump presidency was, at Kushner's urging, to Riyadh to meet the king, and the president has sought to tighten U.S. ties to the Saudis ever since.

Fourth, Trump has celebrated U.S. sales arms to the Saudis as a job-building benefit to America and a way to keep the Saudis as strategic partners in a Mideast coalition against Iran.

Fifth, the leaders of the two wings of Trump's party in the Senate, anti-interventionist Rand Paul and interventionist Lindsey Graham, are already demanding sanctions on Riyadh and an ostracizing of the prince.

As story after story comes out of Riyadh about what happened in that consulate on Oct. 2, each less convincing than the last, the coalition of forces, here and abroad, pressing for sanctions on Saudi Arabia and dumping the prince, grows.

The time may be right for President Trump to cease leading from behind, to step out front, and to say that, while he withheld judgment to give the Saudis every benefit of the doubt, he now believes that the weight of the evidence points conclusively to a plot to kill Jamal Khashoggi.

Hence, he is terminating U.S. military aid for the war in Yemen that Crown Prince Mohammed has been conducting for three years. Win-win.

[Oct 23, 2018] 1988 - Donald Trump on buying a yacht that he did not want

YouTube
An interesting fact that Khashoggi father was a well known and very rich Saudi arms merchant and he himself was very close to jihadists, especially those who belong to Muslim brotherhood.
Notable quotes:
"... Mr. Trump bought the Trump Princess, as the well-known yacht is called, for $30 million in 1987 from the Sultan of Brunei, who had secured it as collateral for a multimillion-dollar loan to Adnan M. Khashoggi. ..."
"... Mr. Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian arms dealer, reportedly spent $85 million to build and outfit the vessel with such features as a helicopter landing pad, a screening room and 800-film library, a discotheque, a hospital, sleeping quarters for a crew of 52, bathrooms of hand-carved onyx, and refrigerators that can carry a three-month supply of food for 100 people. The yacht has 14 fuel tanks that allow it to travel 8,500 miles without refueling. ..."
Oct 23, 2018 | www.youtube.com

Extracted from: Trump Is Reportedly Selling Yacht - The New York Times

Mr. Trump bought the Trump Princess, as the well-known yacht is called, for $30 million in 1987 from the Sultan of Brunei, who had secured it as collateral for a multimillion-dollar loan to Adnan M. Khashoggi.

Mr. Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian arms dealer, reportedly spent $85 million to build and outfit the vessel with such features as a helicopter landing pad, a screening room and 800-film library, a discotheque, a hospital, sleeping quarters for a crew of 52, bathrooms of hand-carved onyx, and refrigerators that can carry a three-month supply of food for 100 people. The yacht has 14 fuel tanks that allow it to travel 8,500 miles without refueling.

In 1989, the Princess was leased by the Trump's Castle hotel and casino and berthed at an Atlantic City marina. It was used for promotion and entertainment by the Castle and several other Trump enterprises.

Mr. Trump disclosed on a recent television appearance that the yacht was cruising the waters of the Far East while he sought a buyer for it.

[Oct 23, 2018] More details emerge on Khashoggi's alleged fianc e

MBS is now stained. Cue bono?
Notable quotes:
"... Hatice graduated from the Sharia college in the University of Istanbul in 2013 and got her MA in 2017 from the Faculty of Social Sciences – History Department at Salahaddin University after finishing a field study about sects in Oman. ..."
"... Sources close to Hatice's family said the family did not know their daughter was engaged to Khashoggi and were surprised to hear the news which they only learnt via media reports, adding that Hatice does not live in the same house with her family. ..."
Oct 23, 2018 | english.alarabiya.net

Ever since Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi went missing in Istanbul, the name Hatice Cengiz has dominated the scene and remained at the forefront of news headlines amid the mysterious aura of the past 13 days.

So who is this Turkish woman that emerged from behind her Twitter account to claim that she is Khashoggi's fiancée?

Hatice graduated from the Sharia college in the University of Istanbul in 2013 and got her MA in 2017 from the Faculty of Social Sciences – History Department at Salahaddin University after finishing a field study about sects in Oman.

She later joined a study program at the Ibn Khaldun University which is affiliated with the Justice and Development Party, and where Bilal Erdogan holds the post of Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

The Ibn Khaldun University which was founded in 2015 signed educational and cultural cooperation agreements with the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies where the Chairman of the Board of Trustees is Azmi Bishara.

Hatice presented herself as a freelance researcher of Gulf countries and presented academic studies about Oman, but the most important question is: Which party was Hatice Cengiz working for then, and which center did her studies and articles serve?

On July 13, 2018, she interviewed Dar Al-Arab media group's Executive Director Jaber al-Harmi for the foreign policy magazine, which is a periodical that is published in the Turkish and English languages and which is affiliated with the Institute of Foreign Policy that's affiliated with the Turkish Foreign Ministry.

In the interview, she addressed the convergence between Qatar and Iran and the stance of the countries that have boycotted Qatar.

The topic was under the headline "Qatari-Iranian relations and the region's developments after America's withdrawal from the nuclear deal," and in it, Hatice criticized Saudi Arabia in exchange for extending the "olive branch of peace" to the Khomeini regime.

Sources close to Hatice's family said the family did not know their daughter was engaged to Khashoggi and were surprised to hear the news which they only learnt via media reports, adding that Hatice does not live in the same house with her family.

[Oct 23, 2018] Insights Into The Khashoggi Ordeal; Who And Why by Ghassan Kadi

This is the same turkey in which Russian ambassador was gunned down... Russian ambassador shot dead in Ankara gallery Reuters (Dec 19, 2016)
Notable quotes:
"... As a Muslim, Mr. Khashoggi could have gone to any country that upholds Muslim marriage rites and remarried without having to formally divorce his first wife, and then go to America and live with his "new wife" under the guise of a de-facto relationship. So why would he risk his life and walk into a potential death trap? ..."
"... Logic stipulates that Khashoggi entered the Consulate after he was given vehement assurances that his safety was guaranteed by the Saudi Crown. He would have never entered the Consulate had he not been given this assurance. ..."
"... Hatice Cengiz (Turkish for Khadijeh Jengiz) it is claimed, raised the first alarm for Khashoggi's disappearance, announcing at the same time that she is/was his fiancée. But that latter announcement of hers came as a surprise even to Khashoggi's own family. ..."
"... Some reports allege that Hatice has had a colourful history, including Mossad training https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SPuKo7WMSA&feature=youtu.be . The same YouTube alleges that she was a Gülenist and was arrested by Erdogan and released under the condition that she works for his security apparatus in order to guarantee her freedom. If such is the case, do we know if she has been also blackmailed in exchange for security of family members, loved ones, property etc? We don't know. ..."
"... In reality, irrespective of what his family members are saying now, Khashoggi has never introduced her to the world as his fiancée; and this is fact. So was she his fiancée? It is at least possible that she wasn't? So, who was she to Khashoggi and what role did she possibly play? ..."
"... Gülen is falling out of America's favour as he seems to have outlived his use-by date, and the Gülenist movement would be in dire need of a new benefactor. ..."
"... Cengiz, a former Gülenist, released on the above-mentioned conditions and possible threats, might have introduced herself to Khashoggi as an undercover Gülenist, and she had a history to support her claim. Being a former Gülenist, she might have indeed kept a foot in the Gülenist camp, and with the diminishing support of the American Government to the Gulenist movement, she might have been recruited to source finance. The Gülenists might have eyed Saudi Arabia to take this role, and as the rift between the Saudi royals and Erdogan intensified after their former joint effort to topple the legitimate secular government of Syria ..."
"... MBS himself would have inadvertently invited the Gülenists to approach him when he announced, back in March 2018 during a visit to the Coptic Pope Tawadros II in Egypt, that the triangle of evil in the Middle East is comprised of Iran, Islamist extremists groups and Turkey, and, in naming Turkey, he obviously meant Erdogan personally. ..."
"... With the Saudi-led Wahhabi version of fundamentalist Islam competing with the Muslim Brotherhood side, politically and militarily headed by Erdogan, it is not far-fetched to believe that either party is conspiring to topple the other. ..."
"... It is highly likely that Saudi officials had several contingency plans for Khashoggi's visit; depending on its outcome and the information that he had to offer. Those plans might have included giving him a wide range of treatments, ranging from a red carpet reception in Saudi Arabia, to beheading and dismembering him within the Consulate's grounds. ..."
"... It is possible that the Saudi officials in Turkey have had their own contacts with the Gülenists prior to the supposed ground-breaking visit of Khashoggi. In such a case, if the story Khashoggi may have offered did not fall in line with the story the Saudi's already know, then Khashoggi would have automatically been branded as suspicious and his safe entry would have been revoked. In such a case, he would have walked into his own trap. ..."
"... If any of the above scenarios are accurate, then the role of Erdogan in this story is not that of a scavenger who capitalized on the rift generated between the Saudis and America, but that he was instrumental in conjuring up and orchestrating the whole drama. Erdogan might have subjected the Saudi Government to the Gülen litmus test, and in such a case, the victim is Saudi Arabia and the scavenger is America seeking silence money in lieu of continued protection of Saudi interests. ..."
"... In all of the above scenarios, Khashoggi would have been driven into the trap by his alleged fiancée and had his impunity revoked by the Saudi officials because he failed the test. ..."
"... Most likely, Khashoggi was after amnesty from the Saudi Crown, and this would be a safety concern not only for Khashoggi himself, but also for his family that continued to live in Saudi Arabia ..."
"... Arabic media are inundated with posts and YouTube videos that are very damning of Hatice Cengiz ..."
"... . In reality however, her sudden emergence as Khashoggi's "fiancée", the fact that she allegedly waited for nearly 24 hours before reporting his disappearance and her personal, professional and political history are all factors that cast much doubt about her innocence and instead, portray her as a possible key element in the series of events that led to the disappearance of Khashoggi. ..."
"... And if Trump is seizing the opportunity to grab MBS, and this time he will be grabbing by the wallet, if Erdogan smells a hint of preparedness of MBS to support Gülen, then Erdogan would want MBS's wallet and head. Any whichever way, the silver lining of this story is that for once, Saudi Arabia is finally running for cover. Few around the world will give this brutal royal family any sympathy. ..."
"... MBS has committed heinous war crimes in Yemen and has made huge errors of judgment with regard to Syria and Qatar. He made many enemies, and it seems that Erdogan is out to get him. ..."
"... It does seem possible that the Assad-must-go curse has reached the neck of the Saudi throne ..."
"... Interestingly enough apparently K handed his two phones to fiancée before he went in ..any good journalist would have left a cache somewhere to be opened incase of certain events?????? ..."
"... why enter the consulate in Turkey? And, not in USA? And, why not the Embassy as the Ambassador has more power, than the Consular? Also, both the Muslim Brotherhood have Wahhabism have been friends for ages, as their theology is very similar with each other. And, if fact Erdogan is not Muslim Brotherhood but a Sufi. ..."
"... I've read several articles about Khashoggi and my feeling right now is everyone is lying, including B and Ghassan Kadi. ..."
"... Seems to me that also the Old US Establishment, along with the EU Establishment, both anti-Trump, never wanted MbS in the first place. Israel, and therefore Trump, are happy with MbS but a lot of people would like to see him gone and get the old "safe" gang back (who paid handsome bribes/salaries for decades). MbS is similar to Trump, way too impulsive, unpredictable and manic, and a special kind of crazy on top to make for a reliable partner in crime. ..."
"... The Establishment wants the Saudis to sell them their oil, then to recycle the money back into their economies. They'd prefer that they do this quietly, without any big fuss. They can get rich doing so, but they shouldn't disrupt the world. And this is the role that the Saudis have played mostly for the last 60-70 years. ..."
"... Until MbS. So yes, it is conceivable that some other powerful people are getting a bit tired of him. The same powerful people who really don't want the disruption of the world that a Shiite-Sunni war over the oil fields would cause. The same powerful friends who are also worried about Trump upsetting apple carts. Perhaps these powerful people are moving against a war, which means against Trump on Iran, and against MbS if they feel he keeps stirring things up too much. ..."
"... One problem throughout this whole affair is that I don't believe the Turks. Erdogon shutdown or converted the independent media that they once had. And in a case like this, all information comes from the government anyways. The Sauds have been rightly attacked for changing their story. But the Turks have been too. I've gotten the feeling that the 'news' reports from Turkish leaks (supposedly) have simply been the plot lines of various Hollywood movies. The body was cut up (with a chainsaw? like in Texas?), the body was dissolved in acid, the killers watched on Skype (always good to get that hip tech tie-in to a story). It can't all be true. ..."
"... Like The Salisbury Affair, The Case of the Disappearing Lover in Instanbul simply is going to have to be one to sit back and wait and see what if anything actually emerges as the truth. ..."
"... Seems pretty clueless to drop the bits in a well. Maybe the "local contact" was actually the consul, suggesting: Hey, I have an idea! How about dropping the body parts down the well? ..."
"... That is about the dumbest thing I have heard yet in the Story of K. Except, the idea of the body double. The people who thought up the body double idea must be the same Einsteins who figured the well in the consul's garden was a solution to disposal. Keystone Konsul. ..."
"... That bit of imagination leads to the idea that one of Khashoggi's last thoughts was "shit, I knew getting married again was a bad idea." ..."
"... The interesting thing was watching the US media go crazy about this. I kept thinking how different was this from Obama ordering Anwar Al-Awaki executed by drone strike? Al-Awaki received no trial, or even some kind of demand. Obama and his team just had him executed. So MBS is a horrible monster for doing exactly what Obama did. ..."
"... Khashoggi seemed to be working to "end dictatorship" and spread "free speech," democracy, voting, opinion polls, feminism, gender theory, lgbt washrooms, all that. All the great stuff of democracy. Worked out great in Sweden, why not Saudi Arabia? ..."
"... It was Khashoggi beating the Assad must go drum. The last Saudi represented on this site said Assad is harmless as long as he understands Saudi interests exist in Syria. Not ideal, but a better offer than London's. Further, the dead "journalist" believed Syria should be divided, and worse, that we should now act as if Assad is already gone ..."
"... Seems to come down to him being lied to, conn'd or lured into the consulate and his death. Then we come to the whole other point of why on earth did the Saudis use their consulate as an assassination killing ground? ..."
"... Governments killing people within their consulates is very rare. For reasons that are now very obvious, if they weren't before. ..."
"... The pundits who say MBS wanted to send a message set off alarms in my brain. Because that is exactly the reason we are supposed to believe that Putin uses all sorts of bizarre assasination methods that are obviously traced back to him. He wants to send a message. Yeah, right. And that's why they brought a bleep-storm of trouble down on top of their heads. To send a message? ..."
Oct 23, 2018 | thesaker.is

­ When I worked and lived in Saudi Arabia, one of the first things I learnt was that the company I worked for had a fulltime employee with the job description of "Mu'aqeb". The best translation of this title is "expeditor". This man was in charge of every matter that had to do with dealing with government. He is the one who takes one's passport and sees that a Saudi "Iquama" (temporary certificate of residence) is produced. He is the one who renews driving licenses. He is the one that does the necessary paperwork to grant employees exit and re-entry visas when they go away on holidays. He even applies on one's behalf for visas to visit other countries. He even paid water and electricity bills. He did it all, and of course, on top of his salary, he expected a present from employees on their return to work from holidays, and some employees would risk big penalties smuggling in Playboy magazines to reward him with. But the company I worked for was not alone in this regard; all other companies had their own "Mu'aqeb".

It is against the Saudi psyche, culture and "pride" to go to a government office, wait in line and make an application for anything. Not even uneducated poor Saudis are accustomed to go through the rigmarole of government red-tape and routine.

Mr. Khashoggi was from the upper crust, and it is highly doubtful that he would have been willing and prepared to physically enter the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul seeking an official document.

Furthermore and more importantly, Mr. Khashoggi had a better reason not to enter any Saudi territory. Even though some recent reports portray him as a Wahhabi in disguise among other things, the man had nonetheless made some serious anti-MBS (Mohamed bin Salman) statements https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jamal-khashoggi-saudi-journalist-called-saudi-arabia-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salmans-behavior-in-foreign-policy-impulsive-2017/

Jamal Khashoggi was no fool. He knew the modus operandi of the Saudi Government too well. He knew that what he had said was tantamount to a death sentence in the brutal Kingdom of Sand. So what incited him to walk into the Consulate? To receive a divorce certificate so he could remarry as the reports are trying to make us believe? Not a chance.

But this is not all. As a Muslim, Mr. Khashoggi could have gone to any country that upholds Muslim marriage rites and remarried without having to formally divorce his first wife, and then go to America and live with his "new wife" under the guise of a de-facto relationship. So why would he risk his life and walk into a potential death trap?

Logic stipulates that Khashoggi entered the Consulate after he was given vehement assurances that his safety was guaranteed by the Saudi Crown. He would have never entered the Consulate had he not been given this assurance.

But why would the Saudi Government give him this assurance even though he had been very critical of MBS? A good question.

Once again, a logical hypothetical answer to this question could be that Khashoggi had some important meeting with a high ranking Saudi official to discuss some issues of serious importance, and this normally means that he had some classified information to pass on to the Saudi Government; important enough that the Saudi Crown was prepared to set aside Khashoggi's recent history in exchange of this information.

If we try to connect more dots in a speculative but rational manner, the story can easily become more interesting.

Hatice Cengiz (Turkish for Khadijeh Jengiz) it is claimed, raised the first alarm for Khashoggi's disappearance, announcing at the same time that she is/was his fiancée. But that latter announcement of hers came as a surprise even to Khashoggi's own family.

Not much is said and speculated about Hatice in the West, but she is definitely making some headlines in the Arab World, especially on media controlled and sponsored by Saudi Arabia. To this effect, and because the Saudi neck is on the chopping board, it is possible that for the first time ever perhaps, the Saudis are telling the truth.

But the Saudis are the boys who cried wolf, and no one will ever believe them. But, let us explore how they might have got themselves into this bind.

As we connect the dots, we speculate as follows:

Some reports allege that Hatice has had a colourful history, including Mossad training https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SPuKo7WMSA&feature=youtu.be . The same YouTube alleges that she was a Gülenist and was arrested by Erdogan and released under the condition that she works for his security apparatus in order to guarantee her freedom. If such is the case, do we know if she has been also blackmailed in exchange for security of family members, loved ones, property etc? We don't know.

It has also been reported that Jamal Khashoggi met her only as early as May 2018 and later introduced her as an expert on Omani history and politics. In reality, irrespective of what his family members are saying now, Khashoggi has never introduced her to the world as his fiancée; and this is fact. So was she his fiancée? It is at least possible that she wasn't? So, who was she to Khashoggi and what role did she possibly play?

The following speculation cannot be proved, but it makes sense:

To explain what a Gülenist is for the benefit of the reader who is unaware of this term, Erdogan blamed former friend and ally Fethullah Gülen for the failed coup attempt of July 2016 and persecuted his followers, putting tens of thousands of them in jail. Erdogan's relationship with America was already deteriorating at that time because of America's support to Syrian Kurds, and to add to Erdogan's woes, America was and continues to give Gülen a safe haven despite many requests by Erdogan to have him extradited to Turkey to face trial. But Gülen is falling out of America's favour as he seems to have outlived his use-by date, and the Gülenist movement would be in dire need of a new benefactor.

Cengiz, a former Gülenist, released on the above-mentioned conditions and possible threats, might have introduced herself to Khashoggi as an undercover Gülenist, and she had a history to support her claim. Being a former Gülenist, she might have indeed kept a foot in the Gülenist camp, and with the diminishing support of the American Government to the Gulenist movement, she might have been recruited to source finance. The Gülenists might have eyed Saudi Arabia to take this role, and as the rift between the Saudi royals and Erdogan intensified after their former joint effort to topple the legitimate secular government of Syria

The Gülenists would have found in Al-Saud what represents an enemy of an enemy, and they had to find a way to seek Saudi support against Erdogan. MBS himself would have inadvertently invited the Gülenists to approach him when he announced, back in March 2018 during a visit to the Coptic Pope Tawadros II in Egypt, that the triangle of evil in the Middle East is comprised of Iran, Islamist extremists groups and Turkey, and, in naming Turkey, he obviously meant Erdogan personally. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/08/saudi-crown-prince-sees-a-new-axis-of-evil-in-the-middle-east/

Khashoggi, with his expansive connections, looked like a good candidate to introduce the would-be new partners and broker a deal between them.

Back to what may have incited Khashoggi to enter the Saudi Consulate and to why the Saudi Government would have, in that case, given him a safe entry despite his history. Possibly, Khashoggi believed that he had a "big story" to relay to the Saudi Government; one that most likely exposed big time anti-Saudi dirt about Erdogan.

With the Saudi-led Wahhabi version of fundamentalist Islam competing with the Muslim Brotherhood side, politically and militarily headed by Erdogan, it is not far-fetched to believe that either party is conspiring to topple the other. If Khashoggi had a story to this effect, even if it was fake but credible enough for him to believe, it would have given him the impetus to seek an audience at the Saudi Consulate and hence an expectation for the Consulate to positively reciprocate. In reality, given the history and culture involved, it is hard to fathom that any scenario short of this one would have given either Khashoggi and/or the Saudi officials enough reasons to meet in the manner and place they did.

It is highly likely that Saudi officials had several contingency plans for Khashoggi's visit; depending on its outcome and the information that he had to offer. Those plans might have included giving him a wide range of treatments, ranging from a red carpet reception in Saudi Arabia, to beheading and dismembering him within the Consulate's grounds. What happened after Khashoggi entered the precinct of the Consulate is fairly muddy and hard to speculate on. If the above speculations thus far have been accurate, then these are the possible scenarios that followed the fateful CCTV coverage of Khashoggi's entry to the Consulate:

1. It is possible that the Saudi officials in Turkey have had their own contacts with the Gülenists prior to the supposed ground-breaking visit of Khashoggi. In such a case, if the story Khashoggi may have offered did not fall in line with the story the Saudi's already know, then Khashoggi would have automatically been branded as suspicious and his safe entry would have been revoked. In such a case, he would have walked into his own trap.

2. On the other hand, if Khashoggi indeed gave Saudi authorities vital information, so vital that it clearly is vehemently pro-Gülen, and as Gülen is no longer an American favourite, then upon his return to America he may have become a Saudi liability that can potentially muddy the Saudi-American waters that the Saudis desperately try to keep clear. In such an instance, it would be opportune for the Saudis to finish him off before he could return to America.

3. A third possibility is that some Saudi officials already working covertly with Gülen saw in Khashoggi an already persona non grata, a dangerous Erdogan implant and decided to take action against him.

If any of the above scenarios are accurate, then the role of Erdogan in this story is not that of a scavenger who capitalized on the rift generated between the Saudis and America, but that he was instrumental in conjuring up and orchestrating the whole drama. Erdogan might have subjected the Saudi Government to the Gülen litmus test, and in such a case, the victim is Saudi Arabia and the scavenger is America seeking silence money in lieu of continued protection of Saudi interests.

In all of the above scenarios, Khashoggi would have been driven into the trap by his alleged fiancée and had his impunity revoked by the Saudi officials because he failed the test.

But what triggered him off personally to walk into this possible trap? What was in it for him? Definitely not divorce documents. Most likely, Khashoggi was after amnesty from the Saudi Crown, and this would be a safety concern not only for Khashoggi himself, but also for his family that continued to live in Saudi Arabia. He may well have thought that by providing vital and sensitive information to his government, his previous "sins" would be set aside and he would be treated as a hero, his family would feel safe, despite that fact that he has criticized the Crown Prince in the past.

Arabic media are inundated with posts and YouTube videos that are very damning of Hatice Cengiz. Most of them perhaps are Saudi propaganda and should not be taken without a grain of salt. In reality however, her sudden emergence as Khashoggi's "fiancée", the fact that she allegedly waited for nearly 24 hours before reporting his disappearance and her personal, professional and political history are all factors that cast much doubt about her innocence and instead, portray her as a possible key element in the series of events that led to the disappearance of Khashoggi.

Furthermore, why would a person in her position make rules and conditions about meeting the President of the United States of America, even if this President is Donald Trump? ( Jamal Khashoggi's fiancee I will only visit Trump if he takes action World news The Guardian ) How many people in history have refused the invitation of American Presidents? Who does she think she is or who is she trying to portray herself as?

And if Trump is seizing the opportunity to grab MBS, and this time he will be grabbing by the wallet, if Erdogan smells a hint of preparedness of MBS to support Gülen, then Erdogan would want MBS's wallet and head. Any whichever way, the silver lining of this story is that for once, Saudi Arabia is finally running for cover. Few around the world will give this brutal royal family any sympathy.

There are other rumors spreading in the Arab world now alluding to the removal of MBS from office and passing over the reins to his brother. MBS has committed heinous war crimes in Yemen and has made huge errors of judgment with regard to Syria and Qatar. He made many enemies, and it seems that Erdogan is out to get him.

It does seem possible that the Assad-must-go curse has reached the neck of the Saudi throne.


JJ on October 23, 2018 , · at 11:22 am EST/EDT

https://www.rt.com/news/442023-khashoggis-body-parts-found/

Allegedly?

Erdogan presentation to his party today too most media seemingly reporting deep international concern and hubris from arms suppliers... Interestingly enough apparently K handed his two phones to fiancée before he went in ..any good journalist would have left a cache somewhere to be opened incase of certain events??????
No confirmation of victims "screams", etc although a there is one report he was held in a stranglehold which would prevent such vocalisation?

Talha on October 23, 2018 , · at 12:28 pm EST/EDT
You left the elephant out of the room. You are right that Jamal Khashoggi had no need to enter the consulate for his divorce, and you suggested the reason being quid pro quo. But why enter the consulate in Turkey? And, not in USA? And, why not the Embassy as the Ambassador has more power, than the Consular? Also, both the Muslim Brotherhood have Wahhabism have been friends for ages, as their theology is very similar with each other. And, if fact Erdogan is not Muslim Brotherhood but a Sufi.

So, why did you leave out the elephant in the room, Israel. With the fall of Saudi Arabia, Israel has more to loose and Iran has more to gain.

Talha

Zico the musketeer on October 23, 2018 , · at 3:48 pm EST/EDT
I was waiting for this article. Looks B is not buying this version.

"There seem to be a lot of conspiracy theories being weaved around the case. Some of them were mentioned in the comments here. I don't buy it. Turkey did not arrange the incident. I see no sign that the U.S., Israel, Qatar or the UAE had a hand in this. This was a very stupid crime committed by Mohammad bin Salman. Or even worse, a mistake. The wannabe-sultan Erdogan is a crafty politician. He is simply riding the wave."
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/10/how-will-caligula-fall.html#more

I've read several articles about Khashoggi and my feeling right now is everyone is lying, including B and Ghassan Kadi. (wrote this article. Mod.)

B ignores all said by Ghassan Kadi . And Ghassan Kadi is being soft on SA cuz Russian wants it. SA is a prize big enough to the bear get out of his cave. Deep State set the trap and SA fell like a kid cuz they are very predictable. They simply kill a lot! Everybody is trying to profit and only one thing is sure about all this: we will never know!

Christian W on October 23, 2018 , · at 12:36 pm EST/EDT
Seems to me that also the Old US Establishment, along with the EU Establishment, both anti-Trump, never wanted MbS in the first place. Israel, and therefore Trump, are happy with MbS but a lot of people would like to see him gone and get the old "safe" gang back (who paid handsome bribes/salaries for decades). MbS is similar to Trump, way too impulsive, unpredictable and manic, and a special kind of crazy on top to make for a reliable partner in crime.
Talks-to-Dawgs on October 23, 2018 , · at 3:41 pm EST/EDT
The Establishment wants the Saudis to sell them their oil, then to recycle the money back into their economies. They'd prefer that they do this quietly, without any big fuss. They can get rich doing so, but they shouldn't disrupt the world. And this is the role that the Saudis have played mostly for the last 60-70 years.

Until MbS. So yes, it is conceivable that some other powerful people are getting a bit tired of him. The same powerful people who really don't want the disruption of the world that a Shiite-Sunni war over the oil fields would cause. The same powerful friends who are also worried about Trump upsetting apple carts. Perhaps these powerful people are moving against a war, which means against Trump on Iran, and against MbS if they feel he keeps stirring things up too much.

Anonymous on October 23, 2018 , · at 2:48 pm EST/EDT
One problem throughout this whole affair is that I don't believe the Turks. Erdogon shutdown or converted the independent media that they once had. And in a case like this, all information comes from the government anyways. The Sauds have been rightly attacked for changing their story. But the Turks have been too. I've gotten the feeling that the 'news' reports from Turkish leaks (supposedly) have simply been the plot lines of various Hollywood movies. The body was cut up (with a chainsaw? like in Texas?), the body was dissolved in acid, the killers watched on Skype (always good to get that hip tech tie-in to a story). It can't all be true.

To some extant, I get the feeling I'm watching Qatar money buying news stories to get back at the Sauds. If so, good for them.

Like The Salisbury Affair, The Case of the Disappearing Lover in Instanbul simply is going to have to be one to sit back and wait and see what if anything actually emerges as the truth.

JJ on October 23, 2018 , · at 5:44 pm EST/EDT
Could not be sulphuric acid the "traditional acid" for dissolving bodies you would need more than 25 litres the most dangerous lethal fumes and smell would have filled the whole building which would have been contaminated other people choking with deadly fumes. How to get acid in and out/disposed ..people in PPE hosing down etc etc
Katherine on October 23, 2018 , · at 6:41 pm EST/EDT
I actually thought the "local contact" who supposed disposed of the body took it rolled up in a rug and cremated it. Seems pretty clueless to drop the bits in a well. Maybe the "local contact" was actually the consul, suggesting: Hey, I have an idea! How about dropping the body parts down the well?

That is about the dumbest thing I have heard yet in the Story of K. Except, the idea of the body double. The people who thought up the body double idea must be the same Einsteins who figured the well in the consul's garden was a solution to disposal. Keystone Konsul.

Katherine

Anonymous on October 23, 2018 , · at 2:53 pm EST/EDT
Maybe I'm being sexist, but I imagine a discussion between the couple, with the future wife saying she wants to get married, while the future husband is saying "Ah, aren't things great now? Why change it? We can just live together." That bit of imagination leads to the idea that one of Khashoggi's last thoughts was "shit, I knew getting married again was a bad idea."
John Neal Spangler on October 23, 2018 , · at 3:01 pm EST/EDT
The interesting thing was watching the US media go crazy about this. I kept thinking how different was this from Obama ordering Anwar Al-Awaki executed by drone strike? Al-Awaki received no trial, or even some kind of demand. Obama and his team just had him executed. So MBS is a horrible monster for doing exactly what Obama did.
Katherine on October 23, 2018 , · at 6:42 pm EST/EDT
And not to forget Assange. Still fighting for his freedom and his life. Elephant in the newsroom.

Katherine

Paul on October 23, 2018 , · at 3:24 pm EST/EDT
Khashoggi seemed to be working to "end dictatorship" and spread "free speech," democracy, voting, opinion polls, feminism, gender theory, lgbt washrooms, all that. All the great stuff of democracy. Worked out great in Sweden, why not Saudi Arabia?

All I'm getting out of this article is a desire to see the house of Saud fall. Plus some dense little leaguer stuff about a marriage or something. Come on!

It was Khashoggi beating the Assad must go drum. The last Saudi represented on this site said Assad is harmless as long as he understands Saudi interests exist in Syria. Not ideal, but a better offer than London's. Further, the dead "journalist" believed Syria should be divided, and worse, that we should now act as if Assad is already gone – said the guy who got sawed up and buried under a flower bed.

Anonymous on October 23, 2018 , · at 3:32 pm EST/EDT
Seems to come down to him being lied to, conn'd or lured into the consulate and his death. Then we come to the whole other point of why on earth did the Saudis use their consulate as an assassination killing ground? Governments wanting to kill people is nothing new. That's what governments do. Governments killing people within their consulates is very rare. For reasons that are now very obvious, if they weren't before.

The pundits who say MBS wanted to send a message set off alarms in my brain. Because that is exactly the reason we are supposed to believe that Putin uses all sorts of bizarre assasination methods that are obviously traced back to him. He wants to send a message. Yeah, right. And that's why they brought a bleep-storm of trouble down on top of their heads. To send a message?

Email is cheaper. And if someone is dead from methods not traced back to you, then someone else goes and whispers the message into the few ears you want to hear it, that is a lot more effective than either Novachuk in a park or a bloody murder in a consulate.

Anonymous on October 23, 2018 , · at 4:15 pm EST/EDT
Israel/US/Saudi tried to pass Turkey off as the sole sponsor and creator of ISIS. It was an important player, certainly, largely because of its geographic location. So a bit of revenge?

As with all these events, there will be multiple facets from the various actors, some mutually exclusive.

The only thing that is certain so far is the west's concern for Saudi's alleged execution of a 'journalist' is rank hypocrisy.

pogohere on October 23, 2018 , · at 4:54 pm EST/EDT
I had some trouble with the syntax here:

"2. On the other hand, if Khashoggi indeed gave Saudi authorities vital information, so vital that it clearly is vehemently pro-Gülen, and as Gülen is no longer an American favourite, then upon his return to America he may have become a Saudi liability that can potentially muddy the Saudi-American waters that the Saudis desperately try to keep clear. In such an instance, it would be opportune for the Saudis to finish him off before he could return to America."

The SA gang would want to protect the "vital" . . . pro-Gulan" information obtained from K because that information would have given the SA gang an advantage in dealing with America because a K running free could expose SA sources and knowledge, so he had to be eliminated. (??)

Or, Erdogan knows via Cengiz that K believes he can facilitate a deal between Gulan and SA to the detriment of Turkey, in order that K can protect his family in SA. But SA already knows somehow that K is in effect an agent for SA's enemy Erdogan and is peddling polyester rugs, that K's story is donkey doo, so SA believes K is betraying SA with said donkey doo, so out comes the Popeil's Pocket Body Dismemberer. ??

". . . should not be taken for (without) a grain of salt." ??

As for the conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and SA's Wahabbists, it strikes me that the custodianship of the two holy mosques in SA, or better said the moral leadership role that said literal custodianship confers could be in contention if Erdogan can demonstrate to his immense egoic neo-Ottoman satisfaction belongs to Turkey under his direction.

It seems no matter who "wins" every one of the players loses credibility any way this plays out.

Katherine on October 23, 2018 , · at 6:48 pm EST/EDT
"contention if Erdogan can demonstrate to his immense egoic neo-Ottoman satisfaction belongs to Turkey under his direction."

This was my main takeaway from Erd's address to Parliament. The bit about the Saudis as protectors of the holy cities. Like, maybe not. LIke, look at the mess they have made.

They are clearly incompetent and have no standing as protectors of holy sites. Hmm, so who would be a better "protector"? Could it be the one who arrogates to himself the authority to call out false 'protectors" by any chance?

Katherine

Katherine

Uncle Bob on October 23, 2018 , · at 5:47 pm EST/EDT
Probably this murder will end with nothing more than "The Saudis are really evil. Who didn't already know that". But lets look at what we do know about the killing (and what is rumored in news reports).

Before Khashoggi goes into for the meeting a team of 15 Saudi agents, several of them men close to MBS arrive from Saudi Arabia and go into the building. Including among them an autopsy expert with a "bonesaw". One of them is a body double for Khashoggi and carries with him a fake beard to make his resemblance to Khashoggi even stronger. An hour or so later that man leaves the building wearing Khashoggi's clothes and sunglasses. And the fake beard. So that the CCTV might record him as Khashoggi.

RT reports that minutes before the killing Khashoggi talks on the phone to MBS. Its thought that MSB wants Khashoggi to agree to return to Saudi Arabia, Khashoggi refuses. Right after that Khashoggi is killed and dismembered. The Turkish press is now reporting that parts of Khashoggi's remains have been found in a well at the Saudi Consuls official residence. I'd say with that kind of evidence anyone would have to be braindead (or just not willing to admit the truth for political reasons), to not conclude MBS is up to his beard in this conspiracy to commit murder.

One question being asked is why would MBS risk it. But I think the answer is simple. He believes he is untouchable and can do whatever he wants (the track record for that is pretty good for him until now, and maybe now as well). He took power in Saudi Arabia from his cousins, and got away with it. He starts and conducts a bloody war against Yemen, and isn't punished. He holds hostage dozens of the wealthiest Saudis and tortures them for large chunks of their wealth. And gets away with it. He kidnaps the Lebanese PM, and forces him to resign (at least for a while). And he gets no punishment even for that. He threatens Qatar with war, closes the border. And still no punishment. He funds terrorists all over the Middle East. And yet again no punishment. So why on earth would he pause at murdering a "pain in the a$$" Saudi dissident who dares to defy him. He may have gone a "bridge too far" this time. But his record points to his surviving this time too (hopefully not).

Katherine on October 23, 2018 , · at 7:49 pm EST/EDT
Has anyone commented of the features of this grisly murder that make it look like some kind of ritual murder? They could have just stabbed or strangled him or druged him. Bu why cut off fingers? Symbolism? Why deface facial features? Was he drawn and quartered like traitors in medieval Europe? Or was it renaissance Europe?
And, what happened to all the blood? How did they keep it off the clothing that the body double then donned?

Just wondering what kind of "message" K's murder was designed to send to him, as he died. Or, what kind of cultic weirdness was being provided for bin Salman to feel satisfaction at the manner of the death?

Katherine

[Oct 22, 2018] Cherchez la femme

Highly recommended!
'Cherchez la femme' is sometimes mistakenly thought to refer to men's attempts to pursue romantic liaisons with women. In fact, the phrase, which is occasionally used in its loose English translation 'look for the woman', expresses the idea that the source of any given problem involving a man is liable to be a woman. That isn't to say that the woman herself was necessarily the direct cause of the problem, as in Shakespeare's Macbeth for instance, but that a man has behaved stupidly or out of character in order to impress a woman or gain her favour. 'Cherchez la femme' - the meaning and origin of this phrase
Notable quotes:
"... His fiance is documentd as a PhD candidate (in what subject? At which institute? What was her background?) They managed to meet at some high level think-tank get-together. That sounds a bit unlikely for some random unconnected outsider. How did she manage to get invited to the meeting? In other circumstances (Assange, Vanunu, etc) a honeypot would come to mind. ..."
"... She is linked to a humanitarian aid organisation IHH whose head Bulent Yıldırım appears to have links with ISIS and al Qaeda. ..."
Oct 22, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Greece , Oct 22, 2018 4:10:22 PM | link

Cherchez la femme

Khashoggi met his fiance (36 year old to his 59) in May 2018. By October 2018, they were looking to get married. One little problem. He is already married and had to arrange a separation. Did he go to the consulate of his own free will or was he 'pushed' (ie he went very reluctantly as he realised he was taking a big risk). His fiance is documentd as a PhD candidate (in what subject? At which institute? What was her background?) They managed to meet at some high level think-tank get-together. That sounds a bit unlikely for some random unconnected outsider. How did she manage to get invited to the meeting? In other circumstances (Assange, Vanunu, etc) a honeypot would come to mind.

Posted by: Yonatan | Oct 22, 2018 2:32:51 PM | 44

Indded. These are some good questions. Nobody asks anything about the fiance. Like she is not even there.

Jen , Oct 22, 2018 6:38:56 PM | link

Yonatan @ 44, Greece @ 61:

I posted this reply to LittleWhiteCabbage on a previous MoA comments thread:

LittleWhiteCabbage @ 223:

I would not trust Hatice Cengiz (the fiancée) even if Jamal Khashoggi did.

Apparently her family did not know she was engaged to marry him until the news of his disappearance / murder became public. She has not been living with her birth family for some time. She first met Khashoggi only in May this year.

She is linked to a humanitarian aid organisation IHH whose head Bulent Yıldırım appears to have links with ISIS and al Qaeda.

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/gulf/2018/10/18/Khashoggi-s-alleged-fianc-e-and-ties-to-a-radical-charity-linked-to-ISIS-al-Qaeda.html
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/former-turkish-counter-terror-chief-exposes-governments-support-for-isis-d12238698f52

Methinks we would be wise not to give this 36-year-old "girl" a pass.

Incidentally the first link is now down but you can still read the Insurge Intelligence link about IHH. Cengiz has now been placed under 24-hour police protection in Istanbul.

[Oct 21, 2018] From Soft Tyranny To Totalitarian Rule America s Unrelenting Data Collection

Notable quotes:
"... More than 60 percent of Americans who have some European ancestry can be identified using DNA databases – even if they have not submitted their own DNA, researchers reported Thursday. ..."
"... Enough people have done some kind of DNA test to make it possible to match much of the population, the researchers said. So even if you don't submit your own DNA, if a cousin does, it could lead people to you. ..."
"... The point here is the stupid, faddish public is dumb enough to submit the material the very DNA being used by the "trusted" authorities either out in the open or by back-door methods to round up all of the DNA for the surveillance state. ..."
"... I invite anyone to comment who has experience with a "transfer station," or other garbage collection facility, and anyone in the healthcare/hospital industry with some inside info as to their nefarious methods. You can easily see from these examples how they are hard on the trail relentless bloodhounds that have the scent of their quarry and they will not stop until everyone is categorized and monitored. Then the real fun begins. ..."
"... The same group (ELITE/DEEPSTATE) that wants this Tyranny outcome is also supporting the infighting, LGBTQ rtstuv, BLM, CODE PINK, ME TOO etc etc... They know that as long as we (the working class tax paying stiffs) think this is actually a left/right- Dem/Rep issue and keep bickering over the BS, we will never unite against the takeover of our country and begin to unite to defend our rights. ..."
Oct 21, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Walmart is interested in what's going on in your body while you shop.

The company wants to collect this data in a particularly creepy way: through the handles of their shopping carts. Walmart recently submitted a patent to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office called " System and Method for a Biometric Feedback Cart Handle ," CBInsights reports.

These innovative shopping cart handles would collect your biometric data, meaning your stress level, your body temperature, and heart rate -- all while you're strolling through the aisles of your local store, filling your cart with Walmart's everyday low-priced items.

The article proceeds to explain Walmart's "spin" on it is to provide a way to "check on a customer with a physical problem."

Since when has Walmart ever been concerned about anyone's physical well-being? Isn't this the company that settled out of court for millions to pay for stolen labor time and breaks from employees? Isn't this the same Walmart that twenty years ago put small stores in to break local competitors (Mom and Pop stores) in small towns and when they went belly up, closed their small Walmarts and "plopped" a Super-Walmart down in the center of where five small ones used to be? Then all the little serfs could come from miles around to service the monolith with their play money, as the local economies of the small towns died, right? Worse. Being a "too big to fail" type of business, they're deep in bed with the governments, federal and state. Simple data collection "for your own safety and well-being," right?

No. They're going to tie this data in with all of the other micro-data and metadata they are already gathering filming you with their little cameras filming Johnny Jones Junior and Daddy Jones as they pick up a box of shells for the shotgun amount and type recorded and filed next to the photos and film with their names and biometrics.

They want every piece of information on you and your family, and they're not going to stop until they have it all of it.

Article number two is even worse, as you may deduce from the title. Published by Maggie Fox of NBC News, it is entitled " DNA databases can send the police or hackers to your door, study finds ." Take a look at this excerpt:

More than 60 percent of Americans who have some European ancestry can be identified using DNA databases – even if they have not submitted their own DNA, researchers reported Thursday.

Enough people have done some kind of DNA test to make it possible to match much of the population, the researchers said. So even if you don't submit your own DNA, if a cousin does, it could lead people to you.

They said their findings, published in the journal Science, raise concerns about privacy. Not only could police use this information, but so could other people seeking personal information about someone.

The article goes on to talk about Joseph DeAngelo, a former cop in California suspected of murder, and how they nabbed him by using DNA submitted by a "distant cousin" that narrowed down the list for cops on his trail. Read the article for more specifics and demographics on these DNA "commercial" test kits.

The point here is the stupid, faddish public is dumb enough to submit the material the very DNA being used by the "trusted" authorities either out in the open or by back-door methods to round up all of the DNA for the surveillance state.

I invite anyone to comment who has experience with a "transfer station," or other garbage collection facility, and anyone in the healthcare/hospital industry with some inside info as to their nefarious methods. You can easily see from these examples how they are hard on the trail relentless bloodhounds that have the scent of their quarry and they will not stop until everyone is categorized and monitored. Then the real fun begins.

To digress: this is why we must all be of one accord, and disseminate this information and take steps while there is still time. As the weeks, months, and years roll by; the hellish apparatus of what was once termed "government" becomes a machine for rule by enslavement. That machine is perfecting itself. When control is finally obtained total, unchallenged control? That's when the liquidations the killings will begin, for the ownership of the resources and for the control and enslavement of all humanity.

perikleous , 8 hours ago link

The same group (ELITE/DEEPSTATE) that wants this Tyranny outcome is also supporting the infighting, LGBTQ rtstuv, BLM, CODE PINK, ME TOO etc etc... They know that as long as we (the working class tax paying stiffs) think this is actually a left/right- Dem/Rep issue and keep bickering over the BS, we will never unite against the takeover of our country and begin to unite to defend our rights.

They the ruling ELITE have funded and played us against one another using our phobias as ammunition (gay/trans rights, racism,religious beliefs, even our political views ) used to exploit us and keep us infighting to avoid the true threat Deep State/ELITE ruling class!

OverTheHedge , 6 hours ago link

What are you getting out of all this? Seriously - are you having fun? Does your career of choice provide you with enough fulfillment to justify the extravagant costs and loss of your time? Being single, (and I assume young), you can go anywhere in the world, do any job, be any person you wish to be. Joint the French foreign legion, watch whales from a tourist charter boat, become a fish and vegitables farmer in Vietnam - if you can think of it, you can do it.

So again - your current lifestyle - what's in it for YOU? Are you having fun yet?

My personal recommendation would be to move out of the city, buy a plot of land and hand build your own house, slowly, using the raw materials from your land. Work when you have to, learn mad skills that become tradeable, grow your own food. Anyone can do it, and back in the day EVERYONE used to do it. But do some travelling first, to wrap your head around how big the world is, and how irrelevant governments and rules are.

Oh, and never take unsolicited advice from strangers on the internet. That's first on the list.

brooklinite8 , 2 hours ago link

OverTheHedge... I appreciate your advise. I have been thinking of moving out of the country all together. This thought might get a serious taking once I do some traveling like you said. I have no job satisfaction. I have no philosophy side feeding my brain here.

I feel like I am just a machine. I am thinking of traveling Asia may be next year. I will sure do it. Thanks for the advise again. I do believe there are other ways to live life. There are other ways to be satisfied and die with out a guilty feeling. Thanks alot my friend.

AlaricBalth , 1 hour ago link
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?...

The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

[Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir

Highly recommended!
UK politicians in Skripal story behaved by cheap clowns. Their story with door knob was pathetic. They tried to invent the legend with poisoning on the fly and that shows. There is definitely something else brewing here and Shamir proposed his version with Skripal double dealings or something along those line is quite plausible.
We will never know, but I think British discredited themselves for the whole world in this story. Trump was not better will using this tory to impose additional sanctions on Russia. This is just another proof that he is another neocon who during election campaign like Obama played the role of isolationalist and then appointed Haley to UN and hired Pompeo as his Secretary of state and Bolton as his security advisor -- a typical "bat and switch" operation in US politics.
Notable quotes:
"... Vrublevsky thinks that British intelligence convinced the GRU (probably we should say that GRU is not called GRU anymore but GU, the Chief Directorate of the General Staff, but it hardly matters) that Mr Skripal wanted to return home to Russia. Probably they were told that Mr Skripal intended to bring some valuable dowry with him, including Porton Down data and the secrets of the Golden Rain dossier. It is possible that Skripal had been played, too; perhaps he indeed wanted to go back to Russia, the country he missed badly. ..."
"... As we had learned from videos and stills published by the Brits, the two men had been carefully followed from the beginning to the end. Meanwhile, British intelligence staged a 'poisoning' of Skripal and his daughter, and the two agents quickly returned home. ..."
"... There is not a single man close to Russian intelligence who thinks that Skripal had actually been poisoned by the Russians. First, there was absolutely no reason to do it, and second, if the Russians would poison him, he would stay poisoned, like the Ukrainian Quisling Stepan Bandera was. ..."
"... However, by playing this card, the British secret service convinced the Foreign Office to expel all diplomats who had contacts and connection to the exposed GRU agents. The massive expulsion of 150 diplomats caused serious damage to the Russian secret services. ..."
"... Such a massive operation against Russian agents and their contacts could signal forthcoming war. In normal circumstances, states do not reveal their full knowledge of enemy agents. ..."
"... I do not know what is the truth. At this point I no longer care because we will never know but it will be the British version that will be the most popular. I like most people like good stories. Unfortunately for Russia the Brits have better script writers, director and actors. ..."
Oct 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

... ... ...

Vrublevsky thinks that British intelligence convinced the GRU (probably we should say that GRU is not called GRU anymore but GU, the Chief Directorate of the General Staff, but it hardly matters) that Mr Skripal wanted to return home to Russia. Probably they were told that Mr Skripal intended to bring some valuable dowry with him, including Porton Down data and the secrets of the Golden Rain dossier. It is possible that Skripal had been played, too; perhaps he indeed wanted to go back to Russia, the country he missed badly.

Two GRU agents, supposedly experts on extraction (they allegedly sneaked the Ukrainian president Yanukovych from Ukraine after the coup and saved him from lynching mob) were sent to Salisbury to test the ground and make preparations for Skripal's return. As we had learned from videos and stills published by the Brits, the two men had been carefully followed from the beginning to the end. Meanwhile, British intelligence staged a 'poisoning' of Skripal and his daughter, and the two agents quickly returned home.

There is not a single man close to Russian intelligence who thinks that Skripal had actually been poisoned by the Russians. First, there was absolutely no reason to do it, and second, if the Russians would poison him, he would stay poisoned, like the Ukrainian Quisling Stepan Bandera was.

However, by playing this card, the British secret service convinced the Foreign Office to expel all diplomats who had contacts and connection to the exposed GRU agents. The massive expulsion of 150 diplomats caused serious damage to the Russian secret services.

Still, the Russians had no clue how the West had learned identities of so many diplomats connected to GRU. They suspected that there was a mole, and a turncoat who delivered the stuff to the enemy.

That is why Vladimir Putin decided to dare them. As he knew that the two men identified by the British service had no connection to the alleged poisoning, he asked them to appear on the RT in an interview with Ms Simonyan. By acting as village hicks, they were supposed to provoke the enemy to disclose its source. The result was unexpected: instead of revealing the name of a turncoat, the Belling Cat, a site used by the Western Secret Services for intentional leaks, explained how the men were traced by using the stolen databases. Putin's plan misfired.

The Russian secret service is not dead. Intelligence services do suffer from enemy action from time to time: the Cambridge Five infiltrated the upper reaches of the MI-5 and delivered state secrets to Moscow for a long time, but the Intelligence Service survived. Le Carre's novels were based on such a defeat of the intelligence. However they have a way to recover. Identity of their top agents remain secret, and they are concealed from the enemy's eyes.

But in order to function properly, the Russians will have to clean their stables, remove their databases from the market place and keep its citizenry reasonably safe. Lax, and not-up-to-date agents do not apparently understand the degree the internet is being watched. Considering it should have been done twenty years ago, and meanwhile a new generation of Russians has came of age, perfectly prepared to sell whatever they can for cash, it is a formidable task.

There is an additional reason to worry. Such a massive operation against Russian agents and their contacts could signal forthcoming war. In normal circumstances, states do not reveal their full knowledge of enemy agents. It made president Putin worry; and he said this week: we'll go to heaven as martyrs, the attackers will die as sinners. In face of multiple and recent threats, this end of the world is quite possible.


utu , says: October 20, 2018 at 4:23 am GMT

Great story. If told many people would believe it. But now it is kind of late. So why it wasn't told within few days or weeks of Skripal affair? Why it is the British media that has initiative and Russian media is reactive and defensive? The story that Skripal wanted to return and that two agents were lured in there should have been told right away and that it turned out be MI5 provocation should have been insinuated. And the two agents should have been interviewed on Russian media. Instead we get defensive inept and indolent Russian reactions.

I do not know what is the truth. At this point I no longer care because we will never know but it will be the British version that will be the most popular. I like most people like good stories. Unfortunately for Russia the Brits have better script writers, director and actors.

jilles dykstra , says: October 20, 2018 at 7:25 am GMT
@utu " Instead we get defensive inept and indolent Russian reactions."
The reaction 'if we want to kill somebody that somebody does not survive' I cannot see as inept and indolent.
Malaysian Truther , says: October 20, 2018 at 8:24 am GMT
Excellent piece by Israel Shamir which I think gives the correct explanation of the Skripal poisoning. This was a classic fishing, 'click bait' operation which produced a very valuable haul for Western Intelligence. The only question is whether Skripal cooperated with it – which I think he did – not knowing that both he and his daughter were meant to die. Hence Putin's rage against Skripal a few weeks ago ( calling him a scumbag traitor etc, etc) after the Russian operatives were identified because retired agents are supposed to stay retired.

Russia made a very serious mistake with the RT interview with the 2 operatives. Better not to say anything if you can't give the whole story. The GU weren't happy to show their incompetence, but compounded the original mistake with obvious lying. That was a propaganda gift to the Western media and has helped convince original disbelievers of Russian perfidy.

Russia needs to step up its game especially in the media dept.

Tom Welsh , says: October 20, 2018 at 9:38 am GMT
"Unfortunately for Russia the Brits have better script writers, director and actors".

Maybe, if your taste runs to "Dr Who" or "Carry On Spying". That's about the level of the Skripal nonsense.

If it was meant for public consumption, the British government's opinion of the British people is much lower than mine.

jilles dykstra , says: October 20, 2018 at 10:33 am GMT
@Anatoly Karlin " British or American human capital, but there are certainly consummate professionals relative to what passes for today's Russian intelligence services. "

On what this 'certainly' is based, I see no argument whatsoever.
Already a long time ago, I must admit, the CIA director had to admit to senator Moynihan that he had lied about the CIA not laying mines in Havana harbour.
A professional in espionage does not get caught.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 'Secrecy', New Haven 1998
Anyone acquinted with Sept 11 understands that the USA's secret army, the CIA, was involved.
Another blunder.
As far as I know British secret services never get caught.
How clever the Russians are, suppose quite clever, I for one do not think that the stupid stories about for example Skripal have any truth in them.
Until now the asserted Russian meddling in USA elections have not been proved.
Do not know of anything credible that Russian intelligence people are said to have done.
But of course Russian intelligence does exist.

Fatima Manoubia , says: October 20, 2018 at 11:18 am GMT
@Anatoly Karlin

"A related problem is that since there is now a free market economy, with many more attractive career options for talented people, the high quality people go to work in other spheres, leaving the intelligence agencies with the dregs;" .

A direct result of erasing ideology so as to erase personality cult towards highly respected people in former USSR .When you have no ideology ( or worst, share ideology with your opponent, i.e free market .) all what you have, from values to secrets, from scientific human capital to secret service officials, are out there in the global market for possible selling to the best postor .this is the principle of capitalism .. after all, it is said, almost everybody has a price .The challenge is finding out where that little bunch who have not are ..Obviously, in this scenario, the one who has the printing machine has a "little" advantage How to overcome this would be part of "what is to be done" ..

Ilyana_Rozumova , says: October 20, 2018 at 12:07 pm GMT
If the Russians wanted to kill them they would be dead. Period. It is all FN hoax.
The latest English came up with was that poison was smeared on the door handle and that both touched the door handle. Give me a break. Such a idiocy. Just imagine the exit procedure where both are touching the door knob.
And than both Russians went to garbage dump carrying the little bottle and thru it there.
What an exemplary citizen neat behavior by Russians,
All English story is such a stupid idiocy that it turns my stomach.
All we like sheep , says: October 20, 2018 at 12:14 pm GMT

However, the presence of Russian spies in Salisbury can be explained by its nearness to Porton Down, the secret British chemical lab and factory for manufacturing chemical weapons applied by the White Helmets in Syria in their false-flag operation in Douma and other places. It is possible that a resident of Salisbury (Mr Skripal?) had delivered samples from Porton Down to the Russian intelligence agents. This makes much more sense than the dubious story of Russians trying to poison an old ex-spy who did his stretch in a Russian jail.

If Mr. Skripal has been poisoned by the stuff of which he himself took samples in Porton Down, this would run completely parallel to the earlier poisoning of Mr. Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko, who also became ill because of carrying poison (polonium) around.

Eagle Eye , says: October 20, 2018 at 12:54 pm GMT

If [Yulia Skripal] had not had the courage to make this call while slipping the observance of British intelligence, she would probably be dead by now.

Both Skripals are most likely DEAD, murdered by British "intelligence" services.

The formulaic and curiously uninterested treatment of the matter in the British media seems inconsistent with the Skripals still being alive.

The article above suggests that the Skripals were unwitting or witting participants in a sting to expose Russian intelligence agents. More importantly, Sergey Skripal appears to have had a role in the creation of the DNC's "dossier" to undermine the Trump presidencey.

Whatever the background, Sergey Skripal became privy to important secrets that the Brits and their seditious allies in the U.S. Deep State do not want exposed.

macilrae , says: October 20, 2018 at 2:38 pm GMT
In the Skripal case the British have not explained why, after claiming to have found the closest approach to a smoking gun in the form of traces of novichok in that hotel room, the hotel was not then immediately quarantined.

And assuredly, with Putin's name on the line, the Russians have to do a better job if they are to refute the standing accusations – the RT interview was something of a PR disaster.

The Belloncat data, although superficially convincing, could so easily have been faked by anybody with reasonable knowledge of Russian internet infrastructure and some proficiency in Photoshop.

CalDre , says: October 20, 2018 at 3:21 pm GMT
@utu

But now it is kind of late. So why it wasn't told within few days or weeks of Skripal affair?

It's still not being told – believe it or not, Israel Shamir is not Sergei Lavrov. I hypothesized to the same state of affairs in early September re: Skripals.

But I did not know about these massive intelligence security breaches in Russia. Wow, that's huge. Even though it's not clear to me how this indicates Putin's plan misfired. If anything he got exactly what he wanted: confirmation that the "West" had access to the entire passport database. Knowing what your enemy has in intelligence is a huge win, now they can work on correcting it (hard as it may be, it would be impossible without knowing).

CalDre , says: October 20, 2018 at 3:24 pm GMT
@macilrae You are right, it could have been faked, anything can be faked today, even a video of Putin speaking (search for "deep fakes" and watch the video at https://www.wsj.com/articles/deepfake-videos-are-ruining-lives-is-democracy-next-1539595787 ).

But the fact is Russia has not really disputed the results so I am fairly confident that not only was Belling Cat right, but Israel is right, and now we have the situation where Russia knows that Western intelligence has full access to Russia's passport database.

wayfarer , says: October 20, 2018 at 3:55 pm GMT
@Tyrion 2 Had some experiences with Chinese and Mossad spies, not to mention Russian Jewish hard-drug dealers.

Here are a few examples.

There was an AMES postdoc at UCSD, a Chinese applied-math brain who had a 10-plus female handler. She'd stop by occasionally to check up on him. He always get extremely anxious when she was around. Couldn't figure out if it was fear, sexual excitement, or a combination of both.

There was an old Chinese man and his foxy young female protege, who enjoyed filming U.S. military maneuvers along the San Diego coast. I observed their operation for days.

There was a swing-shift cleaning crew in a Southern California high-tech mfg facility that was all Chinese, in an area that typically employed Latin American crews. Its head honcho was a beautiful Chinese lady. They made it their job to sort through trash bins and save papers. The feds busted them.

As far as the Mossad, I spent two years on a rental property in SD county, which was occupied by them as well. Mostly Israeli kids using the property and a local Israeli-owned vegetarian restaurant as their "scorpion den." Got fairly familiar with some of their espionage work and methods.

I don't go looking for this stuff. I'm just able to recognize it. As an empath I can read people, quite well. It's a natural gift.

Can't stomach Israel's insensitive nature. That's why you'll typically find me pointing out their self-serving bullshit.

source: https://themindunleashed.com/2013/10/30-traits-of-empath.html

FB , says: October 20, 2018 at 4:13 pm GMT
This is a pretty good article but also falls on its face at the end

Mr Shamir's 'inside' information confirms my own take on Petrov and Boshirov which I published a few days after that RT interview with Ms Simonyan I wrote this on Col Lang's blog on Sept 14

'Yeah those two 'tourists' do look the part don't they I would say they are probably GRU or something similar but nobody 'poisoned' the Skripals that's total kabuki theater another Potemkin village production from the reality masters

Something is afoot here though perhaps these two were lured to Salisbury as part of a frame up plot, perhaps by Skripal himself or perhaps the Brits caught wind of their plans to visit [on some standard spying mission, certainly not assassination] and put in motion the elaborate hoax

Everybody there protested loudly including Andrey Martyanov [Smoothie] I also added this

' I disagree with everyone here it seems these guys aren't tourists but they also didn't try to kill anyone that's stupid

It's some sort of spy game

Here's one scenario double agent Skripal makes convincing noises about flipping back someone at GRU [or some similar outfit] sends these two to Salisbury to check it out a very stupid move which is why Putin is now miffed enough to display these guys publicly and their field career surely over also a slap in the face to the silly Limeys for playing dirty pool even in the cloak and dagger game there are unwritten rules '

This is now exactly the story that Mr Shamir is presenting here but he is a day late and a dollar short

I also don't agree with his take that this is all somehow a big loss for Russian intel the Brits are the ones who have painted themselves in a corner their Skripal story is a wet paper bag waiting to fall apart the fact that they lured the Russians to Salisbury, under whatever pretext, be it Skripal or Porton Down/white helmets etc was their only small tactical victory because they could then later expose those two after months of Russian denials in order to show the Russians were in fact somehow involved

But that exposure came months later all that time the Russians would have known that Boshirov and Petrov had been captured on candid camera and would have had time to work on their countermove

Mr Shamir writes this like the game is over that is ridiculous the Brits have no way out of the Skripal hoax there was never any poisoning the original diagnosis of the Skripals in the Salisbury hospital was opioid overdose that came out in the first BBC interview with the hospital staff months after the 'poisoning'

It was not until 48 hours after the Skripals were admitted to hospital and the convenient intervention of Porton Down that the medical diagnosis was 'changed' to nerve agent poisoning

BUT this is an unsustainable story that WILL FALL APART the simple reason is medical and chemical fact both nerve agents and agricultural pesticides are based on the exact same chemical compound organophosphates

It just so happens that organophsphate poisoning is 'one of the most common causes of poisoning worldwide '

'There are nearly 3 million poisonings per year resulting in two hundred thousand deaths.'

That is the simple reason why emergency doctors EVERYWHERE are trained to recognize and treat this kind of poisoning especially in rural, agricultural areas like Salisbury

That is why it took months for media to gain access to the medical staff at that hospital the British spooks needed to do a lot of 'persuading' with medical professionals that would have wanted no part in such trickery and fakery

But this is a ticking time bomb that is bound to blow up in the faces of the very stupid Brits

So yes they pulled off a minor coup in luring those two to Salisbury but the game is very very far from over

As for Skripal he is in on it for sure as I speculated in my original comment on the matter..the Russian intel services are perfectly aware of this, yet Mr Shamir's supposedly well connected source has zero knowledge of this which tells me this source is actually a useless clown who 'knows' exactly what an internet commenter [myself] already knew two months ago

PS the fact that the Brits supposedly have all kinds of database info on the Russian intel apparatus and personnel files etc doesn't mean anything the author is a making a big deal out of this, but his story lacks meat on its bones most 'intel' is open source material anyway

As for sensitive stuff that may have been 'sold' by 'corrupt' bureaucrats one must ask if such 'info' is actually real or a clever plant providing fake info is the oldest spy trick in the book and this article simply takes for granted that such a trick would not have been employed why not ?

CalDre , says: October 20, 2018 at 5:30 pm GMT
@FB How would a fake database leak include the real data on the two GRU agents that just happened to be sent to UK? Maybe it was to make the data leak seem real?

In spycraft it is always impossible to know how deep the deception goes. That's why the very article to which you are responding started with:

It is hard to evaluate the exact measure of things in the murky world of spies and counter-spies, but it appears that the Western spies have had extraordinary success in the subterranean battle.

An acknowledgement you stubbornly ignore.

M Edward , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:01 pm GMT
None of this matters.

All governments are corrupt and have no interest in the welfare of the native populations.

All this he said she said crap is irrelevant, in the end we all will end up under a totalitarian police state run out of Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem.

Cyrano , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:06 pm GMT
I think that a clear strategy by the western "intelligence" services is starting to emerge vis-a-vis the Russians. By accusing any Russian that they can get their hands on, of being a spy, they want to scare the ordinary Russians from visiting the west, so afterwards any Russian actually caught traveling to the west can be safely assumed to be a spy – since by the calculations of the clever western intelligence – only someone who is actually a spy while at the same time being Russian, would dare to travel to the west. How smart is that?

Joking aside, it really is becoming unsafe for Russian nationals to travel to the west. Even though the west reserves the generosity of calling somebody equal only for those that are from the 3rd world – Russians clearly don't deserve such generosity.

Despite this, exceptions can be made and some unfortunate Russian soul could be accused of being equal with those highly evolved westerners and against their will can be offered protection from Mother Russia.

Pretty much like it happened to Yulia Skripal. She was only visiting her gastarbeiter father in GB, who apparently expressed desire to return to Russia, against pretty much everybody's wishes, and all of a sudden Yulia Skripal found herself bestowed with the western generosity of being declared equal, and was disappeared from public eye in order to protect her from those with whom she is clearly not equal – the Russians.

Thank God at least MI-6 proved equal to the task and discovered her equalness in a nick of time and saved her. The moral of the story: Only democracy has the power to recognize who is equal and who is not. Then, on the other hand, capitalism can keep acquiring new monikers such as "democracy" – all they want, Russia still has better quality of equality, despite ditching socialism.

FB , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:24 pm GMT
@CalDre Yes I 'stubbornly' refuse to take at face value this silly statement

it appears that the Western spies have had extraordinary success in the subterranean battle.'

Because it's not backed up by anything other than hot air as for that supposed 'data' about Petrov and Boshirov that was put out by Bellingcat

Ie mickey mouse stuff as with everything these clowns do, it is meant only to bamboozle the most utterly stupid bipeds

A very nice clue is the fact that a Russian website called 'The Insider' is Bellingcat's acknowledged partner here

If you read the article in English they claim to have 'dug' up a lot of info from various sources such the central Russian resident database and passenger check in data for their flight to the UK

Big deal that Shamir is building a mountain out of a molehill is more than clear

In fact this entire Shamir tale appears to have one subtle purpose to publicize and glorify the Bellingcat outfit

which irredeemably lost any credibility a few weeks back when illiterate poofter Eliott Higgins refused a debate challenge by the distinguished MIT physicist and former presidential advisor Ted Postol actually calling Postol an 'idiot' a move that astounded even those willing to entertain Higgins on a semi-credible level

peterAUS , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:39 pm GMT
@Anatoly Karlin Be that as it may, the "Western side" had (publicly known) Aldrich, Hanssen and Benghazi fiasco.

Boils down to, from the comment below:

When you have no ideology ( or worst, share ideology with your opponent, i.e free market .) all what you have, from values to secrets, from scientific human capital to secret service officials, are out there in the global market for possible selling to the best postor .this is the principle of capitalism .. after all, it is said, almost everybody has a price..

and

Obviously, in this scenario, the one who has the printing machine has a "little" advantage.

And, on top of it, in West, since the fall of The Wall, we've been having "Cooking the Intelligence to Fit the Political Agenda".

Incompetence vs blatant lying?
What a choice.

Kubarking , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:43 pm GMT
This commenter begs to differ with M. Karlin's assessment (8) of the relative competence of Russian sovok and CIA. "consummate professionals relative to what passes for today's Russian intelligence services"? Mais non.

CIA always gets caught. All they do is step on their crank, again and again. They depend not on professionalism but on what Russ Baker describes as a strange mix of ruthlessness and ineptitude. Both stem from impunity in municipal law.

For example: CIA torture and coercive interference got comprehensively exposed, worldwide, in the '70s. What happened? Don Gregg gave the Church and Pike committees an ultimatum: Back off or it's martial law. CIA got busted again in the '80s for the criminal enterprises under the Iran/Contra rubric. By then CIA had installed Tom Polgar, Former Saigon Station Chief, as chief investigator for the cognizant Senate Select committee, and Polgar assured Gregg that his hearings would not be a repeat of the abortive Pike and Church flaps.

So CIA are clowns. They can afford to be clowns because they know they can get away with it. Getting away with it is their only skill, and the only skill they need.

The persistent category error at this site is failing to realize that CIA is the state. They rule the USA.

[Oct 19, 2018] UK press riddled with spooks, conduits for intelligence agencies keen to score one for the Empire by John Wight

Notable quotes:
"... A 2000 article reveals Coughlin was fed material by MI6 for years, which he then turned into Telegraph news articles ..."
"... There is - or has been until recently - a very active programme by the secret agencies to colour what appears in the British press, called, if publications by various defectors can be believed, information operations, or 'I/Ops'. ..."
"... A colourful example of the way these techniques expanded to meet the exigencies of the hour came in the early 70s, when the readers of the News of the World were treated to a front-page splash, "Russian sub in IRA plot sensation", complete with aerial photograph of the conning tower of a Soviet sub awash off the coast of Donegal ..."
"... Read more British intelligence now officially a by-word for organized crime ..."
"... he [Coughlin] regaled [the newspaper's] readers with the dramatic story of the son of Libya's Colonel Gadafy (sic) and his alleged connection to a currency counterfeiting plan. The story [implicating Saif Gaddafi] was falsely attributed to a 'British banking official.' In fact, it had been given to him by officers of MI6, who, it transpired, had been supplying Coughlin with material for years. ..."
"... It could well be, therefore, that the unfortunate Mr Khashoggi has become the victim of the region's dangerous and conflicting currents. ..."
"... The incestuous relationship between the intelligence services and sections of the [British] media is, of course, nothing new. The connection is notoriously close in the case of foreign correspondents Sandy Gall, the ITN reporter and newsreader, boasted of his work for MI6 in Afghanistan during the 1980s ..."
"... After US Senate hearings in 1975 revealed the extent of CIA recruitment of both American and British journalists, 'sources' let it be known that half the foreign staff of a British daily [newspaper] were on the MI6 payroll. ..."
Oct 18, 2018 | www.rt.com

John Wight has written for a variety of newspapers and websites, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal. Published time: 18 Oct, 2018 13:16 Edited time: 18 Oct, 2018 14:44

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That a free press underpins British democracy is an enduring myth that has been allowed to go unchallenged, up there with unicorns and the Loch Ness Monster. Because if a clutch of right-wing reactionary billionaires owning the bulk of a nation's major newspaper titles and media constitutes a free press, the word 'free' has been stripped and shorn of all meaning.

Yet, while the aforementioned – let's be kind here – 'anomaly' has long been understood by anyone of adult years with the ability to put their underpants on the right way round in the morning, the extent to which the British establishment press and media has been penetrated by intelligence services and acts as a conduit for their agenda is less well known.

Read more Guardian columnist Owen Jones © REUTERS / Simon Dawson Telegraph defence editor savaged by Owen Jones over Saudi-links, deletes Twitter account

That it is less well known remains one of life's great mysteries nonetheless. Scratch your average British journalist and you have yourself a frustrated spook; someone who would be on their toes at the sound of a car door slamming shut in the street, while harbouring fantasies of coming across Vladimir Putin in a dark alley one night and scoring one for the Empire.

Take Con Coughlin, for example, Defence Editor at The Daily Telegraph (more colloquially and accurately known as The Daily Torygraph). Coughlin is a product of a private school production line that has unleashed more knaves on the world than spittle on a dentist's chair. While his outing as an MI6 asset may have been a long time coming, now that it has, it marks yet another nail in the coffin of a media class whose relationship to truth and objectivity belongs in the box marked non-existent.

Though I hold no candle for Guardian columnist, Owen Jones, it remains a truism that even a blind chicken gets a piece of corn sometimes; and on this basis Jones has rendered us a service in outing Coughlin in a recent series of devastating tweets. Also providing an invaluable service in helping join the dots of the story is The Canary , independent left-wing news and views web journal that currently boasts a larger readership than a growing section of the mainstream media.

As it turns out, Mr Coughlin's links to MI6 (Britain's foreign intelligence agency) go back some time. As Jones writes: " A 2000 article reveals Coughlin was fed material by MI6 for years, which he then turned into Telegraph news articles ."

The Guardian article Jones is referring to was published at a time when the centre-left newspaper was a worthy source of information and analysis, home to the likes of Seumas Milne, one of Britain's finest-ever columnists currently plying his trade as chief press adviser to Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. It just goes to show that whoever said evolution only moves in one direction had never taken the time to follow the trajectory of The Guardian in recent years.

But that's another story.

We are informed in the aforesaid 2000 Guardian article that " There is - or has been until recently - a very active programme by the secret agencies to colour what appears in the British press, called, if publications by various defectors can be believed, information operations, or 'I/Ops'. "

Further on: " A colourful example of the way these techniques expanded to meet the exigencies of the hour came in the early 70s, when the readers of the News of the World were treated to a front-page splash, "Russian sub in IRA plot sensation", complete with aerial photograph of the conning tower of a Soviet sub awash off the coast of Donegal ."

Read more British intelligence now officially a by-word for organized crime

This story was of course entirely bogus, as was one published in the Sunday Telegraph, sister paper of the aforementioned Daily Telegraph, over two decades later, written by – you guessed it – Con Coughlin.

From the article: " he [Coughlin] regaled [the newspaper's] readers with the dramatic story of the son of Libya's Colonel Gadafy (sic) and his alleged connection to a currency counterfeiting plan. The story [implicating Saif Gaddafi] was falsely attributed to a 'British banking official.' In fact, it had been given to him by officers of MI6, who, it transpired, had been supplying Coughlin with material for years. "

Coughlin, by the way, is also revealed, according to Jones, to have been an eager shill for the Saudis.

In the wake of the disappearance of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, whom according to Turkish authorities was brutally murdered and dismembered by a group of Saudis, who, equipped with a bone saw, flew in to the country from the Kingdom to carry out the deed especially, Coughlin went to work shrouding matters in a fog of benign uncertainty. Consider: " It could well be, therefore, that the unfortunate Mr Khashoggi has become the victim of the region's dangerous and conflicting currents. " Ahem indeed.

Coughlin also saw fit to describe current Saudi tyrant - sorry Crown Prince - Muhammad Bin Salman (affectionately known as MbS) as a " human dynamo ," after he was afforded the privilege of a sit down interview.

At the risk of focusing too much on Mr Coughlin and his work, however, we are obliged to make the point that he is merely one among many British establishment journalists who have eagerly embraced the role of conduit of the nation's intelligence services over the years.

In his classic work on the 1984-85 miners' strike, The Enemy Within, Seumas Milne writes: " The incestuous relationship between the intelligence services and sections of the [British] media is, of course, nothing new. The connection is notoriously close in the case of foreign correspondents Sandy Gall, the ITN reporter and newsreader, boasted of his work for MI6 in Afghanistan during the 1980s ."

Milne, in the same passage, goes on to reveal how " After US Senate hearings in 1975 revealed the extent of CIA recruitment of both American and British journalists, 'sources' let it be known that half the foreign staff of a British daily [newspaper] were on the MI6 payroll. "

So there you have it, the murky relationship between British intelligence and the country's establishment journalists is one that reaches far back in time and continues in the present, as redoubtable and reliable as Big Ben itself.

In fact considering where we are, the indefensible positions taken by prominent newspaper journalists and columnists at not only The Telegraph but also The Times and, yes, The Guardian over Russia, Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela et al. – in other words, the way that almost to a man and woman they have fallen into line behind their own government when it comes to who the officially designated enemies of the moment should be – the question we need to ask ourselves is not how many of them might be in the pay of MI6 and MI5, but how many of them might not?

In fact considering where we are, the indefensible positions taken by prominent newspaper journalists and columnists at not only The Telegraph but also The Times and, yes, The Guardian over Russia, Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela et al. – in other words, the way in which they have fallen into line behind their own government when it comes to who the officially designated enemies of the moment should be – the question we need to ask ourselves is not how many of them might be in the pay of MI6 and MI5, but how many of them might not?

Like this story? Share it with a friend! The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Oct 19, 2018] Thank you, Saudi Arabia for exposing the utter hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of British and American gangsta press and equally gangsta establishment

Notable quotes:
"... "I am withdrawing from all ventures with the Saudi government until they go back to killing people I'll never meet at a party" ..."
"... In relation to people like MBS, there is a double stupidity. The problem is not simply that he has been playing to their need to believe that he wants to 'modernise' Saudi Arabia. It is also that they have wanted to believe that such a venture is possible, which it almost certainly is not. ..."
Oct 19, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

David Habakkuk -> TTG , 2 days ago

TTG,

Someone from whose writings I have derived a great deal of instruction, as well as amusement, is Vladimir Golstein, a Russian Jewish émigré now in charge of 'Slavic Studies' at Brown University.

I introduce his explanation of the response to the Khashoggi killing, in a 'Facebook' post, not because I think it should be taken as some kind of authoritative truth, but because, as often, Golstein's irreverence is thought-provoking.

The post begins:

'Thank you, Saudi Arabia for exposing the utter hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of British and American gangsta press and equally gangsta establishment.

'You've been at it for a very long time. And it seems that finally you've got it right.'

After providing a long list of Saudi delinquencies, Golstein continues:

'I understand that you began to feel more and more desperate. You sided with Israel against Iran and Syria, and the rest of the world said that it is a moral thing to do and put you on the UN human rights board.

'Well, finally, you hit the right cord. Killing innocent people and abusing your moneyed power by buying newspapers, hotels, city districts or think tanks, was not enough to produce an outrage in the west, but when you whacked another cynical morally corrupt journalist that proved too much for the cynical and morally corrupt western press. They decided to stand up for one of their own.'

This does, I think, point to something rather important. And it leads to the thought that MBS and others may have miscalculated, as a result of an 'hubris' which many in the West have actually encouraged – just as they have a parallel 'hubris' in Israel.

As Golstein, who has a great deal of complex history behind him, can see very clearly, it is an interesting question when the 'sympathy' of Western 'liberals' is and is not actually felt.

What I think MBS may have missed is, quite precisely, the realisation that for people like Tom Friedman the fact that – as Golstein is pointing out – Khashoggi is the same kind of animal as they are means that killing him touches them personally.

Second, he is the kind of figure whom they have, as it were, 'cast' in a 'starring role', in their 'narrative' as to how somehow 'Saudi Barbaria' is going to 'modernise', and in so doing create a Middle East hospitable to a Jewish settler state.

So, in assassinating him, MBS may have unleashed a curious kind of psychological 'maelstrom.'

Barbara Ann -> David Habakkuk , 2 days ago
Jon Schwarz of The Intercept summed up the hypocrisy of the outrage rather well in a humorous tweet:

"I am withdrawing from all ventures with the Saudi government until they go back to killing people I'll never meet at a party"

David Habakkuk -> Barbara Ann , a day ago
Barbara Ann,

I think that is absolutely brilliant.

But, as well as hypocrisy, there is also a basic stupidity.

In fact, if one is reasonably 'worldlywise', one knows that people's sympathies, including one's own, are very often much more limited than they profess to be. We commonly find it much easier to feel the griefs and pain of people whom we see as like ourselves, than we do with those of others.

My own history, ironically, has been a move from finding it relatively easy to sympathise with people who write for the 'New York Times', or the 'Guardian', or the 'New York Review of Books', to finding it really rather difficult.

There is also, however, about so many of these people, an element of sheer stupidity.

Whether one agrees, or disagrees, with 'deplorables' is relevant, but only partly so. Actually, people who would not appear at the kind of 'party' which Jon Schwarz so aptly characterises have a very wide range of views, and I often agree in whole or in part with such people, and also often disagree in whole or in part. It is not a simple matter.

A related but distinct question has to do with common prudence.

People who lock themselves in a kind of bubble of the supposedly 'enlightened' are not only doing the rest of us no favours, but are inherently bound to head off in directions which are liable to be suicidal for themselves.

Prudent élites take the trouble at least to be aware that the world is not controllable by the comfortable people who appear at their dinner parties, and realise that if they persist in trying to persuade themselves that it is, sooner or later their self-delusion will blow up in their faces.

In relation to people like MBS, there is a double stupidity. The problem is not simply that he has been playing to their need to believe that he wants to 'modernise' Saudi Arabia. It is also that they have wanted to believe that such a venture is possible, which it almost certainly is not.

[Oct 19, 2018] Profanity-Laced Shouting Match Erupts Between Kelly, Bolton Outside Oval Office

Oct 19, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

"Profanity-Laced" Shouting Match Erupts Between Kelly, Bolton Outside Oval Office

by Tyler Durden Thu, 10/18/2018 - 15:33 41 SHARES

The White House is back to its old, chaotic ways.

Citing "three people familiar", Bloomberg reports that on Thursday, around the time when the Trump administration was contemplating next steps in the Saudi Arabia fiasco, Trump's chief of staff, John Kelly, and his national security adviser, John Bolton, engaged in a "profanity-laced" shouting match outside the Oval Office.

The shouting match was so intense that other White House aides worried one of the two men might immediately resign. Neither is resigning, the people said.

While one possible reason for the argument is which of the two admin officials was more excited to start war in [Insert Country X], Bloomberg said that it wasn't immediately clear what Trump's chief of staff and national security adviser were arguing about. However, the clash was the latest indication that tensions are again resurfacing in the White House 19 days before midterm elections.

It's not clear if Trump heard the argument. "but the people said he is aware of it."

Tags Politics

[Oct 19, 2018] The demise of Davos in the Desert - TTG

This is not just MBS stupidity (which killing of a journalist in a consulate is), or Erdogan reaction, this might be something else. Neoliberal MSM reaction suggest that this is a kind of trigger for the color revolution against MBS when an event is blown out of proportion and used to justify already decided political shift or actions. It might be a trap specifically designed to MBS (the role of "fiancé" here is very interesting) by western intelligence agencies. Look at Skripals for the main components of this plot.
What is interesting is the Stephen Cohen supports this hypothesis.
Notable quotes:
"... Last summer, a standoff between Saudi Arabia and Canada gave us a window into how Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman deals with critics -- but most of the world looked away. It started with two tweets. On Aug. 2, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland wrote on Twitter that she was alarmed by the detention of Samar Badawi, a Saudi human rights activist whose brother, Raif Badawi, was arrested in 2012. Raif Badawi's family lives in Canada. The next day, Global Affairs Canada weighed in, urging Saudi authorities to release civil and women's rights activists. ..."
"... Saudi Arabia was not having it. In a blustery Aug. 6 tweetstorm, the country's Foreign Ministry announced that it was recalling its ambassador to Canada and gave the Canadian ambassador to Saudi Arabia 24 hours to leave. The state airline said it would stop flying to Toronto. Saudi scholarship students were told to pack their bags. Trade and investment were frozen. ..."
"... Pulling ambassadors and threatening to suspend investment was a "massive overreaction" and offered an important lesson, said Thomas Juneau, assistant professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa. "The lesson was that MBS is reckless and completely overreacts to threats," he added, using the crown prince's nickname. ..."
"... The sheer stupidity of what MBS has done fascinates me. The inability to realise 1. that the MIT are rather good at 'bugging', 2. that Erdogan may calculate that his need for Saudi financial assistance is outweighed by his determination – which may also involve 'need' – to portray himself as the leader of the 'Umma', and 3. that people like Tom Friedman are happy to see Yemenis murdered on mass, but get a bit queasy when people like Khashoggi are. ..."
"... For very many years, the 'ruling élites' in Washington, as in London, have allowed themselves to be 'played for suckers', alike by the Saudis and the Israelis. Both have created situations in which there are very powerful concrete incentives for those who have gulled them to continue doing so. A rather unsurprising result is that people like MBS and Netamyahu have got to used to thinking they can get away with anything. A natural result has been massive 'hubris.' An equally unsurprising result is that this is in the process of leading to 'nemesis.' ..."
"... people like Tom Friedman are happy to see Yemenis murdered on mass, but get a bit queasy when people like Khashoggi are ..."
"... This is so true. The sociopaths in the MSM only care when one of their own is put on the chopping block. I get ill watching these people smile as they interview 'experts' cheering on the Saudis on in Yemen. They are pleased by the more convoluted arguments because it makes them feel more intellectual. ..."
"... David Habakkuk's comment below illustrates the difficulty that Western observers have in understanding the thinking and actions of the Saudi rulers. They are essentially just glorified tribal chieftains, still stuck in their medieval ways. MbS wasn't "stupid" when he ordered the killing of Khashoggi, that is what a tribal chief does when a member of his tribe defies him. It was, for him, a 'normal' reaction. After all, he has been doing this kind of stuff in his kingdom for years (without any reaction from outside). ..."
"... I'm quite sure he did realise that the consulate was bugged, and that it would be known that the Saudis had murdered Khashoggi. He just didn't care. Since he believed he had bought off Erdogan and the Western leaders, media, etc who mattered. While he was right in his expectation of the Western leaders' reactions, he misjudged Erdogan's reaction. ..."
Oct 19, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

18 October 2018

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin just announced he will not be attending the Future Investment Initiative Summit in Saudi Arabia next week. Obviously he didn't decide this on his own. His announcement stated that this was done after consultation with Trump and Pompeo. Given that this "Davos in the Desert" summit is the brainchild of MbS, this official and personal snub by the Trump administration could be a sign of future sanctions or it could be an effort to get through this crisis with the issuance of a wrist slap. A lot will depend on how MbS reacts. Judging by his reaction to a mean tweet by the Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister earlier this year, it would not surprise me if MbS goes ballistic over the collapse of his summit.

***********************

Last summer, a standoff between Saudi Arabia and Canada gave us a window into how Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman deals with critics -- but most of the world looked away. It started with two tweets. On Aug. 2, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland wrote on Twitter that she was alarmed by the detention of Samar Badawi, a Saudi human rights activist whose brother, Raif Badawi, was arrested in 2012. Raif Badawi's family lives in Canada. The next day, Global Affairs Canada weighed in, urging Saudi authorities to release civil and women's rights activists.

Saudi Arabia was not having it. In a blustery Aug. 6 tweetstorm, the country's Foreign Ministry announced that it was recalling its ambassador to Canada and gave the Canadian ambassador to Saudi Arabia 24 hours to leave. The state airline said it would stop flying to Toronto. Saudi scholarship students were told to pack their bags. Trade and investment were frozen.

Pulling ambassadors and threatening to suspend investment was a "massive overreaction" and offered an important lesson, said Thomas Juneau, assistant professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa. "The lesson was that MBS is reckless and completely overreacts to threats," he added, using the crown prince's nickname. (Washington Post)

***********************

Trump and Pompeo are now pushing for more time for the Saudis to investigate the disappearance of Khashoggi, essentially stalling for time. I doubt Pompeo's recent trip to Riyadh and Ankara was a search for the truth. It was a desperate effort to coordinate a way out of this mess and preserve the existing Saudi-US relationship. I'd like to know what Pompeo promised Erdogan in an effort to make this all go away. Was it enough? I doubt it. This situation is absolute gold for Erdogan's dreams of a renewed Ottoman Empire.

How about MbS? Did Pompeo convince him to meekly accept whatever slap on the wrist is on the way? I doubt that as well. The Trump administration pretty much destroyed what was left of "Davos in the Desert." If I had my family stationed in the Kingdom, I'd get them out right now and have my go bag within arm's reach at all times. Without any degree of hyperbole, I predict MbS is about to get medieval on someone's ass someone beyond an aging expatriate reporter. The chessboard of the Middle East may be about to change dramatically. The result will be a lot of crying in Tel Aviv and Washington and a lot of smiling in Ankara and Tehran. And maybe an end to the needless dying and suffering in Yemen.

TTG

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/10/17/saudi-arabias-spat-with-canada-was-lesson-trump-ignored-it/

Posted at 01:17 PM in Middle East , Saudi Arabia , TTG , Turkey | Permalink | 32 Comments

Reblog (0) The killers are associated with MBS

"On October 16 th , unnamed Turkish officials reportedly provided the Washington Post with scans of passports supposedly carried by seven men who were part of the 15-person team suspected in the disappearance and likely killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The passports add to the public information provided by Turkish officials as it seeks to fill out gaps in the narrative of what purported after Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate on October 2 nd . The Washington Post published the passports, but obscured the names and faces of the suspects, because it reportedly had no time to verify the people's identities.

Turkey maintains that Jamal had been killed and dismembered within the Saudi Arabian consulate. It also claims that a 15-man team dispatched from Saudi Arabia played a major role in the killing. One man from the group is the head of the medical forensics department in the Saudi ministry of interior.

Turkish officials also reportedly confirmed that the 15 names reported in the Daily Sabah are the actual names of the suspects." SF

-----------

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. There is no constitution. There is no legislature. Instead, there is "consultation." There are no laws that are not royal whims or Wahhabi Hanbali Sharia. Ah, no, my bad! There is also 12er Sharia in the Eastern Province for the Shia second class subjects (not citizens) who live there.

Turkey clearly is intent on "outing"Saudi Arabia as the butchers who killed Khashoggi and cut up his body in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, thus preparing it for re-export to The Kingdom.

Why are the Turks doing this? IMO, the Erdogan government wants to establish itself as the leading power in the world Islamic community, the 'Umma. the Ottoman Sultan Caliph was effectively that in Sunni communities and Erdo seeks to "restore" Ottoman times.

Donald Trump has one hell of a problem, largely of his own and Jared's creation, but, to be fair, also the product of 70 years of IMO misguided US insistence that the Saudis were a normal, post Treaty of Westphalia country that thought of the US as an ally rather that an alien entity to be manipulated and deceived whenever possible.

The Turks evidently really have "the goods" on MBS who is effectiely both head of state and head of government in SA. IMO they will drive the evidence home with the world media seeking to force an acknowledgement of their position in the world by Trump. pl

https://southfront.org/suspected-assasinators-of-khashoggi-appears-to-be-from-close-circle-of-saudi-crown-prince/


David Habakkuk , 12 hours ago

TTG,

A very fine piece. I am waiting to see how this plays out, wit h a mixture of interest and fear.

The sheer stupidity of what MBS has done fascinates me. The inability to realise 1. that the MIT are rather good at 'bugging', 2. that Erdogan may calculate that his need for Saudi financial assistance is outweighed by his determination – which may also involve 'need' – to portray himself as the leader of the 'Umma', and 3. that people like Tom Friedman are happy to see Yemenis murdered on mass, but get a bit queasy when people like Khashoggi are.

This is a clear case of stupidity, but, as we have been learning, the 'realist' notion that one can interpret international politics in terms of reasonably 'rational' calculations of 'national interest' is complete BS: theories produced by intellectually lazy academics who want to avoid the messy business of attempting to understand how other societies, and indeed one's own, actually work.

A further thought.

For very many years, the 'ruling élites' in Washington, as in London, have allowed themselves to be 'played for suckers', alike by the Saudis and the Israelis. Both have created situations in which there are very powerful concrete incentives for those who have gulled them to continue doing so. A rather unsurprising result is that people like MBS and Netamyahu have got to used to thinking they can get away with anything. A natural result has been massive 'hubris.' An equally unsurprising result is that this is in the process of leading to 'nemesis.'

chris chuba -> David Habakkuk , 9 hours ago
"and 3. that people like Tom Friedman are happy to see Yemenis murdered on mass, but get a bit queasy when people like Khashoggi are."

This is so true. The sociopaths in the MSM only care when one of their own is put on the chopping block. I get ill watching these people smile as they interview 'experts' cheering on the Saudis on in Yemen. They are pleased by the more convoluted arguments because it makes them feel more intellectual.

I haven't seen Babbak post in ages, I hope he is doing okay.

Kooshy -> chris chuba , 7 hours ago
Chris- in case you didn't see this, a well done job on Tom Friedman by Hamid Dabashi, in Al Jazeera. An American and an Arab Journalist Walk Into a Saudi Consulate
http://www.informationclear...
FB Ali , 6 hours ago

David Habakkuk's comment below illustrates the difficulty that Western observers have in understanding the thinking and actions of the Saudi rulers. They are essentially just glorified tribal chieftains, still stuck in their medieval ways. MbS wasn't "stupid" when he ordered the killing of Khashoggi, that is what a tribal chief does when a member of his tribe defies him. It was, for him, a 'normal' reaction. After all, he has been doing this kind of stuff in his kingdom for years (without any reaction from outside).

I'm quite sure he did realise that the consulate was bugged, and that it would be known that the Saudis had murdered Khashoggi. He just didn't care. Since he believed he had bought off Erdogan and the Western leaders, media, etc who mattered. While he was right in his expectation of the Western leaders' reactions, he misjudged Erdogan's reaction.

As DH has correctly surmised, Erdogan took advantage of this wonderful opportunity to turn on MbS, and cleverly ensured that Western leaders and media had to publicly react. I don't think Trump, Friedman, etc got "queasy" about the killing, they were pushed into having to take a stand.

The reason the 'ruling élites' in Washington, London etc have "allowed themselves to be 'played for suckers' by the Saudis" is because they've all been bought by the latter (Israel is a different case).

Col Lang is a very special case in that he resisted all their attempts to buy him, unlike all the other US military and political leaders he has mentioned in an earlier comment.

Pat Lang Mod -> FB Ali , 6 hours ago
I thank you brother.
Barbara Ann , 10 hours ago
Gold indeed. Right now the drip drip of salacious details in the Turkish press is focused on the audio recordings, they haven't even started on the claimed video evidence yet. It seems MbS is to undergo prolonged torture by media. And the fear and loathing in The Kingdom is now being given a nice helping hand by claims that one of the 15 dismemberers has been traffic accidented in Riyadh. The report on this starts with the words " Claims are circulating " - outstanding. Turkish media has a huge audience among the 'Umma these days and combined with Al Jazeera this is a potent weapon.

You are right to ask what price Erdogan may be willing to accept to make this go away, his wish list will be long. But if he calculates that the prize may be MbS himself plus irreparable damage to the reputation of the custodians of Islam's two holiest sites, I am not at all sure Pompeo will be able to offer anything to beat that. My SWAG is MbS is removed before it these negotiations are concluded.

Kooshy , 10 hours ago
IMO, for sure Saudi intelligence as well as MBS knew that their diplomatic missions like everybody else's is bogged, everybody knows airports and foreign missions are closely monitored by the host country. With that in mind, what still inspired MBS without any fear of getting exposed and still order the journalists' execution, was his believe of his indispensability and the protection from Trump and the Israelites. I think he very well thought if Erdo and the world can and will find out they wouldn't be able to do a damn thing about him. Unfortunately, with Trump' behavior in last few days he might be right. The one good thing about Trump' admin. is, that they don't care to bore us with the usual hypocritical AMERICAN moral high ground and shining hill BS, they know the world in now full of it. That same goes for our good mannered and morally proper Europeans the Germans, French and jolly good Brits. Not a word about this is coming out of Europeans, they are waiting for the coin to drop and see which side is proper for business to side with.
An important second point in this IMO, is that the American foreign policy establishment, can not and will not trust Erdo and Turks to climbs to the leadership of the Sunni Muslims, that has been the case ever since the Iranian Islamic revolution, specially as is been seen by behavior of this last three US Administrations. US wants and will accept a SOB for the job, as long as he is their SOB. Erdo knows who was behin the cope a few years back, this was a mana from the heavens for him, he is enjoying this torturing MBS and US inch by inch.
VietnamVet , 6 hours ago
TGG

Thanks. Even in the States it is good idea to have a bag packed. Albany GA has been hit three times in the last two years.

During Mike Pompeo's visit, it was reported that the Saudis gave him the 100 million dollars for the American occupation of Eastern Syria. That sum is something that Donald Trump is unlikely to walk away from nor Israel's desire to cut the Shiite Crescent. Erdogan's new Ottoman Empire and eliminating Turkey's Kurd problem requires the Americans to leave. This cauldron will keep boiling until it explodes into a world war. The only way out is Russia convincing the Kurds to rejoin a Syria Federation; liberating Idlib Province and pounding out a peace treaty where everyone respects each other's borders and stands down.

Pat Lang Mod -> VietnamVet , 6 hours ago
It was "reported" by what or whom? You know better than that. If you say such a thing on SST you must support the statement. You want to believe that all people are corrupt? You must prove it here.
TTG -> Pat Lang , 5 hours ago
It was in the NYT and WaPo. The money was pledged by al Jubier back in August. This is from Yahoo Finance:

"U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to discuss the disappearance and presumed murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. That same day, the U.S. government received a $100 million payment from the oil-rich kingdom, The New York Times and Washington Post reported -- an amount that had earlier been promised to the Trump administration to support its stabilization efforts in Syria."

Gresso , 8 hours ago
What do you all think Erdogan's opening line of negotiation would be? Abandoning the Kurds in Syria? Or further, US support for destroying the YPG/J/PKK?
Pat Lang Mod -> Gresso , 6 hours ago
Oh, bullshit. The Saudis do not support the Kurds in Syria and the Americans are not sophisticated enough for such a deal.
Ael , 8 hours ago
Colbert was calling MbS - "Mr. Bone Saw". I think the nickname will stick.
Pat Lang Mod -> Ael , 6 hours ago
I prefer "the electric bone saw."
Jack , 8 hours ago
POTUS tweets: View Hide
Pat Lang Mod -> Jack , 5 hours ago
Yes. They knew exactly what they were doing, but Trump did not. I said at the time that the Islamic World interpreted his performance in Riyadh as submission. At last!
TomWonacott , 10 hours ago
"........This situation is absolute gold for Erdogan's dreams of a renewed Ottoman Empire......."

If that is his dream, it is as realistic as Putin reviving the Soviet empire. Turkey is gaining regional influence; however, Erdogan certainly has no plans to share that with Iran if the Saudis falter.

Pat Lang Mod -> TomWonacott , 10 hours ago
Putin is not delusional. Erdogan is.
Ishmael Zechariah -> Pat Lang , 5 hours ago
Col. Lang,
tayyip is truly delusional along many dimensions. However, he is probably cognizant of the economic difficulties his policies have caused in Turkey. He and his coterie are desperately trying to find a way to pay the piper.
O rly -> TomWonacott , 9 hours ago
Putin has no intention of restoring the soviet empire, he has every intention of protecting the interest of Russians who were stranded outside the Russian state when the soviet union dissolved
Pat Lang Mod -> O rly , 8 hours ago
Yes
Vicky SD , 11 hours ago
Agreed. This is going to be a tricky transition, which is typical when the successors dare not raise their hand before it's crystal clear their head chopping predecessor no longer poses a threat.
A.Trophimovsky , 12 hours ago
But, according to Bloomberg...Big Money is going...although, allegedly, not its "heads"...But since when it is public the air traffic of private jets.....

https://www.bloomberg.com/n...

If great banks are going ( their is that unique opportunity of the public offering by Aramco ), I very doubt Trump is going to lose this opportunity to make "deals"......

I mantain that all this noise is focussed on the midterms, so as to whitewash US support related to Yemen war....After that, everything will go business as usual .....

Pat Lang Mod , 12 hours ago
"Go medieval" I like it. The idea of getting your family out before they become hostages is a good one. The State Department will, of course, evacuate their dependents to Switzerland or some such place while trying to persuade or "demand" that the military not evaacuate families. Ii have "been there" several times.
TTG -> Pat Lang , 11 hours ago
There was a time in the late 90s that it felt like we were coordinating a non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO) some place in Africa every other week. At least my car pool buddy and I missed the rush hour traffic on the ride back home on those days.
Artemesia , 12 hours ago
Blame Mossad. MbS is off the hook, the weapons sales can go forward, the Davos party can proceed, no one needs to be punished because Mossad is never, ever culpable; Adelson quiescent & Bibi happy to have spotlight off his indicted spouse; wins all around.
Blame Iran: MbS is not only off the hook, he gets refreshed motivation for his vendetta, weapons sales not only go forward but are even more necessary; Davos proceeds with renewed vigor; punish Iran some more-- they're used to being the punching bag; Adelson and Bibi are very happy, making US legislators very happy in campaign season.
Wins all around.

State Department propaganda writers must be on strike to have let these opportunities to create narratives cede to Erdogan.

Pat Lang Mod -> Artemesia , 12 hours ago
No, blame Israel and its government and friends. Mossad does the government's will, not the other way around.
James Thomas , 13 hours ago
Why the western news media has suddenly developed all this concern for Saudi human rights has been very puzzling to me. I read somewhere that it is to be used as leverage in order to get Saudi Arabia to cancel their S-400 order. This is the most plausible explanation that I have heard so far - the Borg really doesn't like S-400 exports.
John Waddell -> James Thomas , 11 hours ago
As far as I can find out there is currently no Saudi S-400 order placed, only discussions taking place at a slow pace. Previous such discussions have always faded away as the Russians are well aware of the Saudi's technical (in)abilities and really don't want western contractors operating their systems and giving all kinds of others the opportunity to practice against it. Also I would expect the US to warn that the deal could attract sanctions under the
Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) law.
Pat Lang Mod -> James Thomas , 12 hours ago
So you think the media are helping Trump? My god but you are ignorant.

[Oct 19, 2018] Murder in the Embassy d'Orient Express possibly derails the plans to attack Iran

Notable quotes:
"... hey make clear to him that it would involve him disappearing for ever but with a huge amount of cash to enjoy with his new wife, thus shutting up his mouth about possible details about the 9-11 forever. ..."
"... (Plausible, Khassogi was no saint, he was photographed being armed with an rpg rolling down a hill along with Bin Laden. In Afghanistan?. He used in the past to write supportive stuff for ISIS or "moderate" head choppers) ..."
"... They explain the plan to him and it seems it involves a scheme to feed false information to the close environment of Erdogan in order to damage his credibility and also bring Mohammad Bin Salman in a difficult position. ..."
"... There were other people at the Embassy during the time going about their bussines, it was working hours. It was also mentioned everybody were hearing screams. ..."
"... Yes, a major global geo-political shift is taking place and it is like folks say about you not wanting to see how sausage is made. ..."
"... How did war become substituted for human growth? When will the West realize its inherent social/economic structure is the problem? ..."
"... A few weeks ago Assad said he'd reached an 'understanding ' with other Arab states... Who were those other Arab states ..."
"... I don't know why we are believing the Turk's story, just because it has been spread worldwide by the Mighty Wurlitzer of the corporate media. If there were 15 Saudis meeting with Khashoggi at the Embassy, why do we assume that they were a hit team? Sounds like a joke.. ..."
"... The Turks, a week later, say that he didn't, and come up with a serial narrative, doled out daily, which the imperial media spreads, unchallenged, 24/7. Erdogan doesn't control the world's media. I remain skeptical. ..."
"... I agree that the target may be Trump. This reminds me of Stephen Vincent Benet's short story, "The Devil and Daniel Webster." The devil (anti-Trump deep state) ostensibly wants to take the soul of Jabez Stone (Mohammad bin Salman) but in reality the devil has his sights on a bigger quarry, Daniel Webster (Trump.) ..."
"... My feeling is that if sanctions against Saudi Arabia are approved by Congress, Trump will NOT veto. He has tended to follow the laws made by Congress more than his predecessor did. ..."
"... On the other hand, how can Congress approve significant financial sanctions against Saudi Arabia? There is too much power and money involved. You think the NRA has power to influence Congress? I expect that congressmen and congresswomen are getting phone calls even as we speak. ..."
Oct 19, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Greece , Oct 17, 2018 8:15:04 PM | link

Agatha Christie's
Murder in the Embassy d'Orient Express

It was a dark and rainy afternoon...Jamal, sitting in his favorite Constantinopolitan coffee shop was seeping his Earl Gray tea watching the clouds gathering from afar in Bosporus, watching the impressive Hagia Sophia ancient church monuments in the background. The smells of Musaka and kiofte with red hot tomato sauce from a small tavern down the road were tinkling his nose. As he reaches his phone to call his soon to be Turkish wife, someone approaches khassogi and makes him a deal he can't refuse.

They make clear to him that it would involve him disappearing for ever but with a huge amount of cash to enjoy with his new wife, thus shutting up his mouth about possible details about the 9-11 forever.

(Plausible, Khassogi was no saint, he was photographed being armed with an rpg rolling down a hill along with Bin Laden. In Afghanistan?. He used in the past to write supportive stuff for ISIS or "moderate" head choppers)

They explain the plan to him and it seems it involves a scheme to feed false information to the close environment of Erdogan in order to damage his credibility and also bring Mohammad Bin Salman in a difficult position.

Khassogi is thrilled and he accepts gladilly.

(Plausible, D.Trump needs the new deal with the weapons to be signed which MbS agreed to but now it seems he stalled, D.Trump's/J.Kushner's environment along with Israel also could be needing to get a better control on Aramco's future plans which MbS might be postponing for the time, because these actors have planed new and suprising moves in the global scene)

This entity would also exploit this scheme to the max by discrediting every loud critic against D.Trump/J.Kushner (and Israel over it's alleged cooperation with MbS/Saudi Arabia), and that all soap opera would happen during the final weeks closing November's elections in the US.

(Plausible, timing is suspicius, also D.Trump should know better since he is no idiot)

The plan would involve designing the scheme in a way that false possitives about the truth of the story would regularly surface in the media being fed from the scheming Entity to Erdogan's environment who in their turn would leak out to the regime press (though that would also involve trusted persons in his environment having been sold out to the dark side in order to see him go)
(Plausible, still no body, no video, and a few audio tracks here and there make absolutely no credible truth for anything since fals audio is very easy to be manufactured, plus how can Erdogan explain in detail how he bugged Saudi embassy, since that would also be illegal?)

After the deal is made, Khasoggi played his part and they find a way to whisk him out from somewhere erdogan's people wouldn't be able to surveil. The "evidence" is planted and the soap opera is rolling....


Kadath , Oct 17, 2018 8:18:25 PM | link

given how much of the audio tapes descriptions have been leaked already I think the actual recordings (at least audio and perhaps even the video) will be leaked shortly. I would theorize that if the negotiations between the Saudis and Turkey don't make progress quickly enough Erdogan will leak the full Audio and then threaten to release the video.

However, the real unknown is Trump and the US, Trump & the Republicans need Saudi Arabia to keep oil prices low to prime the US economy, especially if the rumors of a planned strike against Iran in 2019/2020 are true.

I don't see how the US could launch anything against Iran (beyond funding Terrorist attacks) without completely tanking the US/world economy unless they have 100% support of Saudi Arabia (even with their support, I still think an attack against Iran would be a disastrous failure). Even getting rid of MbS would still leave Saudi Arabia with strained relations with the US for years to come (possibly derailing the plans against Iran entirely)

Greece , Oct 17, 2018 8:30:37 PM | link
There were other people at the Embassy during the time going about their bussines, it was working hours. It was also mentioned everybody were hearing screams. Where is their audio/video of what happened?

Nobody mentioned that people were being frisked on their way out from the Embassy for their cellphones, and also the alleged team left in a hurry from an exite other than the main entrance where obviously people usually com and go. Where is their stuff? Why nothing on the internets about that? Turkey is not on an total internet lockdown, yet at least.
So?

psychohistorian , Oct 17, 2018 8:45:47 PM | link
@ Pft who is thinking big enough for the situation....nice

Yes, a major global geo-political shift is taking place and it is like folks say about you not wanting to see how sausage is made.

Pft alluded to blatant exertion and assertion of force which much of the world only sees on TV or in the movies. Since so much effort has been made to normalize such behavior, is there any surprise that might-makes-right continues to be projected by the West?

We are about to see how far the might-makes-right folks are willing to push their inhumane social structure. At the end of WWII there was a semblance of claim to moral high ground and global structures to support furtherance of visions of global peace.....which has all seemed to evolve to myth/facade

How did war become substituted for human growth? When will the West realize its inherent social/economic structure is the problem?

Jen , Oct 17, 2018 8:55:23 PM | link
Greece @ 66:

Ever considered taking up writing spy thriller novels for a living? I think you'd be much better than Ted Bell and my local library stocks his laughable trash tomes.
https://openlettersreview.com/open-letters-review/overkillby-ted-bell

But would our man Jamal not also be smoking a hookah pipe while sipping apple tea through a cube of sugar between his teeth and snacking on some nice baklava?

Plod , Oct 17, 2018 9:03:09 PM | link
mark2 ^^^ A few weeks ago Assad said he'd reached an 'understanding ' with other Arab states... Who were those other Arab states Turkey ? Saudi? Iran we can only guess ! We could all think of many others !

Turks? Iranians? Arabs? Wow. USA education system? Pretty basic schoolboys howlers there. Looks as if we could not "all think of many others".

wagelaborer , Oct 17, 2018 9:15:32 PM | link
I don't know why we are believing the Turk's story, just because it has been spread worldwide by the Mighty Wurlitzer of the corporate media. If there were 15 Saudis meeting with Khashoggi at the Embassy, why do we assume that they were a hit team? Sounds like a joke...

how many Saudis does it take to murder one journalist? Maybe it was a negotiation. The Saudis say that he left the Embassy. The Turks, a week later, say that he didn't, and come up with a serial narrative, doled out daily, which the imperial media spreads, unchallenged, 24/7. Erdogan doesn't control the world's media. I remain skeptical.

TheBAG , Oct 17, 2018 9:55:57 PM | link

I agree that the target may be Trump. This reminds me of Stephen Vincent Benet's short story, "The Devil and Daniel Webster." The devil (anti-Trump deep state) ostensibly wants to take the soul of Jabez Stone (Mohammad bin Salman) but in reality the devil has his sights on a bigger quarry, Daniel Webster (Trump.)

Axios has just reported a letter signed by 11 senators demanding that Trump disclose his family's financial links to Saudi Arabia.

"It is imperative that this sanctions determination, and U.S. policy towards Saudi Arabia generally, are not influenced by any conflicts of interest that may exist because of your or your family's deep financial ties to Saudi Arabia."

My feeling is that if sanctions against Saudi Arabia are approved by Congress, Trump will NOT veto. He has tended to follow the laws made by Congress more than his predecessor did.

On the other hand, how can Congress approve significant financial sanctions against Saudi Arabia? There is too much power and money involved. You think the NRA has power to influence Congress? I expect that congressmen and congresswomen are getting phone calls even as we speak.

[Oct 16, 2018] Dan King and E.A. Greene

Notable quotes:
"... Stalin was a leader ahead of his time, with his relatively benign surveillance state plans, compared to those of the "Free" world. ..."
Oct 16, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

October 16, 2018

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Credit: reddees/Shutterstock Should each and every intersection you stop at or drive through be a potential federal surveillance site? The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) certainly seems to think so. The DEA is currently expanding its use of license plate readers (LPRs) in digital road signs, which is sure to have an impact on drivers' basic expectation of privacy.

The agency sees this program as a collaboration between "federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement license plate readers" to curb the actions of drug traffickers, money launderers, and other criminals. The agency installs these cameras in digital street signs on roads that it believes are popular with lawbreakers.

Such actions are not unique to the DEA. Police agencies share the data they obtain from LPRs with hundreds of different local, state, and federal agencies. These agencies range from police departments to Customs and Border Patrol to the U.S. Park Service to the U.S. Postal Service. For example, the San Diego Police Department is reportedly sharing its license plate data with around 900 different federal, state, and local agencies.

Before these agencies can use their LPRs, though, the roads they select must have use for the signs in which they are installed. Daniel Herriges, an urban planner and content manager at Strong Towns, observes that "road design is, in fact, often the biggest underlying cause of unsafe speed in cities." Because traffic engineers design roads to be forgiving, it creates the perception that they are less risky. Motorists then respond "by driving faster or less attentively," Herriges says.

In response to such unsafe driving, communities like Albuquerque, New Mexico, have been requesting traffic calming and enforcement measures through safe street initiatives, including signs that warn drivers. This unwittingly provides an outlet for data collection.

Herriges suggests that rather than increase enforcement, roads should be rethought entirely. "Addressing speed through design rather than through enforcement carries numerous advantages," he says. "For one, it's more effective -- studies consistently show that most drivers disregard posted speed limits." That means traffic engineering could be the best defense of Fourth Amendment rights in terms of license plate data collection -- except, of course, for a constitutional challenge in court.

No federal or state courts have made any rulings on the constitutionality of an LPR program as vast as the DEA's. Instead, the judiciary has ruled that "single-instance database checks of license plate numbers" do not constitute searches under the Fourth Amendment. The courts have argued this is the case because license plates are in "plain view." However, the DEA's massive database, and the sharing they engage in with other agencies, clearly exceed the "single-instance" that courts have ruled constitutional.

"Law enforcement likes to claim that because license plates are in public view that creating massive ALPR networks aren't very different than stationing cops at certain locations and having them write down the information by hand," said Dave Maass, senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "So far, there haven't been many challenges to this in the courts, except on the state level. That said, policymakers have been pursuing (and passing) new restrictions on both sides of the aisle."

Baltimore's Failed Surveillance Regime To Make Streets Safe, Make Them Dangerous

Similar to the National Security Agency's vast metadata collection program, the sharing of license plate information can paint a very holistic picture of who a person is and what their day-to-day life looks like. It can be as mundane as a person visiting his parents or it can be more intrusive -- local police could share the data of everyone who visits a certain immigration lawyer with Customs and Border Patrol, for example.

"I am definitely concerned that agencies may target people by searching ALPR data for visitors to immigration lawyers, medical clinics serving undocumented people, churches specializing in foreign-language services, or locations where day laborers gather," Maass said. He added that DHS routinely uses "questionable tactics" when detaining undocumented immigrants.

The DEA expanding its LPR program would further erode Americans' basic expectation of privacy, and do nothing to make America's streets any safer. It's time to stop throwing more money and resources at the failed war on drugs.

Dan King is a Young Voices contributor, journalist, and digital communications professional based in Arlington, Virginia. His work has appeared at Reason , , The Week and the Washington Examiner .

Ethan A. Greene is a Young Voices alumnus and master's student of City and Regional Planning at Clemson University. His writing has appeared in Strong Towns, Planetizen, Spiked!, and the Washington Times .



Frank D October 16, 2018 at 1:27 pm

The biggest waste of tax payers' money everywhere are speed limit signs. Nobody pays any attention to them unless you see a police vehicle.
Fran Macadam , , October 16, 2018 at 2:31 pm
Stalin was a leader ahead of his time, with his relatively benign surveillance state plans, compared to those of the "Free" world.

Only in his dreams -- or the United States and its clients.

Waz , , October 16, 2018 at 2:52 pm
Don't underestimate the gravity of yet another ominous sign of times. Ever since the first street cameras appeared the specter of totalitarian control has loomed large.

That moment brought into sharp focus concern that the technology that enables unlimited storage and instant access to data could quickly become the tool of total control, too tempting to any form of government and transform it into a totalitarian monster.

I was shocked by how virtually no resistance emerged, no serious, principled objections were raised. Now, we are rapidly progressing into the next stage. If conservatism stands for anything, this is the hill to die on. Comrades frogs, water's getting warmer, high time to jump out!

[Oct 13, 2018] Any sce nario is possible coming from the Saudis or the Anglo media. The Skripal has been a successful one

Notable quotes:
"... Any scenario is possible coming from the Saudis or the Anglo media. The Skripal has been a successful one. ..."
"... The Skripal hoax grew legs I never imagined possible. If people did quietly question it, those people were deprived of a public counter-narrative in the mainstream Press to nurture their skepticism. This could cause a dimwit to renounce natural suspicion and a sharpie to know when to shut-up if he/she did not wish to be laughed at or worse. ..."
"... It is like a well choreograhped drame, Skripals were the same, this also is tooooo nice fitting together... ..."
"... Jared Kushner's friendship/affair with previously merely progressive war criminal MBS, who has progressed to now also beinted tainted with responsibility for the lurid butchery of an offensive to MBS 'journalist' who was but days from marriage and the arms of his love, does not elevate Kushner's already dubious standing in some circles. ..."
"... And then there's NYT's Tom Friedman's gushing rhapsody in purple over MBS: "... a genuine reformer, mega-popular dude, and an all-around super awesome guy." Friedman's love was stoked over what he presumed was a lamb dinner, but in the light of further developments, we are not so sure.... ..."
"... Reminded me of the Sultan Bin Turki affair. ..."
"... He was most critical of the Saudi Royals and ;) 'pro-reform.' He was kidnapped in Geneva, apparently as carried out or 'allowed' for a good part by the Saudi Ambassador. ..."
"... On one hand, the quantity of black flag incidents is increasing, and that leads to low quality at many occasions. Ukrainians in particular excel in making most laughable incidents and the British seem to be influenced. Babchenko was killed, his murder condemned by Her Majesty Foreign Office and then got resurected. ..."
Oct 13, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Virgile , Oct 12, 2018 5:07:49 PM | link

@71 Activist potatoe

We are in "Pulp Fiction" aren't we? Any scenario is possible coming from the Saudis or the Anglo media. The Skripal has been a successful one.
Thanks for completing the scenario with your own ideas of the beheading of witnesses that you mistakenly attributed to me.

I would suppose that Saudis have something usually convincing to shut off talkative people, like they will shut off Trump or even the Turks: Money

Activist Potato , Oct 12, 2018 6:08:40 PM | link

... ... ...

The Skripal hoax grew legs I never imagined possible. If people did quietly question it, those people were deprived of a public counter-narrative in the mainstream Press to nurture their skepticism. This could cause a dimwit to renounce natural suspicion and a sharpie to know when to shut-up if he/she did not wish to be laughed at or worse.

They have so many of us dangling on a string. Thank b and others for MoA!

Den Lille Abe , Oct 12, 2018 10:10:26 PM | link
Cool down! We had TWO GRU murderers walk into Salisbury, with no CCCTV ecidense yet that they were near Skripal's house, and no evidence from his house , which surely must have under surveillance. Do you believe this? OK you believe the official story too.

And apart from that, Kashroggis probable demise is all cool, as he was a head chopping advocate, a Wahabistst. Fuck him . Wahabists go in Class on camps which has on the entrance "Arbeit mach frei" which of course is a general lie, but the whe get to kill them in a humanely way (see instruction manual from CiA)

Or you just shoot them in the chest, less smatter and more blood. Headshots are messy, stuff everywhere., sometimetimes, if you accidentially hit a weak point in the cranium , you have brains everywhere , dont wan't that.

Den Lille Abe , Oct 13, 2018 8:46:30 AM | link
As another poster commented, something is missing...

It is like a well choreograhped drame, Skripals were the same, this also is tooooo nice fitting together... Hmfr!

Qui bono? Who makes money on this? I certainly cannot answer that, but lets play safe : The Russians did it!

They beamed up Kasshoggi to their base on the dark side of the moon, the re killed him in civilized manner, fucking him to death with nice looking whores and spoonfeeding him Beluga caviar and interjected wit sips of Russian Starka. He was then made to mush and beamed back into the Saudi consulate making a real mess. Now poor headchop promoter is all over the place! He must love that up in his muslum heaven with 72 old hags. There is no martyrdom in being beamed to the moon and put through a garden shredder, that is nothing special.

So now the Saudi's has Khassoggi al over their faces (literally :)) and the Turks eye a new way to betray someone (Putin, wake up!!). Ever since democracy was bestowed on these people, they have made a mess of it.

Back in the day (when I was gung ho Army boy), it was OK for a Turk officer to shoot dead a couple of conscripts a year, no problemo, the sentries with weapons had no live rounds hi-hi. Turkey does not need a hard shove and it will crumble, and the Americans will intervene, unless Russia is first.

This game is about Turkey, and not goat herders in Saudi Sodoma. They have hardly oil left and the plebs are angry.

Robert Snefjella , Oct 13, 2018 8:50:46 AM | link
Trivia?

Jared Kushner's friendship/affair with previously merely progressive war criminal MBS, who has progressed to now also beinted tainted with responsibility for the lurid butchery of an offensive to MBS 'journalist' who was but days from marriage and the arms of his love, does not elevate Kushner's already dubious standing in some circles.

Kushner, he who on one memorable occasion chatted till the early hours of the morning, "cultivating a close friendship", with the mass murdering progressive MBS, who (thus inspired?; coincidentally?) to Trumpian applause arrested and shook down many members of his billionaire-cult family. But is this a busom buddy friendship born of equality, two young men with so much in common?

MBS has been quoted as saying he has "Kushner in my pocket". Hmmm.

And then there's NYT's Tom Friedman's gushing rhapsody in purple over MBS: "... a genuine reformer, mega-popular dude, and an all-around super awesome guy." Friedman's love was stoked over what he presumed was a lamb dinner, but in the light of further developments, we are not so sure....

mali , Oct 13, 2018 9:30:32 AM | link
Trump vows 'severe punishment' if Saudi Arabia is behind killing of WaPo journalist Khashoggi . However, Trump stressed that even if the journalist was killed at the hands of Riyadh, he still wouldn't end the arms deal between the two countries .
Noirette , Oct 13, 2018 9:53:35 AM | link
Reminded me of the Sultan Bin Turki affair.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultan_bin_Turki_II_bin_Abdulaziz_Al_Saud

He was most critical of the Saudi Royals and ;) 'pro-reform.' He was kidnapped in Geneva, apparently as carried out or 'allowed' for a good part by the Saudi Ambassador.

He was, allegedly, 'rendered' back to KSA, drugged and tortured. Five masked men knocked him unconscious, anesthetized him, taken him to a Boeing 747 waiting at the Geneva airport, and flew him to the Saudi capital Riyadh

http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13940427000348

In F, closer to the events: Celui-ci s'éclipse de la pičce et peu aprčs, des hommes armés font irruption, frappent Sultan ben Turki, le menottent, lui font une injection et le transportent inconscient jusqu'ŕ l'aéroport de Cointrin, oů il est embarqué ŕ bord d'un Boeing médical arrivé plusieurs jours auparavant et toujours pręt ŕ décoller, selon le récit qu'il en a fait plus tard.

https://www.letemps.ch/monde/ne-prince-saoudien-exile-europe

Prison > house arrest, > once freed - he was allowed to go to Boston for medical treatment - he fled - back to Geneva! - and a court case took place (2016.) Pierre de Preux, a well known lawyer here, represented him. Imho the state prosecutor (= DA) was brave to take on this case. It was nevertheless shelved for lack of evidence.

Killing off critics / potential trouble makers / other / takes different forms in different régimes.

In the US for ex. no big show is made, and the death is classed as suicide, car accident, druggie death, mystery fall / drowning, etc. no matter how weird the circumstances. In other lands, it is deemed necessary to demonstrate the power of the Overlords, who can organise 15 ppl, a stark warning is projected.

Piotr Berman , Oct 13, 2018 10:40:02 AM | link
@Den Lille Abe | Oct 13, 2018 8:46:30 AM | 118

On one hand, the quantity of black flag incidents is increasing, and that leads to low quality at many occasions. Ukrainians in particular excel in making most laughable incidents and the British seem to be influenced. Babchenko was killed, his murder condemned by Her Majesty Foreign Office and then got resurected. Brits seem to liked that, as exemplified by heroics of Sir Gavin, the Lord Defender of the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, Island of Man etc. etc.) on the frontline of the Free Ukraine.

... ... ..

[Oct 12, 2018] For years disinformation specialists have peddled a giant lie about the crash of Pan Am 103 at Lockerbie

Oct 12, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Coldish , Oct 11, 2018 5:17:07 PM | link

That might sound far fetched or even crazy but we have been here before. When in December 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie it was quite obvious that it was a revenge act for the July 1988 murder of 290 people on board of Iran Air flight 655 by the U.S. navy. But the investigation was fudged and in the end it was politically most convenient to blame Libya's Ghaddafi for the Pan Am disaster even while he had nothing to do with either incident.

@8: For an objective discussion, with detailed analysis of the forensic evidence, of how and where the Lockerbie bomb was placed I recommend the book 'Adequately explained by stupidity?' by M.Kerr. The author (wisely in my view) does not speculate on who might have placed the bomb, although she makes it clear that it could not have been either of the Libyans tried for the crime. The book is not perfect, as it lacks an index, but you can't have everything!

mauisurfer , Oct 11, 2018 5:55:53 PM | link

re: Lockerbie

Read this
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:The_Framing_of_al-Megrahi

originally published in 2009 here (but you must sign up):
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n18/gareth-peirce/the-framing-of-al-megrahi

mauisurfer , Oct 11, 2018 6:07:33 PM | link
Re: Lockerbie
Here is a previous article from 2007 also from LRB:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n12/hugh-miles/inconvenient-truths
Ross , Oct 11, 2018 6:36:17 PM | link
@Posted by: DontBelieveEitherPropaganda | Oct 11, 2018 4:31:13 PM | 8

re Lockerbie

This is excellent: Lockerbie - The Flight From Justice Paul Foot - Private Eye Special Report

A dying ember of investigative journalism in the UK, written by a good man no longer with us.

Guerrero , Oct 11, 2018 10:21:47 PM | link
To Pan Am Flight 103: 4-5 years ago i watched a documentation about it, with the usual narrative. But some weeks ago i tried to learn some more pieces of the truth about it, and on Wikipedia is a MSM/propaganda article like so often these days. Has anyone some links to an unbiased account on the tragedy? Thanks in advance! Posted by: DontBelieveEitherPropaganda | Oct 11, 2018 4:31:13 PM | 8

"For years disinformation specialists have peddled a giant lie about the crash of Pan Am 103 at Lockerbie. Time and time again the media has hysterically regurgitated the flawed and impossible legend that Maid of the Seas was brought to earth by a bomb triggered by a barometrically-activated timer, hidden in a radio in a samsonite suitcase. A barometric timer set for 10,000 feet altitude, which miraculously failed to activate when the Air Malta Flight it was allegedly planted on climbed through 10,000 feet after departing Valetta for Frankfurt, and again when the Pam Am feeder Boeing 727 to London climbed through 10,000 feet after departing Frankfurt." https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:The_Bomb_Trigger_on_Pam_Am_103
Copyright Joe Vialls, May 2000
pogohere , Oct 12, 2018 1:20:42 AM | link
DontBelieveEitherPropaganda @8

In The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror , which bombing is a modern template for many false flags that follow, i.e. , a drill goes live, the author follows a myriad of threads, including the fact that CIA intelligence officers were on Pan Am 103 ("Inconvenient Truths" and "Lockerbie: The Flight From Justice" mention this was well). The contention is that they were returning to Langley to present evidence that a rogue CIA group was running drugs through Lebanon. It sez here the rogues managed to place a bomb on the plane in Germany.

lili , Oct 12, 2018 6:49:45 AM | link
@ 9

I looked into the Lockerbie thing several years ago and was astonished to find out that the only link to Lybia was a Swiss made timer supposedly used to detonate the bomb. It was found "by chance" although the plane debris were scattered over many square kilometers...

hestroy , Oct 12, 2018 8:42:20 AM | link

@9 Lockerbee ---> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6222677/How-world-sold-monstrous-lie-Lockerbie.html

Barbara Ann , Oct 12, 2018 2:26:43 PM | link
@9 For Pan Am 103 & much more: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04b183c/adam-curtis-hypernormalisation needs a UK IP address
dh , Oct 12, 2018 3:19:01 PM | link Peter Brooke , Oct 12, 2018 3:45:01 PM | link
In response to DontBelieveEitherPropaganda, item 9 above, a good account of the Lockerbie affair by David Morrison can be found at http://www.peterbrooke.org.uk/p%26t/Lockerbie/index
Jen , Oct 12, 2018 3:55:04 PM | link
DontBelieveEitherPropaganda @ 9:

My understanding of the Lockerbie air tragedy is that it's a classic example of two birds being killed with one stone.

Where TPTB find a possibility that two problems or issues can be dealt with by the same solution, however violent, that possibility becomes reality.

The context to the Lockerbie shootdown is that at the time the CIA was running a heroin-trafficking racket in the Middle East with Lebanese partners. Investigators from the DIA (Defense Intelligency Agency, the Pentagon's own spy agency) discovered this scheme and collected evidence to expose it. The CIA became aware of what the DIA agents knew and wanted them out of the way. One of the CIA's Lebanese partners knew that the Iranian government, or people within it, wanted revenge on the US for the earlier shootdown of an Iranian passenger jet by the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf.

The CIA's Lebanese partners knew of the Iranians' desire for revenge and may have arranged with the Iranians to substitute a bomb for cash or heroin packets in a suitcase taken on board the Pan Am jet. This case may have been part of the evidence the DIA was taking back to the US (but the DIA agents might not have known at the time they took the case on board).

I am not sure of all the details (details not being my strong suit) but that's my understanding in a nutshell.

FWIW, the Wikipedia article on alternate theories surrounding the Lockerbie air crash offers sources you may like to chase up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103_conspiracy_theories#CIA_drug_smuggling

[Oct 12, 2018] Like the values and rules that led the NSA to eavesdrop on Chancellor Merkel's phone calls for years, and to use American Embassies as listening posts. Mutti Merkel was very understanding, considering they were only doing it to keep us all safe.

Oct 12, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Mark Chapman October 4, 2018 at 11:02 am

"the GRU's disregard for global values and rules that keep us all safe".

Like the values and rules that led the NSA to eavesdrop on Chancellor Merkel's phone calls for years, and to use American Embassies as listening posts. Mutti Merkel was very understanding, considering they were only doing it to keep us all safe.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/cover-story-how-nsa-spied-on-merkel-cell-phone-from-berlin-embassy-a-930205.html

The British and the Dutch – and doubtless all America's many 'allies' – have no real pride left. They just keep bending over further.

[Oct 02, 2018] WikiLeaks Calls QAnon A Likely 'Pied Piper' Operation

Oct 02, 2018 | www.unz.com

FKA Max says: September 25, 2018 at 1:34 am GMT

@John Gruskos

One of my comments appears to have vanished, here the information on QAnon I shared:

WikiLeaks Calls QAnon A Likely 'Pied Piper' Operation

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/wikileaks-calls-qanon-a-likely-pied-piper-operation-e5c4f4fac4a

Archived link : http://archive.is/3yTZl

The thread is worth reading in its entirety, easier done here in this thread reader due to its size. Dawson explains how QAnon uses standard psyop tactics, first establishing credibility and then implementing gamification and spirituality to suck followers into an energized, cultish mentality which leaves them susceptible to suggestion, manipulation and direction.

Thread here : https://archive.is/gS1PJ

[Sep 27, 2018] Hiding in Plain Sight Why We Cannot See the System Destroying Us

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... But strangely most of us are much readier to concede the corrupting influence of the relatively small power of individuals than we are the rottenness of vastly more powerful institutions and structures. We blame the school teacher or the politician for abusing his or her power, while showing a reluctance to do the same about either the education or political systems in which they have to operate. ..."
"... It is relatively easy to understand that your line manager is abusing his power, because he has so little of it. His power is visible to you because it relates only to you and the small group of people around you ..."
"... It is a little harder, but not too difficult, to identify the abusive policies of your firm – the low pay, cuts in overtime, attacks on union representation ..."
"... It is more difficult to see the corrupt power of large institutions, aside occasionally from the corruption of senior figures within those institutions, such as a Robert Maxwell or a Richard Nixon ..."
"... But it is all but impossible to appreciate the corrupt nature of the entire system. And the reason is right there in those aphorisms: absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption. If that were not the case, we wouldn't be dealing with serious power – as should be obvious, if we pause to think about it ..."
"... The current neoliberal elite who effectively rule the planet have reached as close to absolute power as any elite in human history. And because they have near-absolute power, they have a near-absolute control of the official narratives about our societies and our "enemies", those who stand in their way to global domination ..."
"... What is clear, however, is that the British intelligence services have been feeding the British corporate media a self-serving, drip-drip narrative from the outset – and that the media have shown precisely no interest at any point in testing any part of this narrative or even questioning it. They have been entirely passive, which means that we their readers have been entirely passive too ..."
"... Journalists typically have a passive relationship to power, in stark contrast to their image as tenacious watchdog. But more fundamental than control over narrative is the ideology that guides these narratives. Ideology ensures the power-system is invisible not only to us, those who are abused and exploited by it, but also to those who benefit from it. ..."
"... It is precisely because power resides in structures and ideology, rather than individuals, that it is so hard to see. And the power-structures themselves are made yet more difficult to identify because the narratives created about our societies are designed to conceal those structures and ideology – where real power resides – by focusing instead on individuals ..."
"... Before neoliberalism there were other systems of rule. There was, for example, feudalism that appropriated a communal resource – land – exclusively for an aristocracy. It exploited the masses by forcing them to toil on the land for a pittance to generate the wealth that supported castles, a clergy, manor houses, art collections and armies. For several centuries the power of this tiny elite went largely unquestioned ..."
"... Neoliberalism, late-stage capitalism, plutocratic rule by corporations – whatever you wish to call it – has allowed a tiny elite to stash away more wealth and accrue more power than any feudal monarch could ever have dreamt of. And because of the global reach of this elite, its corruption is more endemic, more complete, more destructive than any ever known to mankind ..."
"... A foreign policy elite can destroy the world several times over with nuclear weapons. A globalised corporate elite is filling the oceans with the debris from our consumption, and chopping down the forest-lungs of our planet for palm-oil plantations so we can satisfy our craving for biscuits and cake. And our media and intelligence services are jointly crafting a narrative of bogeymen and James Bond villains – both in Hollywood movies, and in our news programmes – to make us fearful and pliable ..."
"... The system – whether feudalism, capitalism, neoliberalism – emerges out of the real-world circumstances of those seeking power most ruthlessly. In a time when the key resource was land, a class emerged justifying why it should have exclusive rights to control that land and the labour needed to make it productive. When industrial processes developed, a class emerged demanding that it had proprietary rights to those processes and to the labour needed to make them productive. ..."
"... In these situations, we need to draw on something like Darwin's evolutionary "survival of the fittest" principle. Those few who are most hungry for power, those with least empathy, will rise to the top of the pyramid, finding themselves best-placed to exploit the people below. They will rationalise this exploitation as a divine right, or as evidence of their inherently superior skills, or as proof of the efficiency of the market. ..."
"... And below them, like the layers of ball bearings, will be those who can help them maintain and expand their power: those who have the skills, education and socialisation to increase profits and sell brands. ..."
"... None of this should surprise us either. Because power – not just the people in the system, but the system itself – will use whatever tools it has to protect itself. It is easier to deride critics as unhinged, especially when you control the media, the politicians and the education system, than it is to provide a counter-argument. ..."
"... so neoliberalism is driven not by ethics but the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of the planet. ..."
"... The only truth we can know is that the western power-elite is determined to finish the task of making its power fully global, expanding it from near-absolute to absolute. It cares nothing for you or your grand-children. It is a cold-calculating system, not a friend or neighbour. It lives for the instant gratification of wealth accumulation, not concern about the planet's fate tomorrow. ..."
Sep 27, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

I rarely tell readers what to believe. Rather I try to indicate why it might be wise to distrust, at least without very good evidence, what those in power tell us we should believe.

We have well-known sayings about power: "Knowledge is power", and "Power tends to corrupt, while absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely." These aphorisms resonate because they say something true about how we experience the world. People who have power – even very limited power they hold on licence from someone else – tend to abuse it, sometimes subtly and unconsciously, and sometimes overtly and wilfully.

If we are reasonably self-aware, we can sense the tendency in ourselves to exploit to our advantage whatever power we enjoy, whether it is in our dealings with a spouse, our children, a friend, an employee, or just by the general use of our status to get ahead.

This isn't usually done maliciously or even consciously. By definition, the hardest thing to recognise are our own psychological, emotional and mental blind spots – and the biggest, at least for those born with class, gender or race privileges, is realising that these too are forms of power.

Nonetheless, they are all minor forms of power compared to the power wielded collectively by the structures that dominate our societies: the financial sector, the corporations, the media, the political class, and the security services.

But strangely most of us are much readier to concede the corrupting influence of the relatively small power of individuals than we are the rottenness of vastly more powerful institutions and structures. We blame the school teacher or the politician for abusing his or her power, while showing a reluctance to do the same about either the education or political systems in which they have to operate.

Similarly, we are happier identifying the excessive personal power of a Rupert Murdoch than we are the immense power of the corporate empire behind him and on which his personal wealth and success depend.

And beyond this, we struggle most of all to detect the structural and ideological framework underpinning or cohering all these discrete examples of power.

Narrative control

It is relatively easy to understand that your line manager is abusing his power, because he has so little of it. His power is visible to you because it relates only to you and the small group of people around you.

It is a little harder, but not too difficult, to identify the abusive policies of your firm – the low pay, cuts in overtime, attacks on union representation.

It is more difficult to see the corrupt power of large institutions, aside occasionally from the corruption of senior figures within those institutions, such as a Robert Maxwell or a Richard Nixon.

But it is all but impossible to appreciate the corrupt nature of the entire system. And the reason is right there in those aphorisms: absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption. If that were not the case, we wouldn't be dealing with serious power – as should be obvious, if we pause to think about it.

Real power in our societies derives from that which is necessarily hard to see – structures, ideology and narratives – not individuals. Any Murdoch or Trump can be felled, though being loyal acolytes of the power-system they rarely are, should they threaten the necessary maintenance of power by these interconnected institutions, these structures.

The current neoliberal elite who effectively rule the planet have reached as close to absolute power as any elite in human history. And because they have near-absolute power, they have a near-absolute control of the official narratives about our societies and our "enemies", those who stand in their way to global domination.

No questions about Skripals

One needs only to look at the narrative about the two men, caught on CCTV cameras, who have recently been accused by our political and media class of using a chemical agent to try to murder Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia back in March.

I don't claim to know whether Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov work for the Russian security services, or whether they were dispatched by Vladimir Putin on a mission to Salisbury to kill the Skripals.

What is clear, however, is that the British intelligence services have been feeding the British corporate media a self-serving, drip-drip narrative from the outset – and that the media have shown precisely no interest at any point in testing any part of this narrative or even questioning it. They have been entirely passive, which means that we their readers have been entirely passive too.

That there are questions about the narrative to be raised is obvious if you turn away from the compliant corporate media and seek out the views of an independent-minded, one-time insider such as Craig Murray.

A former British ambassador, Murray is asking questions that may prove to be pertinent or not. At this stage, when all we have to rely on is what the intelligence services are selectively providing, these kinds of doubts should be driving the inquiries of any serious journalist covering the story. But as is so often the case, not only are these questions not being raised or investigated, but anyone like Murray who thinks critically – who assumes that the powerful will seek to promote their interests and avoid accountability – is instantly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or in Putin's pocket.

That is no meaningful kind of critique. Many of the questions that have been raised – like why there are so many gaps in the CCTV record of the movements of both the Skripals and the two assumed assassins – could be answered if there was an interest in doing so. The evasion and the smears simply suggest that power intends to remain unaccountable, that it is keeping itself concealed, that the narrative is more important than the truth.

And that is reason enough to move from questioning the narrative to distrusting it.

Ripples on a lake

Journalists typically have a passive relationship to power, in stark contrast to their image as tenacious watchdog. But more fundamental than control over narrative is the ideology that guides these narratives. Ideology ensures the power-system is invisible not only to us, those who are abused and exploited by it, but also to those who benefit from it.

It is precisely because power resides in structures and ideology, rather than individuals, that it is so hard to see. And the power-structures themselves are made yet more difficult to identify because the narratives created about our societies are designed to conceal those structures and ideology – where real power resides – by focusing instead on individuals.

That is why our newspapers and TV shows are full of stories about personalities – celebrities, royalty, criminals, politicians. They are made visible so we fail to notice the ideological structures we live inside, which are supposed to remain invisible.

News and entertainment are the ripples on a lake, not the lake itself. But the ripples could not exist without the lake that forms and shapes them.

Up against the screen

If this sounds like hyperbole, let's stand back from our particular ideological system – neoliberalism – and consider earlier ideological systems in the hope that they offer some perspective. At the moment, we are like someone standing right up against an IMAX screen, so close that we cannot see that there is a screen or even guess that there is a complete picture. All we see are moving colours and pixels. Maybe we can briefly infer a mouth, the wheel of a vehicle, a gun.

Before neoliberalism there were other systems of rule. There was, for example, feudalism that appropriated a communal resource – land – exclusively for an aristocracy. It exploited the masses by forcing them to toil on the land for a pittance to generate the wealth that supported castles, a clergy, manor houses, art collections and armies. For several centuries the power of this tiny elite went largely unquestioned.

But then a class of entrepreneurs emerged, challenging the landed artistocracy with a new means of industrialised production. They built factories and took advantage of scales of economy that slightly widened the circle of privilege, creating a middle class. That elite, and the middle-class that enjoyed crumbs from their master's table, lived off the exploitation of children in work houses and the labour of a new urban poor in slum housing.

These eras were systematically corrupt, enabling the elites of those times to extend and entrench their power. Each elite produced justifications to placate the masses who were being exploited, to brainwash them into believing the system existed as part of a natural order or even for their benefit. The aristocracy relied on a divine right of kings, the capitalist class on the guiding hand of the free market and bogus claims of equality of opportunity.

In another hundred years, if we still exist as a species, our system will look no less corrupt – probably more so – than its predecessors.

Neoliberalism, late-stage capitalism, plutocratic rule by corporations – whatever you wish to call it – has allowed a tiny elite to stash away more wealth and accrue more power than any feudal monarch could ever have dreamt of. And because of the global reach of this elite, its corruption is more endemic, more complete, more destructive than any ever known to mankind.

A foreign policy elite can destroy the world several times over with nuclear weapons. A globalised corporate elite is filling the oceans with the debris from our consumption, and chopping down the forest-lungs of our planet for palm-oil plantations so we can satisfy our craving for biscuits and cake. And our media and intelligence services are jointly crafting a narrative of bogeymen and James Bond villains – both in Hollywood movies, and in our news programmes – to make us fearful and pliable.

Assumptions of inevitability

Most of us abuse our own small-power thoughtlessly, even self-righteously. We tell ourselves that we gave the kids a "good spanking" because they were naughty, rather than because we established with them early on a power relationship that confusingly taught them that the use of force and coercion came with a parental stamp of approval.

Those in greater power, from minions in the media to executives of major corporations, are no different. They are as incapable of questioning the ideology and the narrative – how inevitable and "right" our neoliberal system is – as the rest of us. But they play a vital part in maintaining and entrenching that system nonetheless.

David Cromwell and David Edwards of Media Lens have provided two analogies – in the context of the media – that help explain how it is possible for individuals and groups to assist and enforce systems of power without having any conscious intention to do so, and without being aware that they are contributing to something harmful. Without, in short, being aware that they are conspiring in the system.

The first :

When a shoal of fish instantly changes direction, it looks for all the world as though the movement was synchronised by some guiding hand. Journalists – all trained and selected for obedience by media all seeking to maximise profits within state-capitalist society – tend to respond to events in the same way.

The second :

Place a square wooden framework on a flat surface and pour into it a stream of ball bearings, marbles, or other round objects. Some of the balls may bounce out, but many will form a layer within the wooden framework; others will then find a place atop this first layer. In this way, the flow of ball bearings steadily builds new layers that inevitably produce a pyramid-style shape. This experiment is used to demonstrate how near-perfect crystalline structures such as snowflakes arise in nature without conscious design.

The system – whether feudalism, capitalism, neoliberalism – emerges out of the real-world circumstances of those seeking power most ruthlessly. In a time when the key resource was land, a class emerged justifying why it should have exclusive rights to control that land and the labour needed to make it productive. When industrial processes developed, a class emerged demanding that it had proprietary rights to those processes and to the labour needed to make them productive.

Our place in the pyramid

In these situations, we need to draw on something like Darwin's evolutionary "survival of the fittest" principle. Those few who are most hungry for power, those with least empathy, will rise to the top of the pyramid, finding themselves best-placed to exploit the people below. They will rationalise this exploitation as a divine right, or as evidence of their inherently superior skills, or as proof of the efficiency of the market.

And below them, like the layers of ball bearings, will be those who can help them maintain and expand their power: those who have the skills, education and socialisation to increase profits and sell brands.

All of this should be obvious, even non-controversial. It fits what we experience of our small-power lives. Does bigger power operate differently? After all, if those at the top of the power-pyramid were not hungry for power, even psychopathic in its pursuit, if they were caring and humane, worried primarily about the wellbeing of their workforce and the planet, they would be social workers and environmental activists, not CEOs of media empires and arms manufacturers.

And yet, base your political thinking on what should be truisms, articulate a worldview that distrusts those with the most power because they are the most capable of – and committed to – misusing it, and you will be derided. You will be called a conspiracy theorist, dismissed as deluded. You will be accused of wearing a tinfoil hat, of sour grapes, of being anti-American, a social warrior, paranoid, an Israel-hater or anti-semitic, pro-Putin, pro-Assad, a Marxist.

None of this should surprise us either. Because power – not just the people in the system, but the system itself – will use whatever tools it has to protect itself. It is easier to deride critics as unhinged, especially when you control the media, the politicians and the education system, than it is to provide a counter-argument.

In fact, it is vital to prevent any argument or real debate from taking place. Because the moment we think about the arguments, weigh them, use our critical faculties, there is a real danger that the scales will fall from our eyes. There is a real threat that we will move back from the screen, and see the whole picture.

Can we see the complete picture of the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury; or the US election that led to Trump being declared president; or the revolution in Ukraine; or the causes and trajectory of fighting in Syria, and before it Libya and Iraq; or the campaign to discredit Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party; or the true implications of the banking crisis a decade ago?

Profit, not ethics

Just as a feudal elite was driven not by ethics but by the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of land; just as early capitalists were driven not by ethics but by the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of mechanisation; so neoliberalism is driven not by ethics but the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of the planet.

The only truth we can know is that the western power-elite is determined to finish the task of making its power fully global, expanding it from near-absolute to absolute. It cares nothing for you or your grand-children. It is a cold-calculating system, not a friend or neighbour. It lives for the instant gratification of wealth accumulation, not concern about the planet's fate tomorrow.

And because of that it is structurally bound to undermine or discredit anyone, any group, any state that stands in the way of achieving its absolute dominion.

If that is not the thought we hold uppermost in our minds as we listen to a politician, read a newspaper, watch a film or TV show, absorb an ad, or engage on social media, then we are sleepwalking into a future the most powerful, the most ruthless, the least caring have designed for us.

Step back, and take a look at the whole screen. And decide whether this is really the future you wish for your grand-children.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are " Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and " Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair " (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/

[Sep 27, 2018] The Bellingcat claim that Ruslan Boshirov = Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga.

Sep 27, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Debsisdead , Sep 27, 2018 2:30:46 AM | link

I flicked on the beeb news channel as I dragged meself outta the pit this am and caught the 'news' of the bellingcat claim that Ruslan Boshirov = Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga.

Now I'm fully cognisant of the fact that neither Russia nor Chepiga should feel obliged to prove this claim is untrue, but since whichever way you slice it Chepiga is now 'blown', They (Russia/Chepiga) may as well prove the claim is nonsense. The thing being that the boof heads at MI6/CIA would also have worked that out, unless it was a particularly boofed, boofhead who put this latest snippet together.

IMO in all likelihood Ruslan Boshirov = Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga is correct. Towards the end of one of the supporting articles that sets out the 'proof' Bellingcat mutters something rather odd which seems like it actually detracts from the story - if the ultimate target of this revelation is Colonel Chepiga.
But who really cares about some obscure military intelligence mid-level bloke? (Colonel is nowhere near the giddy heights of any military, something I discovered when working in the Oz public service & I was seconded to the department of defence to do a job. Since I was working with a bunch of uniformed saluters, it was claimed they would not "feel comfortable working with someone of unknown status in the hierarchy". So I was told that my position in the Public Service equated with the rank of colonel in the army. I can tell you, if it weren't totally apparent, that I was just an average sh1tkicker)
No one cares about Chepiga, this entire saga is about getting the masses to accept without any deep consideration, that "Putin" the figurehead who (according to western media) micromanages everything evil about russia, only cares about destroying the life of Jo/Joe Sh1tkicker where ever in the world Jo/Joe may be.
So the last two paras of the burble runs thusly:

Bellingcat has contacted confidentially a former Russian military officer of similar rank as Colonel Chepiga, in order to receive a reaction to what we found. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed surprise that at least one of the operatives engaged in the operation in Salisbury had the rank of colonel. Even more surprising was the suspects' prior award of the highest military recognition.

In our source's words, an operation of this sort would have typically required a lower-ranked, "field operative" with a military rank of "no higher than captain." The source further surmised that to send a highly decorated colonel back to a field job would be highly extraordinary, and would imply that "the job was ordered at the highest level."


The logical flaw is obvious of course. If 'the job' had been ordered at the highest level surely sending some bloke who had been riding a desk for the last six years is not how it would handled, the most recently capable operative would be sent - either a relatively junior officer or a young but experienced NCO.

However assuming Boshirov = Colonel Chepiga is correct, while he would never be sent to supervise a hit on the ground much less carry it out; it doesn't take a great stretch to ruminate on the possible tasks a military intelligence colonel would be sent to england for.
There is one obvious task which would explain most credibly what he was in Salisbury for - to give Sergey Skripal confidence that his repatriation was a genuine offer, not some half arsed wish fulfillment plan dreamed up by Yulia and a low level intelligence operator eager to climb into Yulia's pants.
Two colonels of the GRU, one a highly decorated hero and the other a dodgy turncoat who had come to realise after the nonsense his immediate MI6 superior Pablo Miller, plus his big boss "Mr Steele" had put out about Moscow golden showers, whilst insinuating he, Skirpal was party to the fiction, that rapprochment between Russia and angland/amerika was never gonna happen. He was never going to be able to know any of his grandchildren or see his motherland again because usuk needed 'evil Russia' to distract their citizens away from the real evildoing 'at home'.
Someone used a chess mataphor elsewhere in a thread, well I would say that if the Bellingcat revelation that Ruslan Boshirov = Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga. if true sails close to a checkmate.
If Russia confesses that Ruslan Boshirov does = Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, citizens in the west would be denied any explanation as the fishwraps and talking heads would be too busy celebrating Russia's alleged 'defeat' to include any other portion of what Russia had said, especially not an exposition which dealt with everything from the fact that Chepiga & co arrived too late on Sunday for their poisoned doorknob to have tainted the Skirpals who had left the house for the last time hours before and that of all the english towns some idjit chose to squirt this muck around Salisbury was the one where assassination by chemical weapon was the town the least likely to give success since the proximity of Porton Downs guaranteed that some not all staff at Salisbury Hospital would have been trained in chem weapon detection and antidote.

On the other side of the coin - panic stations at MI6, on a quiet Sunday it has just been uncovered that an asset was 'going over'. So some duty officer sent the thug on call for the day over to Porton Downs to grab 'a little something' guaranteed to prevent any such nonsense.

[Sep 27, 2018] It should be noted that Herbert Marcuse was employed by the the U.S.'s OWI (Office of War Information) and then Bill Donovan's OSS (precursor to the CIA) during WWII.

Notable quotes:
"... It should be noted that Herbert Marcuse was employed by the the U.S.'s OWI (Office of War Information) and then Bill Donovan's OSS (precursor to the CIA) during WWII. Though long dead, HM would be proud of today's Germany, probably the most guilt-inflicted, self-loathing community in the world. ..."
Sep 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

Stephen Paul Foster , says: Website September 24, 2018 at 12:10 pm GMT

"One hopes that Rensmann is a rare specimen of the epigenesis of brainwashing via post war psychological warfare against the German people and, more subtly, the American people."

Unfortunately, the only difference between Rensmann's embrace of the Frankfurt School "Gnosis" and that of the average German is that Rennsmann's job is to celebrate their genius. While most Germans probably don't have a clue as to who Marcuse, Adorno, etc. where and how they were employed, most Jurgens and Gretas in contemporary Deutschland are thoroughly "Frankfurted".

It should be noted that Herbert Marcuse was employed by the the U.S.'s OWI (Office of War Information) and then Bill Donovan's OSS (precursor to the CIA) during WWII. Though long dead, HM would be proud of today's Germany, probably the most guilt-inflicted, self-loathing community in the world.

[Sep 23, 2018] Arguing the Constitution with Brennan is like arguing the Bible with an Atheist

Sep 23, 2018 | www.realclearpolitics.com

KCMarkLeader -> JackDan

Arguing the Constitution with Brennan is like arguing the Bible with an Atheist.

hansenwtLeader -> KCMark

Except Brennan will be in charge of something again in the next Democrat Presidency....if you vote Democrat....Anyone that remotely acts like Brennan, (not a partisan argument)...should never ever be allowed near the levers of control of this country....the 2016 election has proven this.

[Sep 22, 2018] A confidential report by Belgian investigators confirms that British intelligence services hacked state-owned Belgian telecom giant Belgacom on behalf of Washington

Sep 22, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al September 21, 2018 at 1:28 pm

Euractiv with AFP: Belgian inquest implicates UK in phone spying
https://www.euractiv.com/section/justice-home-affairs/news/belgian-inquest-implicates-uk-in-phone-spying/

A confidential report by Belgian investigators confirms that British intelligence services hacked state-owned Belgian telecom giant Belgacom on behalf of Washington, it was revealed on Thursday (20 September).

The report, which summarises a five-year judicial inquiry, is almost complete and was submitted to the office of Justice Minister Koen Geens, a source close to the case told AFP, confirming Belgian press reports

The matter will now be discussed within Belgium's National Security Council, which includes the Belgian Prime Minister with top security ministers and officials.

Contacted by AFP, the Belgian Federal Prosecutor's Office and the cabinet of Minister Geens refused to comment .
####

NO. Shit. Sherlock.

So the real question is that if this has known since 2013, why now? BREXIT?

[Sep 21, 2018] That agency is and always has been in the business of subverting or toppling other governments.

Notable quotes:
"... "....cunning, ambitious,and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.....". ..."
"... JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass ..."
Sep 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

blues , Sep 20, 2018 11:45:07 AM | link

The CIA is not really in the business of collecting "intelligence." That "agency" is and always has been in the business of subverting or toppling other governments.

So they have finally gotten around to subverting the USSA government. Why am I not surprised.

Jose Garcia , Sep 20, 2018 11:49:31 AM | link
What came to my mind when I read this good article, MB, is words from George Washington's Farewell Address. He may have written to explain about the dangers of political parties, but it resonates exactly about what is occurring in this present state of American governance.

"....cunning, ambitious,and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.....".

Posted by: financial matters | Sep 20, 2018 12:00:01 PM | 11

blues@6 I wouldn't say finally.

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass and

David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

[Sep 16, 2018] Looks like the key players in Steele dossier were CIA assets

Highly recommended!
'Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that a wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.
'What exactly might an "insurance policy" against Donald Trump look like?'
All this leads me back to the suspicion that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making it possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie Ohr's sudden interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele.
Notable quotes:
"... A great deal of evidence, I think, suggests that practically all those involved in 'Russiagate' were caught totally unprepared by Trump's victory, that they then went rushing around like headless chickens, and that part of this process involved a decision being taken to publish the dossier, without consulting British intelligence. If people like Younger were not consulted, then it would seem to me unlikely that Steele was. ..."
"... And I have immense difficulty seeing how any competent media lawyer would not have recommended, at the minimum, the redaction of the names of Aleksej Gubarev and his company from the final December 2016 memorandum. This would have made legal action unlikely, without greatly diminishing the effect of the claims. ..."
"... But if this was so, and if what they thought was accurate information was actually disinformation, the likely conduit would not have been through Steele, but from FSB cybersecurity people to their FBI counterparts. ..."
"... It it is I think material that intelligence agencies commonly include a great variety of people, ranging from very able analysts and operators to complete dolts. So, the CIA has employed both Philip Giraldi and John Brennan, MI6 both Alastair Crooke and also Christopher Steele and Alex Younger. ..."
"... It is however somewhat revealing that one now finds Giraldi and Crooke appearing on a Russian site, 'Strategic Culture Foundation', while Brennan and Younger are treated as authoritative figures by the MSM. ..."
"... My strong suspicion is that 'Russiagate' is a kind of nemesis, arising from the fact that key figures in British and American intelligence have, over a protracted period of time, got involved in intrigues where they are way out of their depth. The unintended consequences of these have meant that people like Brennan and Younger, and also Hannigan, have ended up having to resort to desperate measures to cover their backsides. ..."
"... There are many aspects to this story that don't make any sense to me if one looks at it from a rational perspective. One of course being concerns about libel litigation and the related legal discovery that you note. The second being no real contingency planning in the event Hillary loses the election. Admittedly they must have bought the media line and Nate Silver's forecast of a greater than 75% probability of a Hillary win. ..."
"... The purported "arms length" relationships don't make any sense. There's Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson playing a central role. They hire Nellie Ohr, a possible CIA asset and the wife of Bruce Ohr, the 4th highest ranking official at the DOJ. ..."
"... Glenn Simpson also hires Christopher Steele who he knows from previous "spook" associations. Steele had numerous and continuous communications including telephone, Skype, email and personal meetings with Bruce and Nellie Ohr during all this. ..."
"... Then there is Mifsud and Halper. Apparently both are CIA and FBI assets. ..."
"... You have Brennan ginning up concerns giving super secret and individual briefings to the Gang of 8 in Congress. There's Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the minority leader on the Senate Intelligence Committee texting and calling Adam Waldman, Deripaska's US attorney about setting up clandestine meetings with Steele. ..."
"... Not to be left behind there's Sen. McCain doing the same. His top aide even travels to London to meet Steele. And then there's Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page busily spending every waking moment texting each other about every twist and turn in all the political games being played. Of course there's Admiral Rogers investigating unusual searches by FBI officials and contractors on the NSA database. And he briefs President-elect Trump at Trump Tower which prompts the entire transition team to move to Trump's golf course in NJ. ..."
"... In fact the IG report on the Clinton "investigation" states that many at the FBI were accepting "gifts" from various media personalities for a quid pro quo ..."
"... There's Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr's direct boss who testifies he knew nothing about Ohr being a conduit to Strzok for Steele. Of course he knew nothing but signed the FISA application on Carter Page. ..."
"... At this point I don't buy that Christopher Steele dug up real intelligence from his contacts at the highest levels of the Russian government, which caught Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Lynch's pants on fire, who then launched a formal investigation of Russia collusion with Trump. Many things just don't pass the smell test. Now of course I have no qualifications nor experience in spookdom. ..."
"... I agree that it (and Skripalmania) are almost impossible to make sense of unless you think of a bunch of highly politicised not very bright people sinking deeper and deeper into what looked like a bright idea at the time. ..."
"... I ask because, if one tries to look at it in a non-partisan way, the Western IC seemed to be a failure when it came to predicting Russian reactions in the Donbass, the Crimea, and it seems in Syria. I link this to various comments from Colonel Lang indicating that true experts were replaced over the years by less experienced and knowledgeable people. Does being "highly politicised" mean that they're not up to much when it comes to minding the shop? ..."
"... I thought I detected a protest against the politicisation of the US in the world some years ago. And we must not forget that Gen Flynn (DIA) and Adm Rogers (NSA) acted strongly against this. Flynn was the first casualty of the Trump/Russia hysteria and the Clapper claque tried to fire Rogers. ..."
"... I was born in the Depression and have seen vitriolic politics but never have seen such a massive opposition by the media, the pundits and the establishment of both parties. Over 500 print publications endorsed Hillary. Only some 20 endorsed Trump. Yet he confounds the pundits by winning the election. Clearly many voters are at odds with the political media class. ..."
"... I think there is an ideological background to this, on which the piece by Alastair Crooke – himself former MI6 – to which Patrick Armstrong links, and the piece by James George Jatras to which Crooke links, are both to the point. The 'end of history' crowd thought they were inhabiting a realised utopia, and cannot cope with the fact that their dream is collapsing. ..."
"... In relation to the millenarian undercurrents on which Crooke focuses, however, it is also worth noting that a traditional conservative suspicion has been that millenarianism is naturally linked to antinomianism: the belief that the moral law is not binding on the elect. ..."
"... It is obviously possible that Ohr did not report up the chain of command, and if so, he and his wife become pivotal figures in the conspiracy. Alternatively, it could be that Rosenstein is lying – in which case, we have large questions about who else is implicated, and specifically whether the termination of Steele by the FBI was anything more than a ruse. ..."
"... 'Yet, Simpson allegedly acknowledged that most of the information Fusion GPS and British intelligence operative Christopher Steele developed did not come from sources inside Moscow. "Much of the collection about the Trump campaign ties to Russia comes from a former Russian intelligence officer (? not entirely clear) who lives in the U.S.," Ohr scribbled in his notes.' ..."
"... And it confirms my strong suspicion that the dossier is actually a composite product, much of it assembled at Fusion, which could indeed contain material from a range of people from the former Soviet space, who could living in the United States, Britain, or elsewhere – Ukraine and the Baltics being obvious possibilities. ..."
"... So Sergei Skripal and Sergei Millian, neither of whom fit the description by Simpson, have been mentioned as possible sources, and there is also the very curiously ambiguous role of Rinat Akhmetshin. ..."
"... All these people, obviously, could simply have fabricated material or retailed gossip, and Steele himself was involved in fabricating material on an industrial scale to cover up what actually happened to Alexander Litvinenko. ..."
"... All this leads me back to the suspicion that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making it possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie Ohr's sudden interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele. ..."
"... Apparently that organisation is doing rather well in sustaining the claiming that 'fair report privilege' could circumvent any requirement to prove truth – and a key question now is whether documents which the DOJ is being forced to produce will establish that the dossier was being used by officials in ways that would trigger the privilege as of 10 January 2017. ..."
"... That said, what Ohr reports Simpson as telling him raises fundamental questions about how anyone could have relied upon the dossier for anything – and should push people back to actually asking hard questions about its origins. ..."
"... To add: Steele was on the FBI's payroll, in addition to being on Fusion GPS's payroll. And on the payroll of Her Majesty's Government. After he got caught leaking to the media he was apparently "fired" by the FBI. But he was continuing to communicate and brief through Bruce Ohr at the DOJ. ..."
"... I think the circle of Glenn Simpson. Chris Steele, Bruce & Nellie Ohr, Adam Waldman. Peter Strzok, and Sen. Mark Warner will be very interesting to pursue. ..."
"... The other circle that should be investigated is the Brennan, Clapper, Lynch, Comey, Yates, Susan Rice. ..."
"... No investigation can exclude the active participation of key people from the media complex including people like Comey's good friend Benjamin Wittes. ..."
"... In its original version, the 'Statement of Principles' explained, among other things, that the Society: 'Believes that only modern liberal democratic states are truly legitimate, and that any international organization which admits undemocratic states on an equal basis is fundamentally flawed.' ..."
"... Ironically, it was shortly after the publication of the dossier that Anatol Lieven published in the 'National Interest' an article entitled 'Is America Becoming a Third World Country?' (See https://nationalinterest.or... .) ..."
"... Also in June, Sergei Karaganov published a piece in 'Russia in Global Affairs', of which he is publisher, entitled 'Ideology of Eastward Turn.' ..."
"... I do not think Karaganov's article is simply a reflection of changes in Russian attitudes. The changes, it seems to me, are global. ..."
"... I do think that we in the West really blew it. In 1990, we could have said, in all humility, that our way of life (IMO the key word is pluralism) had proven more survivable. So we should welcome the others into the tent. Instead, we were right and that was that. ..."
"... Just as you're asking about the origins of the dossier I wonder if it was orchestrated or something that evolved organically? If it was orchestrated, then who was the mastermind? Did Brennan, Clapper and Come sit down and hatch it or was Simpson the brains? What is astounding is the scale. So many people involved. Were they all motivated by ideology or by the need to protect their racket? ..."
"... It seems there are many sub-plots. There's the Deripaska, Steele, Waldman, Mueller, Sen. Warner angle. Then there's the Simpson, Steele, Ohr, Strzok, Page, McCabe angle. There's also the Simpson, Steele, media reporters angle. Then there's the whole Mifsud, Halper, Carter Page, Papadopolous, Downer bit. There's the Comey, Rosenstein, Yates, Strzok FISA application piece. Then there's all the stuff happening in the UK including Hannigan's resignation as soon as Trump is elected. Of course the whole Mueller appointment and the obstruction of justice thread to tie Trump's hand. There are so many elements. Who initiated and coordinated? Was each element separate? ..."
"... Together, these methods are likely to have produced a mass of information. It is important to remember, for example, that at the time of his mysterious death on 23 March 2013 Boris Berezovsky was negotiating to return to Russia, and that his head of security, Sergei Sokolov did return, with a 'cache' of documents. ..."
"... The purpose was to demonstrate that Alexei Navalny was the instrument of a 'régime change' plot in which William Browder was acting as an agent of MI6. ..."
"... An important role in the Apelbaum piece is played by the private security company Hakluyt. A quick look at the entries on Wikipedia and Powerbase will make clear that, if there is a British 'deep state', this is likely to be at its core. ..."
"... It is against this background that on has to see a specific claim which Apelbaum makes, for which I do not think any evidence is produced, about two figures whose role in 'Russiagate' is clearly central. So Luke Harding is described as 'A Guardian reporter and a Hakluyt and Orbis contractor' (note word.) Meanwhile, Edward Baumgartner is described as 'Co-founder of Edward Austin. Contractor at Orbis and Hakluyt.' ..."
"... That Harding is corrupt, as also Sir Robert Owen's 'Inquiry' into the death of the late Alexander Litvinenko, I can prove. When Owen's report was published in January 2016, a preliminary response by me was posted here on SST, which among other things listed some of the evidence establishing that the interviews supposedly recorded with Litvinenko by Detective Inspector Brent Hyatt immediately before his death were blatant forgeries. ..."
"... In relation to that part of the evidence discussed in my January 2016 post which exposes the fumbling attempts by Steele and his colleagues to cover up the truth about when and how Litvinenko travelled into central London on the day he was supposedly killed, most of this had been among a mass of material submitted by me to the Inquiry Team, which I have e-mails to prove was read. ..."
"... Further study of Owen's report has confirmed my suspicion that a strong 'prima facie case' of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice exists against very many of those involved in it. ..."
"... At the same time, materials produced on the Russian side have confirmed my suspicion that the reason why Steele and others have been able to get away with their cover-up is that the Russian intelligence services are no more enthusiastic than their British counterparts about having anything like the whole truth about how Litvinenko lived and died made public. ..."
"... Additionally, the text itself displays an odd parallelism with his assertion regarding the Steele Dossier- that is, the likelihood of multiple authors, of diverse origins. ..."
"... My curiosity about who Apelbaum might be is reinforced by the fact that the intimations he gives about his background in his responses to comments, while not incompatible with what he has said in the past, do not sit so easily with it. ..."
"... So, questions naturally arise about Apelbaum's intelligence career, in particular, who he is likely to have been employed by, and associated with, in the past, and whether he is still involved with any of those agencies which have employed him. ..."
"... 'Also, there is a large Hakluyt/Orbis "commercial intelligence" network in the US that regularly services political and federal agencies and has the power to summon Nazgűls the likes of John Brennan. So Steele is not the new kid on the block, he has been doing this type of work long before 2016. This is also why he has such a cozy relationship with the brass at the DOJ and state.' ..."
"... This is that he, the Ukrainian nationalist former KGB person Yuri Shvets, the convicted Italian disinformation peddler Mario Scaramella, and quite possibly the sometime key FBI expert on Mogilevich, Robert 'Bobby' Levinson, were involved in trying to suggest that Mogilevich was an instrument of a plot by Putin to equip Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb.' ..."
"... In his prepared statement, Lugovoi claimed that his supposed victim used to say that everyone in Britain were ''retards', to use the translation submitted in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, or 'idiots', to use that by RT. And according to this version, the British believed in everything that 'we' – that is, the Berezovky group – said was happening in Russia. ..."
"... Whether or not Litvinenko expressed this cynical contempt, the credulity with which the claims of the 'information operations' people around Berezovsky have been accepted – well illustrated by Owen's report and perhaps most ludicrous in Harding's journalism – makes clear it is justified. ..."
"... Perhaps then, cartoons about Trump as a puppet, with the strings pulled by another puppet representing Manafort, whose strings are in turn pulled by Putin, should be replaced by ones in which Mueller is seen as a puppet manipulated by the ghost of Boris Berezovsky. ..."
"... But that is the irony. The relationship with Berezovsky blew up in the faces of all concerned, when in the wake of the successsful corruption of the investigation into the death of Litvinenko by him and his 'information operations' people, he attempted to recoup his fortunes by suing Roman Abramovich, and got taken to pieces by Lord Sumption. ..."
"... The 'Vesti Nedeli' piece uses what Elizaveta Berezovskaya says in support of the claim that Berezovsky was murdered by British 'special forces', because he was planning to return to Russia, and he 'knew too much about them.' ..."
"... One of the things I've never understood about the Trump Dossier story is the lack of any forensic analysis of its content and style anywhere in the media, even the alt media. Who was supposed to have actually written it? Steele? The style does not match someone of his background and education, and the formatting and syntax were atrocious. The font actually varied from "report" to "report." It certainly did not give me the impression of being the product of a high-end, Belgravia consultancy. ..."
"... I wonder whether it was produced by an American of one sort or another and then "laundered" by being accorded association with the UK firm. Given that Steele just happened to be hired by the USG to help in the anti-FIFA skulduggery, he and his firm seem very much to be a concern that does dirty little jobs that need discretely to be done, though in this case, the discretion was undermined. ..."
"... Most of the memos were issued before October and Fusion/Simpson authorized Steele to release information to the FBI starting in July. The question is why the memos were released after the election when a release before the election would have been enough to sink Trump. Instead the FBI and presumably those paying Fusion on Hillarys behalf sat on it, and Comey comes out days before the election ..."
"... Kind of looks like they all wanted Trump in office and the disclosure was to give Trump the excuse needed to back track on his promises to improve relations with Russia and blame that on pressure from the Deep State and Russia Gate. ..."
"... Looking at Trumps history with Sater (FBI/CIA asset) and his political aspirations that began following his Moscow visit in 1987 it seems likely Trump has been a Deep State asset for 30 years and fed intelligence to CIA/FBI on Russian oligarchs and mafia . Indeed he may well have duped Russians into believing he was working for them when in fact it was the CIA/FBI who had the best Kompromat with US RICO laws that could have beggared him ..."
"... One thing to remember about the FBI is Sy Hersh. Hersh claims the FBI has been sitting on a report for two years that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the Wikileaks DNC email leaker (or one of them, at least.) ..."
"... I suspect the decision to publish the dossier was political. It was required to enable Clapper, Brennan, and others to opine on national media and create further media hysteria prior to the vote as well as to justify the counter-intelligence investigations underway. They were throwing the kitchen sink to sink Trump's electoral chances. I don't think a lot of thought was given about the legal ramifications. ..."
"... This seems to be a pattern. Leak information. Then use the leaked story to justify actions like apply for a FISA warrant or fan the media flames. ..."
"... I find it incredulous that former leaders of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies have gained paid access to powerful media platforms and they have used it to launch vicious attacks on a POTUS. ..."
"... I find it amazing that McCabe and Peter Strzok are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars on social media platforms. ..."
"... If the GOP retains the House and Jim Jordan becomes speaker, then there may be a possibility that Sessions, Rosenstein and Wray may be fired and another special counsel appointed who will then convene a grand jury. ..."
Aug 23, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

My strong impression is that nobody on the British side vetted the dossier for publication. A striking feature of the early news coverage is that there appeared to be total confusion, with some of the reporting suggesting that the sources quoted wanted to hang him out to dry, others that they wanted to defend him.

An interesting aspect is that not only were anonymous sources linked to MI6 quoted on both sides of the argument -- which could have been explained by disagreements within the organisation: in different stories, not however far apart in date, its head, Sir Alex Younger, was portrayed as holding radically different views.

When CNN publicised the existence of the dossier on 10 January 2017, the same day that it was published by 'BuzzFeed', it suggested that the author was British. The following day, the WSJ named Steele.

On 13 January, Martin Robinson, UK Chief Reporter for 'Mail Online', published a report whose headlines seem worth quoting in full:

'I introduced him to my wife as James Bond': Former spy Chris Steele's friends describe a "show-off" 007 figure but MI6 bosses brand him "an idiot" for an "appalling lack of judgement" over the Trump "dirty dossier": Intelligence expert Nigel West says friend is like Ian Fleming's famous character; He said: "He's James Bond. I actually introduced him to my wife as James Bond'; Mr West says Steele dislikes Putin and Kremlin for ignoring rules of espionage; Angry spy source calls him 'idiot' and blasts decision to take on the Trump work; Current MI6 boss Sir Alex Younger is said to be livid about reputation damage.'

(See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/... . )

On 15 January, however, Kim Sengupta, Defence Editor of the 'Independent', produced a report headlined: 'Head of MI6 used information from Trump dossier in first public speech; Warnings on cyberattacks show ex-spy's work is respected.'

(See https://www.independent.co.... .)

A great deal of evidence, I think, suggests that practically all those involved in 'Russiagate' were caught totally unprepared by Trump's victory, that they then went rushing around like headless chickens, and that part of this process involved a decision being taken to publish the dossier, without consulting British intelligence. If people like Younger were not consulted, then it would seem to me unlikely that Steele was.

This leads me on to another puzzle about the dossier to which I have been having a difficulty finding a solution. Long years ago I was reasonably familiar with libel law in relation to journalism. Anyone who 'served indentures', as very many of us did in those days, had to study it. Later, I got involved in a protracted libel suit -- successfully, I hasten to add -- in relation to a programme I made, and had the sobering experience of having a top-class libel barrister requiring me to justify every assertion I had made.

In the jargon then, a crucial question when an article, or programme, was being 'vetted' before publication was whether it represented a 'fair business risk.' This involved both the technical legal issues, and also judgements as to whether people were likely to sue, and how if they did the case would be likely to pan out.

On the face of things, one would not have expected that people at 'BuzzFeed' would have gone ahead and make the dossier public, without having it 'vetted' by competent lawyers. And I have difficulty seeing how, if they did, the advice could have been to publish what they published.

I have some difficulty seeing how the advice could have been to include the memorandum with the claims about the Alfa Group oligarchs, unless either these could be seriously defended or it was assumed that contesting them effectively would involve revealing more 'dirty linen' than these wanted to see aired in public.

And I have immense difficulty seeing how any competent media lawyer would not have recommended, at the minimum, the redaction of the names of Aleksej Gubarev and his company from the final December 2016 memorandum. This would have made legal action unlikely, without greatly diminishing the effect of the claims.

Trying to make sense of why such an obvious precaution was not taken, I find myself wondering whether, in fact, the reason may have been that the people responsible for the dossier may have actually believed this part of it at least.

If that is so, however, the most plausible explanation I can see is that while other claims in the dossier may well be total fabrication, either by the people at Fusion and Steele or by some of their questionable contacts, this information at least did come from what Glenn Simpson, Nellie Ohr et al thought were reliable Russian government sources.

But if this was so, and if what they thought was accurate information was actually disinformation, the likely conduit would not have been through Steele, but from FSB cybersecurity people to their FBI counterparts.

I think that the cases involving Karim Baratov and Dmitri Dokuchaev and his colleagues may be much more complex than is apparent from what looks to me like patent disinformation put out both on the Western and Russian sides.

It it is I think material that intelligence agencies commonly include a great variety of people, ranging from very able analysts and operators to complete dolts. So, the CIA has employed both Philip Giraldi and John Brennan, MI6 both Alastair Crooke and also Christopher Steele and Alex Younger.

It is however somewhat revealing that one now finds Giraldi and Crooke appearing on a Russian site, 'Strategic Culture Foundation', while Brennan and Younger are treated as authoritative figures by the MSM.

If you want to get a clear picture of quite how low-grade the latter figure is, incidentally, it is worth looking at the speech to which Kim Sengupta refers.

(See https://www.sis.gov.uk/medi... .)

A favourite line of mine comes in Younger's discussion of the -- actually largely mythical -- notion of 'hybrid warfare': 'In this arena, our opponents are often states whose very survival owes to the strength of their security capabilities; the work is complex and risky, often with the full weight of the State seeking to root us out.'

Leaving aside the fact that this is borderline illiterate, what it amazing is Younger's apparent blindness to clearly unintended implications of what he writes. If indeed, the 'very survival' of the Russian state 'owes to the strength of [its] security capabilities', the conclusions, seen from a Russian point of view, would seem rather obvious: vote Putin, and give medals to Patrushev and Bortnikov.

My strong suspicion is that 'Russiagate' is a kind of nemesis, arising from the fact that key figures in British and American intelligence have, over a protracted period of time, got involved in intrigues where they are way out of their depth. The unintended consequences of these have meant that people like Brennan and Younger, and also Hannigan, have ended up having to resort to desperate measures to cover their backsides.

Posted at 01:19 PM in Habakkuk , Intelligence | Permalink

Jack , 4 days ago

David

There are many aspects to this story that don't make any sense to me if one looks at it from a rational perspective. One of course being concerns about libel litigation and the related legal discovery that you note. The second being no real contingency planning in the event Hillary loses the election. Admittedly they must have bought the media line and Nate Silver's forecast of a greater than 75% probability of a Hillary win.

The purported "arms length" relationships don't make any sense. There's Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson playing a central role. They hire Nellie Ohr, a possible CIA asset and the wife of Bruce Ohr, the 4th highest ranking official at the DOJ.

Glenn Simpson also hires Christopher Steele who he knows from previous "spook" associations. Steele had numerous and continuous communications including telephone, Skype, email and personal meetings with Bruce and Nellie Ohr during all this. They even have discussions about Deripaska and about his visa application to visit the US. Bruce is a conduit to Strzok at FBI. Glenn Simpson also is part of these discussions with Steele and the Ohrs.

Simpson also arranges for Steele to brief "reporters" like David Corn and others at the NY Times, WaPo, WSJ, Politico and others. Then there is Mifsud and Halper. Apparently both are CIA and FBI assets. They are communicating with Carter Page and Papadopolous, who in turn is drinking and yapping with Aussie ambassador Downer.

You have Brennan ginning up concerns giving super secret and individual briefings to the Gang of 8 in Congress. There's Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the minority leader on the Senate Intelligence Committee texting and calling Adam Waldman, Deripaska's US attorney about setting up clandestine meetings with Steele. There's Sen. Harry Reid passing on the Steele "dossier" to Comey.

Not to be left behind there's Sen. McCain doing the same. His top aide even travels to London to meet Steele. And then there's Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page busily spending every waking moment texting each other about every twist and turn in all the political games being played. Of course there's Admiral Rogers investigating unusual searches by FBI officials and contractors on the NSA database. And he briefs President-elect Trump at Trump Tower which prompts the entire transition team to move to Trump's golf course in NJ.

Oh, there is also Nellie Ohr setting up ham radio to avoid detection in her communications with Steele. Then we have everyone leaking and spinning to their "cohorts" in the premier media like the NY Times, CNN and WaPo.

Comey even has his buddy a professor and ostensibly his legal counsel on the payroll of the FBI as a contractor with access to all the sensitive databases leaking to the media.

Andy McCabe has his legal counsel Lisa Page spin stories around his wife's huge campaign contributions from Clinton consigliere McAuliffe.

In fact the IG report on the Clinton "investigation" states that many at the FBI were accepting "gifts" from various media personalities for a quid pro quo.

As if all this was not enough there's AG Loretta Lynch, meeting with Bill Clinton on a tarmac ostensibly to discuss their grandkids. Not to forget there were these "unmaskings" of surveillance information by Susan Rice, Samantha Power.

There's Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr's direct boss who testifies he knew nothing about Ohr being a conduit to Strzok for Steele. Of course he knew nothing but signed the FISA application on Carter Page. Then there are the FISC judges who never believed their mandate required them to verify the evidence before issuing sweeping surveillance warrants. Now all this is what I as an old farmer and winemaker have read. Those more in tune would easily add to these convoluted machinations.

I don't know how to make sense of all this. All I see is the extent of effort to prevent Donald Trump from being elected and after he won from governing. The most obvious observation is that the leadership in our law enforcement and intelligence agencies are so busy politicking spinning and leaking they have neither the time or the inclination let alone competence to do their real job for which they get paid a handsome wage and sterling benefits.

At this point I don't buy that Christopher Steele dug up real intelligence from his contacts at the highest levels of the Russian government, which caught Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Lynch's pants on fire, who then launched a formal investigation of Russia collusion with Trump. Many things just don't pass the smell test. Now of course I have no qualifications nor experience in spookdom.

If you have any speculative theories that connects some of the dots it would be my great pleasure to read.

Patrick Armstrong -> Jack , 3 days ago

I agree that it (and Skripalmania) are almost impossible to make sense of unless you think of a bunch of highly politicised not very bright people sinking deeper and deeper into what looked like a bright idea at the time.

Confident that their horse is going to win the race and that the media will cover it all up and nobody will ever hear anything about anything. Now that the unexpected happened, they're just spinning and denying faster hoping the Dems win in Nov and stop all the investigations. And, they're getting nervous wondering who's going to sell out whom next. Up and down, around and around. Gerbils -- there really isn't anything very consistent, planned or thought-out.

In this respect, this piece attempts to make sense (on a very large scale) of their panic. https://www.strategic-cultu...

English Outsider -> Patrick Armstrong , a day ago

"I agree that it (and Skripalmania) are almost impossible to make sense of unless you think of a bunch of highly politicised not very bright people sinking deeper and deeper into what looked like a bright idea at the time."

I believe your summary of what's happening is more accurate than Alastair Crooke's as set out in the article linked to.

But bright or not, what are these people in the IC doing being "highly politicised"? Does that not render them considerably less efficient?

I ask because, if one tries to look at it in a non-partisan way, the Western IC seemed to be a failure when it came to predicting Russian reactions in the Donbass, the Crimea, and it seems in Syria. I link this to various comments from Colonel Lang indicating that true experts were replaced over the years by less experienced and knowledgeable people. Does being "highly politicised" mean that they're not up to much when it comes to minding the shop?

Patrick Armstrong -> English Outsider , 5 hours ago

I thought I detected a protest against the politicisation of the US in the world some years ago. And we must not forget that Gen Flynn (DIA) and Adm Rogers (NSA) acted strongly against this. Flynn was the first casualty of the Trump/Russia hysteria and the Clapper claque tried to fire Rogers.

https://russia-insider.com/...

Jack -> Patrick Armstrong , 3 days ago

Patrick

Usually the incumbent party loses the mid-term election. The Democrats lost big in Obama's first mid-term. The Republicans won the House and gained six senators. While the punditry claims a Blue Wave and Nate Silver is giving the Dems the odds. I'm not so sure. I think the GOP will increase their majority in the Senate putting any conviction of Trump out of question.

I was born in the Depression and have seen vitriolic politics but never have seen such a massive opposition by the media, the pundits and the establishment of both parties. Over 500 print publications endorsed Hillary. Only some 20 endorsed Trump. Yet he confounds the pundits by winning the election. Clearly many voters are at odds with the political media class.

Patrick Armstrong -> Jack , 2 days ago

Yeah. My bet is that the Repubs hold onto both. 1) the economy is getting better 2) what do the Dems have to offer other than this crazy Trump/Russia thing?

Rob -> Patrick Armstrong , a day ago

Economy will slow down sharply in 2019 but there should be enough momentum to help with the mid-terms. Trump needs to stop with the endless sanction stuff. The House does look like a close one.

Pat Lang Mod -> Rob , a day ago

what is the evidence for a slowdown in 2019?

Rob -> Pat Lang , a day ago

With all the caveats that apply to financial forecasting copper, monetary indicators and equity markets are all flagging a slowdown is upon us.

David Habakkuk -> Jack , 3 days ago

Jack,

At a very general level, a 'speculative theory' which I have been mulling over for some time was rather well set out in a commentary in 'The Hill' on 9 August by Sharyl Attkisson, which opens:

'Let's begin in the realm of the fanciful.

'Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that a wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.

'What exactly might an "insurance policy" against Donald Trump look like?'

And Attkisson goes on to outline precisely the developments that appear to have happened.

(See http://thehill.com/opinion/... .)

I think there is an ideological background to this, on which the piece by Alastair Crooke – himself former MI6 – to which Patrick Armstrong links, and the piece by James George Jatras to which Crooke links, are both to the point. The 'end of history' crowd thought they were inhabiting a realised utopia, and cannot cope with the fact that their dream is collapsing.

In relation to the millenarian undercurrents on which Crooke focuses, however, it is also worth noting that a traditional conservative suspicion has been that millenarianism is naturally linked to antinomianism: the belief that the moral law is not binding on the elect. And in turn, according to a familiar skeptical view, antinomianism can easily end up in in straightforward rascality.

On the rascality – to which Attkisson is pointing – I am working on how parts of the picture can be fleshed out. A few preliminary points raised by your remarks.

As you note, 'There's Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr's direct boss who testifies he knew nothing about Ohr being a conduit to Strzok for Steele.' So, we know that Ohr and Steele were conspiring together to ensure that the latter could continue to be intimately involved in the Mueller investigation, despite the FBI termination,

It is obviously possible that Ohr did not report up the chain of command, and if so, he and his wife become pivotal figures in the conspiracy. Alternatively, it could be that Rosenstein is lying – in which case, we have large questions about who else is implicated, and specifically whether the termination of Steele by the FBI was anything more than a ruse.

If, as seems to me likely, although not certain, the second possibility is closer to the truth than the former, then before Ohr testifies on 28 August before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees he will have to consider whether he is prepared to 'take the rap' for his superiors, or 'sing sweetly.'

The fact that in a report in 'The Hill', I think on the same day as the Attkisson piece, John Solomon was quoting from Ohr's handwritten notes of a meeting with Glenn Simpson in December 2016 makes me wonder whether he may not already have made a decision. A key paragraph from the report:

'Yet, Simpson allegedly acknowledged that most of the information Fusion GPS and British intelligence operative Christopher Steele developed did not come from sources inside Moscow. "Much of the collection about the Trump campaign ties to Russia comes from a former Russian intelligence officer (? not entirely clear) who lives in the U.S.," Ohr scribbled in his notes.'

(See http://thehill.com/hilltv/r... .)

There is I think a need for caution here. There is no guarantee that Simpson was telling the literal truth to Ohr, or indeed the latter reproducing with absolute accuracy with he was told (handwritten notes can be disposed of easily, but they can also be rewritten.)

One is I think on firmer ground in relation to what it suggests was not the case – that there is any substance whatsoever in the ludicrous story of someone running a private security company in London sending out hired employees who then gain access to top Kremlin insiders, with these, of course, telling them precisely what they actually think.

And it confirms my strong suspicion that the dossier is actually a composite product, much of it assembled at Fusion, which could indeed contain material from a range of people from the former Soviet space, who could living in the United States, Britain, or elsewhere – Ukraine and the Baltics being obvious possibilities.

So Sergei Skripal and Sergei Millian, neither of whom fit the description by Simpson, have been mentioned as possible sources, and there is also the very curiously ambiguous role of Rinat Akhmetshin.

All these people, obviously, could simply have fabricated material or retailed gossip, and Steele himself was involved in fabricating material on an industrial scale to cover up what actually happened to Alexander Litvinenko.

That said, I continue to think it possible that both the second and final memoranda may incorporate some 'glitter', as well as 'chickenfeed' fed from FSB cybersecurity people to their FBI counterparts, to hark back to George Smiley says to the Minister, quite possibly included in the hope that the BS involved would be reproduced in contexts where it could provoke legal action.

All this leads me back to the suspicion that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making it possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie Ohr's sudden interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele.

It could then be that Steele has been, in effect, hoist with his own petard, in that he is having to sustain the fiction that he had some kind of grounds for making the claims about Aleksej Gubarev and XBT. How far this matters, at least in relation to the action bought against 'BuzzFeed' in Florida, remains moot at the moment.

Apparently that organisation is doing rather well in sustaining the claiming that 'fair report privilege' could circumvent any requirement to prove truth – and a key question now is whether documents which the DOJ is being forced to produce will establish that the dossier was being used by officials in ways that would trigger the privilege as of 10 January 2017.

That said, what Ohr reports Simpson as telling him raises fundamental questions about how anyone could have relied upon the dossier for anything – and should push people back to actually asking hard questions about its origins.

fanto -> David Habakkuk , 2 days ago

Mr Habakkuk, you mention "ambiguous role of Rinat Akhmetshin" - I am not sure if you meant Akhmetov.

I am surprised and curious about you mentioning him - if you meant Akhmetov - because that is one name among all the oligarchs which has so far not been prominent. Thank you for your posts, these posts and the SST comments could and should serve as help to the congressional investigations and hearings.

blue peacock -> Jack , 4 days ago

Jack

To add: Steele was on the FBI's payroll, in addition to being on Fusion GPS's payroll. And on the payroll of Her Majesty's Government. After he got caught leaking to the media he was apparently "fired" by the FBI. But he was continuing to communicate and brief through Bruce Ohr at the DOJ.

I think the circle of Glenn Simpson. Chris Steele, Bruce & Nellie Ohr, Adam Waldman. Peter Strzok, and Sen. Mark Warner will be very interesting to pursue.

The other circle that should be investigated is the Brennan, Clapper, Lynch, Comey, Yates, Susan Rice.

No investigation can exclude the active participation of key people from the media complex including people like Comey's good friend Benjamin Wittes.

Patrick Armstrong , 3 days ago

Younger isn't the brightest bulb in the box, is he?

"If you doubt the link between legitimacy and effective counter-terrorism, then – albeit negatively – the unfolding tragedy in Syria will, I fear, provide proof. I believe the Russian conduct in Syria, allied with that of Assad's discredited regime, will, if they do not change course, provide a tragic example of the perils of forfeiting legitimacy. In defining as a terrorist anyone who opposes a brutal government, they alienate precisely that group that has to be on side if the extremists are to be defeated. Meanwhile, in Aleppo, Russia and the Syrian regime seek to make a desert and call it peace. The human tragedy is heart-breaking"

David Habakkuk -> Patrick Armstrong , 3 days ago

Patrick,

Those were indeed some of the most inane comments in an inane piece.

But then, if you read an interview given to Jay Elwes of 'Prospect' magazine in May last year by Younger's predecessor Sir Richard Dearlove, who looks to have been a significant background presence in what has been going on, you will find that, although he is much more coherent than than his successor, it is almost as inane.

(See https://www.prospectmagazin... . )

As it happens, Dearlove was one of the signatories of the 'Statement of Principles' of something called the 'Henry Jackson Society.'

This was founded in 2005, in Cambridge, by a group in whom acolytes of an historian called Maurice Cowling were prominent – Dearlove is himself a graduate in history from that university.

In its original version, the 'Statement of Principles' explained, among other things, that the Society: 'Believes that only modern liberal democratic states are truly legitimate, and that any international organization which admits undemocratic states on an equal basis is fundamentally flawed.'

(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... .)

Ironically, it was shortly after the publication of the dossier that Anatol Lieven published in the 'National Interest' an article entitled 'Is America Becoming a Third World Country?' (See https://nationalinterest.or... .)

Among other things, he harked back to the way that, in 1648, a century and a half of bloody ideological strife in Europe had been ended with a recognition that the legitimacy of different state forms had to be accepted, if a kind of 'war of all against all' was to be avoided.

And Lieven went on to reflect on the way that, at what was then widely seen as the end of the Cold War, the abandonment of universalisitic pretensions by Russia and China was interpreted as justifying an embrace of these by the the West.

This, he went on to argue, had actually had the paradoxical effect of relegitimising 'régimes' which do not conform to Western 'democratic' models, concluding by noting what appears to our new, quasi-Soviet, preference for not letting experience interfere with ideological dogma:

'Finally – even after the catastrophes of Iraq and Libya – there is almost no awareness among US policymakers of the fact that US attempts to change the regimes of other countries are likely to be seen not only by the elites of those countries but also by their populations as leading to – and intended to lead to – the destruction of the state itself, leading to disaster for its society and population. When the Communist regime in the USSR collapsed (though only in part under Western pressure), it took the Soviet state with it. The Russian state came close to following suit in the years that followed, Russia was reduced to impotence on the world stage, and large parts of the Russian and other populations suffered economic and social disaster. Remembering their own past experiences with state collapse, warlordism, famine and foreign invasion, Chinese people looked at this awful spectacle and huddled closer to the Chinese state – one that they may dislike in many ways, but which they certainly trust more than anything America has to offer – especially given the apparent decay of democracy throughout the West.'

( https://nationalinterest.or... .)

I read with interest your piece back in June entitled 'Putin Once Dreamed the American Dream', reprinting Charles Heberle's account of the 'Transforming Subjects Into Citizens' project, and the attitude of some people close to Putin to it.

(See https://patrickarmstrong.ca... .)

One of the things which struck me was that the question why the American Revolution succeeded, and so many others failed, which was concerning the intellectuals to whom Heberle talked, is one of the central questions of modern political thought, from Tocqueville on.

(Indeed, the question of the preconditions for what might be called 'constitutional' government, has been central to 'republican' thought, ever since it was revived by Italian thinkers, including prominently Machiavelli, when the 'Renaissance' made them reactivate and rework debates from ancient Rome and Greece.)

However, to hark back to the anxieties expressed by Lieven, nothing in the analysis of the great French thinker necessary guarantees that the success of 'Democracy in America' is stable and permanent, or indeed that the relatively civilised order of the post-war 'Pax Americana' is necessarily durable in Western Europe.

Also in June, Sergei Karaganov published a piece in 'Russia in Global Affairs', of which he is publisher, entitled 'Ideology of Eastward Turn.' A paragraph that struck me:

'Russian society should by no means abdicate from its mostly European culture. But it should certainly stop being afraid, let alone feel ashamed, of its Asianism. It should be remembered that from the standpoint of prevailing social mentality and society's attitude to the authorities Russia, just as China and many other Asian states, are offspring of Chengiss Khan's Empire. This is no reason for throwing up hands in despair or for beginning to despise one's own people, contrary to what many members of intelligencia sometimes do. It should be accepted as a fact of life and used as a strength. The more so, since amid the harsh competitive environment of the modern world the authoritarian type of government – in the context of a market economy and equitable military potentials – is certainly far more effective than modern democracy. This is what our Western partners find so worrisome. Of course, we should bear in mind that authoritarianism – just like democracy – may lead to stagnation and degradation. Russia is certainly confronted with such a risk.'

Unlike you, I cannot claim serious expertise on Russia. But, as a reasonably alert generalist television current affairs producer, I took note of the indications which were emerging in the course of 1987 that the Gorbachev 'new thinking' was underpinned by a realisation that Soviet institutions and ideas had become fundamentally dysfunctional, to which you have referred repeatedly over the years.

And, after long tedious months trying interest the powers that were in British broadcasting in what was happening, I ended up producing a couple of programmes for BBC Radio in February/March 1989 in which we interviewed some of the leading 'new thinkers', among them Karaganov's then immediate superior at the Institute of Europe, Vitaly Zhurkin.

At the Institute for the USA and Canada, by contrast, we did not interview its head, Georgiy Arbatov, but his deputy, Andrei Kokoshin, and one of the latter's mentors on military matters and collaborators General-Mayor Valentin Larionov, who I later realised had earlier been one of the foremost Soviet nuclear strategists. (At the Institute for World Economy and International Relations, we interviewed Arbatov's son, Alexei.)

Talking to these people we got a sense, although it had to be fleshed out later, of the scale of the disillusion with Soviet models, and indeed – which began to frighten me not long after – of the way many of them were romanticising the West.

What Karaganov now writes is I think a hardly very surprising reaction to the way that the Western powers responded to the 'new thinking.' Moreover, it seems to me that the disillusionment involved is in no sense particular Russian, but rather global.

If one regards 'democracy' as though it were quoted on the stock exchange, before 1914 there were very many buyers, including among the Russian élite. By 1931, in very many places, including large sections of the 'intelligentsia' in Western countries, it was a sellers' market, to put it mildly.

After 1945, a kind of long 'bull market' in 'democracy' started: for very good reasons.

The – largely but very far from entirely – peaceful retreat and collapse of Soviet power was to a very significant extent the product of this. The subsequent behaviour of Western élites has generated a vicious 'bear market', a fact they appear unable to understand.

I do not think Karaganov's article is simply a reflection of changes in Russian attitudes. The changes, it seems to me, are global.

Patrick Armstrong -> David Habakkuk , 3 days ago

I do think that we in the West really blew it. In 1990, we could have said, in all humility, that our way of life (IMO the key word is pluralism) had proven more survivable. So we should welcome the others into the tent. Instead, we were right and that was that.

PS, in light of the Henry Jackson society and all Younger's references to "values" this one rather stands out "A vital lesson I take from the Chilcot Report is the danger of group think."

Yeah. Group think, the very opposite of what I mean by pluralism.

Jack -> David Habakkuk , 3 days ago

David,

Sharyl Atkinson describes well the conspiracy. When one steps back and look at all the machinations we know now, it seems incredible.

Just as you're asking about the origins of the dossier I wonder if it was orchestrated or something that evolved organically? If it was orchestrated, then who was the mastermind? Did Brennan, Clapper and Come sit down and hatch it or was Simpson the brains? What is astounding is the scale. So many people involved. Were they all motivated by ideology or by the need to protect their racket?

It seems there are many sub-plots. There's the Deripaska, Steele, Waldman, Mueller, Sen. Warner angle. Then there's the Simpson, Steele, Ohr, Strzok, Page, McCabe angle. There's also the Simpson, Steele, media reporters angle. Then there's the whole Mifsud, Halper, Carter Page, Papadopolous, Downer bit. There's the Comey, Rosenstein, Yates, Strzok FISA application piece. Then there's all the stuff happening in the UK including Hannigan's resignation as soon as Trump is elected. Of course the whole Mueller appointment and the obstruction of justice thread to tie Trump's hand. There are so many elements. Who initiated and coordinated? Was each element separate?

There's no doubt a political thriller movie could be made.

FB -> Patrick Armstrong , 3 days ago

Thanks for the quote...LOL

I guess the comedy part is that there actually exist people with medically functioning brains, who are somehow able to contort such a worldview...Aleppo as peaceful 'desert' indeed...who knew that having bearded fanatics in charge is somehow 'better'...[and not 'heart-breaking']...

Michael Regan , 2 days ago

Some here may find blogpost from March of this year interesting as it speaks to the production of the Steele dossier. I have not seen it mentioned here before and a site search produced no results. https://apelbaum.wordpress.... Some sections seem to have gotten David Cay Johnston's hackles up.

David Habakkuk -> Michael Regan , a day ago

Michael Regan,

I had seen Yaacov Apelbaum's piece referred to by Clarice Feldman in a post on the 'American Thinker' site a few days back, but not looked at it properly.

It is indeed fascinating, and clearly repays a closer study than I have so far had time to give it. I was however relieved to find that what Apelbaum writes 'meshes' quite well with my own views of the likely authorship of the dossier.

A question I have is whether the monumental amount of labour involved in producing it can really be the work of a single IT person – however wide-ranging his abilities and interests. My suspicion is that there may be input from Russian intelligence.

This is not said in order to discredit Apelbaum's work. In matters where I have had occasion critically to examine claims from official Russian sources, I have found several unsurprising, but recurring, patterns. Sometimes, the information provided can be shown to be essentially accurate, and it is reasonably clear how it has been obtained.

At other times, claims are made which information from other sources suggests either are, or may well be, true, but the 'sources and methods' involved are deliberately obscured, making evaluation more difficult.

And then, there are many occasions when what one gets is quite patently a mixture of accurate information and disinformation. Analysing these can be very productive, if one can both sift out the accurate information, and attempt to see what the disinformation is designed to obscure.

One thing of which I am absolutely certain is that the networks which are outlined by Apelbaum are precisely those which Russian intelligence will have spent a great deal of time and ingenuity penetrating.

This will have been attempted by 'SIGINT' and surveillance methods, and also through infiltrating agents and turning people. (There are often grounds to suspect that some of those most vociferously denouncing Putin are colluding with Russian intelligence.)

Together, these methods are likely to have produced a mass of information. It is important to remember, for example, that at the time of his mysterious death on 23 March 2013 Boris Berezovsky was negotiating to return to Russia, and that his head of security, Sergei Sokolov did return, with a 'cache' of documents.

Some of these were used back in April 2016 in a 'Vesti Nedeli' edition presented by Dmitry Kiselyov, who manages Russia's informational programming resources, and an accompanying documentary on the 'Pervyi Kanal' station.

The purpose was to demonstrate that Alexei Navalny was the instrument of a 'régime change' plot in which William Browder was acting as an agent of MI6.

There is a good discussion of this, which highlights some of the problems with the documents, by Gilbert Doctorow, and Sokolov appears to have been involved in some murky activities since.

(See https://russia-insider.com/... ; https://en.crimerussia.com/... .)

But whatever the credibility or lack of it of the material, its appearance illustrates a general pattern, where the political disintegration of the London-based opposition to Putin has meant that more and more people involved in it have been supplying information to the Russians.

If, as I strongly suspect, there is fire beneath the smoke in those Russian television programmes, and if a great part of a series of projects of a related kind orchestrated in conjunction by elements in American and British intelligence were actually large run from this side, this will be creating headaches for people in Washington, as well as London.

An important role in the Apelbaum piece is played by the private security company Hakluyt. A quick look at the entries on Wikipedia and Powerbase will make clear that, if there is a British 'deep state', this is likely to be at its core.

(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... ; http://powerbase.info/index... .)

It is against this background that on has to see a specific claim which Apelbaum makes, for which I do not think any evidence is produced, about two figures whose role in 'Russiagate' is clearly central. So Luke Harding is described as 'A Guardian reporter and a Hakluyt and Orbis contractor' (note word.) Meanwhile, Edward Baumgartner is described as 'Co-founder of Edward Austin. Contractor at Orbis and Hakluyt.'

That Harding is corrupt, as also Sir Robert Owen's 'Inquiry' into the death of the late Alexander Litvinenko, I can prove. When Owen's report was published in January 2016, a preliminary response by me was posted here on SST, which among other things listed some of the evidence establishing that the interviews supposedly recorded with Litvinenko by Detective Inspector Brent Hyatt immediately before his death were blatant forgeries.

If this is the case, then questions are raised about how much of the apparently compelling forensic evidence is forged – and close examination suggests that key parts of it are.

(See http://turcopolier.typepad.... .)

In relation to that part of the evidence discussed in my January 2016 post which exposes the fumbling attempts by Steele and his colleagues to cover up the truth about when and how Litvinenko travelled into central London on the day he was supposedly killed, most of this had been among a mass of material submitted by me to the Inquiry Team, which I have e-mails to prove was read.

Likewise, also in January 2016, I sent the key relevant evidence on this crucial matter to Harding and senior figures at the 'Guardian', and have reason to believe it was read.

Further study of Owen's report has confirmed my suspicion that a strong 'prima facie case' of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice exists against very many of those involved in it.

At the same time, materials produced on the Russian side have confirmed my suspicion that the reason why Steele and others have been able to get away with their cover-up is that the Russian intelligence services are no more enthusiastic than their British counterparts about having anything like the whole truth about how Litvinenko lived and died made public.

Given the central role which Steele has now assumed in what looks like one of the biggest political scandals in American history, and the fact that in his book 'Collusion' Harding was again coming out in support of him, it would be of the greatest possible interest if indeed the latter had combined being a senior 'Guardian' correspondent with being paid by both Orbis and – even more important – Hakluyt.

And, particularly given the peculiar ambiguities of the role both of Fusion GPS and Baumgartner in the 'Trump Tower' meeting, it would be of great interest if the latter could be tied not only to Fusion, but to Orbis and – again even more important – Hakluyt.

This in turn might be relevant in trying to make sense of whether the fact that he and Simpson appear to have been working against Trump and Browder at the same time was or was not part of an elaborate ploy to give credibility to 'information operations' against the former.

There are accordingly two possibilities. It may be that, while much else in the Apelbaum material can be shown to be accurate, such accurate information is being used to give credibility to disinformation.

Alternatively, he is being used as a conduit for accurate and really explosive information about the British end of 'Russiagate', which he is unlikely to have unearthed all by himself, and the actual sources of which are – for very understandable reasons – being obscured.

Michael Regan -> David Habakkuk , a day ago

Mr Habakkuk-

Thank you for your reply. You have given me much to think about and I am very grateful that you took the time to respond in such a comprehensive manner, and that you have provided me and others here with some really compelling information and notions.

In particular, the issue of sources and methods you note seems spot on. The author(s)'s information gathering methodologies and expertise are certainly not those of the laiety. In fact in the comments below his post YA mentions intelligence work.

Additionally, the text itself displays an odd parallelism with his assertion regarding the Steele Dossier- that is, the likelihood of multiple authors, of diverse origins.

One thing that did catch my eye was a response he made to David Cay Johnston's pissy request for a retraction about Jacoby involvement. YA included a quote in Latin from Cicero's accusations against Cataline. Here is the English: What is there that you did last night, what the night before -- where is it that you were -- who was there that you summoned to meet you -- what design was there which was adopted by you, with which you think that any one of us is unacquainted?

While this sort of riposte isn't exactly hyper-erudite, it ain't chopped liver either. What I mean to say is that exceptional cyber skills, algorithm coding (I'm guessing crawlers) are not commonly coupled with that sort of classical formation. His recourse to various biblical quotes suggests an unusual level of education as well. And no way is he younger than 38 or so.

At any rate, thank you for the article and your kind and informative reply.

David Habakkuk -> Michael Regan , a day ago

Michael Regan,

Thanks. I have now read both a good few of Apelbaum's earlier posts, and also the comments on his discussion of the dossier. Given the importance of his analysis of that document closer study is clearly needed of all this material, but I have some preliminary reactions.

My curiosity about who Apelbaum might be is reinforced by the fact that the intimations he gives about his background in his responses to comments, while not incompatible with what he has said in the past, do not sit so easily with it.

In a July 2010 post, he explained that: 'In my previous life, I was a civil engineer. I worked for a large power marine construction company doing structural design and field engineering.' According to the account he gave then, he subsequently shifted to software development.

(See https://apelbaum.wordpress.... .)

What he now tells us is that: 'As far as how I first started, I do have an intelligence background and have been developing OSINT/cyber/intelligence platforms for many years.'

That makes sense in terms of the analysis, which – whatever other inputs there may or may not have been – looks to me like the work of someone who has a serious background in these kinds of methodology, and moreover, is clearly not any kind of 'Fachidiot.'

So, questions naturally arise about Apelbaum's intelligence career, in particular, who he is likely to have been employed by, and associated with, in the past, and whether he is still involved with any of those agencies which have employed him.

Even if he is not, questions would obviously rise about present connections arising from past work. This is in addition to the possibility that the logic of events may have provoked him to collaborate with those who might earlier have been his adversaries.

Reading Apelbaum's work, I am reminded of another interesting intervention in an embittered argument relating to the Middle East and the post-Soviet space, from what turned out to be an unexpected source.

In the period following the 'false flag' sarin attack at Ghouta on 21 August 2013 an incisive demolition of the conventional wisdom was provided in the 'crowdsourced' investigation masterminded by one 'sasa wawa' on a site entitled 'Who Attacked Ghouta?'

(See http://whoghouta.blogspot.com .)

And then, in December 2016, an Israeli high technology entrepreneur called Saar Wilf, a former employee of Unit 8200, that country's equivalent of the NSA or GCHQ, who had subsequently made a great deal of money when he and his partner sold their company to Paypal, co-founded a site called 'Rootclaim.'

(See https://www.rootclaim.com .)

The site, it was explained, was dedicated to applying Bayesian statistics to 'current affairs' problems. This is a methodology, whose modern form owes much to work done at Bletchley Park in the war, which is invaluable in 'SIGINT' analysis and also combating online fraud.

At the outset, 'Rootclaim' posted a recycled version of some of the key material from the 'Who Attacked Ghouta?' investigation. So, it seems likely, if not absolutely certain, that Saar Wilf and 'sasa wawa' are one and the same.

Following the Salisbury incident on 4 March, a blogger using the name 'sushi' produced a series of eleven posts under the title 'A Curious Incident' on the 'Vineyard of the Saker' blog.

(See https://thesaker.is/tag/sushi/ .)

Again, there are some very clear resemblances to 'sasa wawa' and Saar Wilf, which made me wonder whether the same person may be reappearing under yet another 'moniker.'

While the 'flavour' of Apelbaum seems to be different, the combination of what looks like serious technical expertise in IT techniques relating to intelligence with broad general intellectual interests looks to me similar.

I was amused by the combination of his quotation of the words from John 8:32 etched into the wall of the original CIA headquarters – 'And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free' – and the following remarks:

'The June 2016 start date of Steele's contract with Fusion GPS is the start of the "billable" activity, not the beginning of the research. Steele and Simpson/Jacoby have been collaborating on Trump/Russia going back to 2009.

'Also, there is a large Hakluyt/Orbis "commercial intelligence" network in the US that regularly services political and federal agencies and has the power to summon Nazgűls the likes of John Brennan. So Steele is not the new kid on the block, he has been doing this type of work long before 2016. This is also why he has such a cozy relationship with the brass at the DOJ and state.'

As it happens, I think that many of the collaborations involved may have started significantly earlier than this. In his response to David Cay Johnston, Apelbaum links to an April 2007' WSJ' article by Simpon and Jacoby which, among other things, deals with Semyon Mogilevich.

This is behind a paywall, but, fortunately, the fact that Ukrainian nationalists have had an obvious interest in treating it as a source of reliable information has meant that it is easily accessible.

(See www.madcowprod.com/wp-conte... )

It should I think be clear from my January 2016 post why I find this particularly interesting, in that it has to be interpreted in the context of a crucial 'key' to the mystery of the death of Alexander Litvinenko.

This is that he, the Ukrainian nationalist former KGB person Yuri Shvets, the convicted Italian disinformation peddler Mario Scaramella, and quite possibly the sometime key FBI expert on Mogilevich, Robert 'Bobby' Levinson, were involved in trying to suggest that Mogilevich was an instrument of a plot by Putin to equip Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb.'

So, I then come back to the question of whether this notion of a 'large Haluyt/Orbis "commercial intelligence" network in the US', playing the role of Sauron with Brennan, perhaps, as the 'Witch-king of Angmar', does or does not have substance.

If it does, there would be very good reasons for a variety of people, with a range of different attitudes to events in the post-Soviet space and the Middle East, to think that they had an interest in collaborating with Russian intelligence against a common enemy.

If it does not, then there is a real possibility that Apelbaum may be involved in using accurate intelligence to disseminate inaccurate. (It seems to me that he is much too intelligent to be a plausible candidate for the role of 'useful idiot.')

One further point that may, or may not, be relevant. Many of the most influential American and British Jews, for reasons which I find somewhat hard to understand, seem to have decided that the heirs of the architects of the Lvov pogrom are nice and cuddly.

So, for example, Chrystia Freeland, the unrepentant granddaughter of the notorious Nazi collaborator Michael Chomiak, has been able to end up as Canadian Foreign Minister because made a successful journalistic career on the London 'Financial Times', a paper with a strong Jewish presence.

That the editorial staff of such a paper thought it appropriate to have someone like Freeland as their Moscow correspondent gives you a good insight into how moronic British élites have become. This may well be relevant, in trying to evaluate claims about Hakluyt and other matters.

In relation to Apelbaum, it may be quite beside the point that other Jews from a Russian/East European background, both in Russia, Israel, and the United States, have very different views on Ukraine, Russia, and the dangers posed – not least to Israel – by jihadists. It is however a fact which needs to be born in mind, when one comes across people whose views cut across conventional dividing lines in the United States and Britain.

Beside the point in relation to Apelbaum, I am confident, but also needing to be kept in mind, is the possibility that elements in the United States 'intelligence community', seeing the 'writing on the wall', may think it appropriate to shift from trying to pass the buck by blaming the Russians to doing so by blaming the Brits.

Michael Regan -> David Habakkuk , a day ago

It seems apparent that Putin's reordering of the Russian economy after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, Republic Bank's difficulites and the death of Edmund Safra left a bitter taste in the mouths of many who had hoped to exercise rentier rights over the Russian economy and resources. Why so much US resources and energy have been committed to recovering a contested deed is a real conundrum.

I was unaware of Freeland's grandfather and his lamentable CV. Thank you. It's funny that you mentioned both the Ghouta post and the Vineyard of the Saker. I recall reading those and thinking- this is not like common fare on the intertubes.

Your last points about failings in the quality of elite decision-making is extremely important. This dynamic of the dumb (US, UK, EU) at the wheel is, for me, the most frightening feature of the current state of play. In the worst moments I fear we are all on a bus driven by a drunk monkey, careening through the Andes. It's going to hurt all the way to the bottom.

Again, I am very grateful for your replies and all the great information and thought.

David Habakkuk -> Michael Regan , 2 hours ago

Michael Regan,

I think the question of why large elements in both American and British élites got so heavily invested, in essence, in supporting the oligarchs who refused Putin's terms in what turned into a kind of 'bare knuckles' struggle they were always likely to lose is a very interesting one.

It has long seemed to me that, even if one looked at matters from the most self-interested and cynical point of view, this represented a quite spectacular error of judgement. And, viewing the way in which 'international relations' are rearranging themselves, I am reasonably confident that this was one matter on which I got things right.

A central reason for this, I have come to think, is that Berezovsky and the 'information operations' people round him – Litvinenko is important, but the pivotal figure, the 'mastermind', if you will, was clearly Alex Goldfarb, and Yuri Shvets and Yuri Felshtinsky both played and still play important supporting roles – were telling people in the West what these wanted to hear.

It is a truth if not quite 'universally acknowledged', at least widely recognised by those who have acquired some 'worldly wisdom', that intellectually arrogant people, with limited experience of the world and a narrow education, can commonly be 'led by the nose' by figures who have more of the relevant kinds of intelligence and experience, and few scruples.

This rather basic fact is central to understanding the press conference on 31 May 2007 where the figure whom the Berezovsky group and Christopher Steele had framed in relation to the death of Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi, responded to the Crown Prosecution Service request for his extradition.

In his prepared statement, Lugovoi claimed that his supposed victim used to say that everyone in Britain were ''retards', to use the translation submitted in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, or 'idiots', to use that by RT. And according to this version, the British believed in everything that 'we' – that is, the Berezovky group – said was happening in Russia.

(For the RT translation, see https://www.rt.com/news/and... .)

Whether or not Litvinenko expressed this cynical contempt, the credulity with which the claims of the 'information operations' people around Berezovsky have been accepted – well illustrated by Owen's report and perhaps most ludicrous in Harding's journalism – makes clear it is justified.

What moreover became very evident, when Glenn Simpson testified to the House Intelligence and Senate Judiciary Committees, was that he was once again recycling the Berezovsky's group's version of Putin 'sistema' as the 'return of Karla.'

Given what has been emerging on the ways in which Fusion GPS and Steele were both integrated into networks involving top-level people in the FBI, DOJ, State Department and CIA, it seems clear that the 'retards'/'idiots' label is as applicable to people on your side as to people on ours.

Perhaps then, cartoons about Trump as a puppet, with the strings pulled by another puppet representing Manafort, whose strings are in turn pulled by Putin, should be replaced by ones in which Mueller is seen as a puppet manipulated by the ghost of Boris Berezovsky.

But that is the irony. The relationship with Berezovsky blew up in the faces of all concerned, when in the wake of the successsful corruption of the investigation into the death of Litvinenko by him and his 'information operations' people, he attempted to recoup his fortunes by suing Roman Abramovich, and got taken to pieces by Lord Sumption.

As to what happened next, a recent item on 'Russian Insider', providing a link to and transcript of a more recent piece presented by Dmitry Kiselyov on 'Vesti Nedeli is a good illustration of where accurate information and disinformation can be mixed in material from Russian sources.

(See https://russia-insider.com/... .)

The piece, which appeared in July, discusses, and quotes from, an interview given the previous month to Dmitry Gordon, who runs a Ukrainian nationalist site, by Berezovsky's daughter Elizaveta. Among other things, this deals with Berezovsky's death.

(See https://gordonua.com/public... . A little manipulation will get you a reasonably serviceable English translation, although it becomes comic because Berezovsky is referred to as 'pope'.)

The 'Vesti Nedeli' piece uses what Elizaveta Berezovskaya says in support of the claim that Berezovsky was murdered by British 'special forces', because he was planning to return to Russia, and he 'knew too much about them.'

As it happens, this is a patently tendentious reading of what she says. However, interesting features of the actual text of the interview are 1. that it does provide what to my mind is compelling evidence that her father was murdered, and 2. while she clearly suggests that this was covered up by the British, she is not suggesting that they were responsible – but also not making Putin 'prime suspect.'

Whether the suggestion by his daughter that her father might have been murdered by people who knew that by so doing they might get control of assets he might otherwise recoup has any merit I cannot say: I doubt it but cannot simply rule the possibility out.

What remains the case is that at that point there were very many people, including but in no way limited to elements in Western intelligence agencies, who had strong interests in avoiding a return by Berezovsky to Russia.

And the same people had the strongest possible interest in avoiding his being treated at the Inquest into Litvinenko's death by a competent barrister representing the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation in the way he had been treated by Lord Sumption.

Ironically, it may have been partly because Lugovoi had made a dramatic announcement that he was withdrawing from the proceedings less than a fortnight before Berezovsky's death that before this happened a lot of people were staring at an absolutely worst-case scenario.

Time and again, in Owen's report, one finds matters where he recycles patent disinformation, which a well-briefed barrister acting for the ICRF could have easily ripped to shreds. At the same time, in this situation, the Russians could most probably have made a reasonable fist of coping with the multiple contradictions in claims made on their own side.

And, crucially, their patent weak suit – the need to obscure the actual role of Russian intelligence in the smuggling of the polonium into London, which had nothing to do with any murder plot – could have been reasonably well 'covered.'

Precisely because of these facts, the one scenario which can very easily be completely ruled out is that which is basic to the 'information operations' now coming out of London and Washington. In this, Berezovsky's death is portrayed as a key element in a systematic attempt by the Putin 'sistema' to eradicate the supposedly heroic opposition, much of it located in London.

That sustaining this fable is critical to defending the credibility of Steele, and therefore of the whole 'Russiagate' narrative, is quite evident from the 'From Russia With Blood' materials published by 'BuzzFeed' in July last year.

(See https://www.buzzfeed.com/he... .)

This, however, leads on to a paradox, which is highlighted by a piece posted by James George Jatras on the 'Strategic Culture Foundation' site on 18 August, entitled 'Have You Committed Your Three Felonies Today?'

(See https://www.strategic-cultu... .)

Among the points Jatras – who I think is an Orthodox Christian – makes is that the logic of contesting the 'Russiagate' narrative has had some strange consequences. Among these, there is one on which the actual history of the activities of Berezovsky and his 'information operations' people bears directly:

'Flipping the "Russians did it" narrative: Among the President's defenders, on say Fox News, no less than among his detractors, Russia is the enemy who (altogether now!) "interfered in our elections" in order to "undermine our democracy." Mitt Romney was right! The only argument is over who was the intended beneficiary of Muscovite mendacity, Trump or Hillary – that's the variable. The constant is that Putin is Hitler and only a traitor would want to get along with him. All sides agree that the Christopher Steele dossier is full of "Russian dirt" – though there's literally zero actual evidence of Kremlin involvement but a lot pointing to Britain's MI6 and GCHQ.'

(See https://www.strategic-cultu... .)

For reasons I have already discussed, I think what while Jatras is substantially right, 'zero evidence' is only partially correct: It seems to me that disinformation supplied by elements in Russian intelligence could quite possibly have found its way into the second and final memoranda.

That said, Jatras has pointed to a fundamental feature of the current situation, which involves multiple ironies.

The total destruction of Steele's credibility could easily be achieved by anyone who was interested in looking at the evidence about the life and death of the late Alexander Litvinenko seriously. However, because a central tactic of most of those who are attacking the 'Russiagate' narrative has generally been 'Flipping the "Russians did it" narrative', they are like people who ought to be able to see Steele's 'Achilles' heel', but in practice, often end up attacking him where his armour is, without being, not at its weakest.

Meanwhile, as I have already stressed, the ability of the Russian authorities to undermine the 'narrative' produced by the 'information operations' people around Berezovsky, of whom the most important are Alex Goldfarb and Yuri Shvets, is compromised by their fear of having to 'own up to' their actual role in the smuggling of the polonium into London in October-November 2007.

The person who had a strong interest in blowing this structure of illusion to pieces was actually Lugovoi. But it seems to me at least possible that there has been a kind of disguised covert conspiracy by elements in Western and Russian intelligence to ensure there was no risk of him doing so.

Steve Smith , 3 days ago

One of the things I've never understood about the Trump Dossier story is the lack of any forensic analysis of its content and style anywhere in the media, even the alt media. Who was supposed to have actually written it? Steele? The style does not match someone of his background and education, and the formatting and syntax were atrocious. The font actually varied from "report" to "report." It certainly did not give me the impression of being the product of a high-end, Belgravia consultancy.

I wonder whether it was produced by an American of one sort or another and then "laundered" by being accorded association with the UK firm. Given that Steele just happened to be hired by the USG to help in the anti-FIFA skulduggery, he and his firm seem very much to be a concern that does dirty little jobs that need discretely to be done, though in this case, the discretion was undermined.

Paul M , 3 days ago

Most of the memos were issued before October and Fusion/Simpson authorized Steele to release information to the FBI starting in July. The question is why the memos were released after the election when a release before the election would have been enough to sink Trump. Instead the FBI and presumably those paying Fusion on Hillarys behalf sat on it, and Comey comes out days before the election

Saying he was reopening the HC email investigation.

Kind of looks like they all wanted Trump in office and the disclosure was to give Trump the excuse needed to back track on his promises to improve relations with Russia and blame that on pressure from the Deep State and Russia Gate.

Looking at Trumps history with Sater (FBI/CIA asset) and his political aspirations that began following his Moscow visit in 1987 it seems likely Trump has been a Deep State asset for 30 years and fed intelligence to CIA/FBI on Russian oligarchs and mafia . Indeed he may well have duped Russians into believing he was working for them when in fact it was the CIA/FBI who had the best Kompromat with US RICO laws that could have beggared him

richardstevenhack , 3 days ago

One thing to remember about the FBI is Sy Hersh. Hersh claims the FBI has been sitting on a report for two years that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the Wikileaks DNC email leaker (or one of them, at least.)

Now can we imagine that not everyone in a senior position at the FBI knows about that report? I can't. Literally everyone from the supervisor of the Special Agent or computer forensic investigator who examined Rich's computer right up to the Director HAD to know that report exists - and covered it up.

That right there is obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Literally everyone at the FBI who can't PROVE he didn't know about that report will be going to jail. The entire top administration of the FBI is going to go down.

And how many people at the Department of Justice are aware of that report? Did Rosenstein know? Who else in the Obama administration knew?

That would be motivation for a lot of desperate maneuvering. Add to that who was really behind the Steele Dossier and even more people are likely to end up in jail.

Pat Lang Mod -> richardstevenhack , 3 days ago

What is the link for Hersh saying that?

richardstevenhack -> Pat Lang , 3 days ago

You haven't heard that yet? It's the infamous audio tape that Hersh was caught on discussing it. He's since obfuscated what he said, but the tape stands on its own, and he has never said that anything he said on the tape wasn't true, despite that a lot of Democrats and Trump-bashers claim he has.

Here's one source on Youtube:

Seymour Hersh discussing Wikileaks DNC leaks Seth Rich & FBI report

https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FgYzB96_EK7s%3Ffeature%3Doembed&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DgYzB96_EK7s&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FgYzB96_EK7s%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=21d07d84db7f4d66a55297735025d6d1&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube

Pat Lang Mod -> richardstevenhack , 3 days ago

I have told you several times and I will tell you again probably hopelessly that Hersh PERSONALLY has told me that the "tape" was made without his permission or knowledge when he was aimlessly speculating on possibilities.

richardstevenhack -> Pat Lang , 3 days ago

I am unaware of your explicitly telling me that he personally told you that the tape was "aimless speculation." My apologies if I missed that response.

Of course the tape was made without his permission. We all know that. It's irrelevant to what he said on the tape.

What I'm saying is that despite what he may have told you, nothing on that tape sounds like "aimless speculation".

When you consider that he has four good reasons for dissembling about the tape, I view it as far more likely that everything he said was true.

1) If what he said is true, he may have compromised his FBI contact. Not good for his line of work.

2) If what he said is true, compromising that contact may well make all his other contacts wary about talking to him in the future - a bad deal for a journalist who relies on his contacts.

3) If what he said is true, he may have compromised his ability to get his "long form journalism" article published - a problem he already has had in the past.

4) If what he said is true, he's accusing the FBI of sitting on that report for two years, which might well make him a target of retaliation in some way.

If you believe that everything he said on the tape is untrue and that is what he explicitly told you, fine. I'm waiting for his "long form journalism" report to explain it. So far everything he has said publicly about it has not contradicted what he said on the tape, but merely waved his hands about it.

Pat Lang Mod -> richardstevenhack , 3 days ago

Sy Hersh talks a lot both loudly and profanely. He never intended to tell Buttowski that there was more than a possibility that the FBI held more than a rumor that this might be true. He talked to Buttowski because a mutual friend of him and me asked him to do so for no good reason. Please go talk to all the other people you pester and not on SST. You are an argumentative nuisance.

Aukuu Makule -> Pat Lang , 3 days ago

I have no stake in the debate about Rich, DNC, wikileaks.
But I do notice some loose ends. Hersh may well have engaged in speculation, but it is interesting speculation:
quote:
55. During his conversation with Butowsky, Mr. Hersh claimed that he had received information from an "FBI report." Mr. Hersh had not seen the report himself, but explained: "I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. And I know this person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He's a very high level guy."

56. According to Mr. Hersh, his source told him that the FBI report states that, shortly after Seth Rich's murder, the D.C. police obtained a warrant to search his home. When they arrived at the home, the D.C. police found Seth Rich's computer, but were unable to access it.The computer was then provided to the D.C. police Cyber Unit, who also were unable to access the computer. At that point, the D.C. police contacted the Cyber Unit at the FBI's Washington D.C. field office. Again, according to the supposed FBI report, the Washington D.C. field office was able to get into the computer and found that in "late spring early summer [2016], [Seth Rich][made] contact with Wikileaks." "They found what he had done. He had submitted a series of documents, of emails. Some juicy emails from the DNC." Mr. Hersh told Butowsky that Seth Rich "offered a sample [to WikiLeaks][,] an extensive sample, you know I'm sure dozens, of emails, and said I want money."
. . .
"I hear gossip," Hersh tells NPR on Monday. "[Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of it."
. . .
The clip is definitely worth listening to in its entirety if you haven't already. Hersh is heard telling Butowsky that he had a high-level insider read him an FBI file confirming that Seth Rich was known to have been in contact with WikiLeaks prior to his death, which is not even a tiny bit remotely the same as having "heard rumors". Hersh's statements in the audio recording and his statement to NPR cannot both be true.
endquote
https://medium.com/@caityjo...

blue peacock , 3 days ago

All

An interview of Rep. John Ratcliffe who will lead the questioning of Bruce Ohr.

https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2Fqn23H0vMCsM%3Ffeature%3Doembed&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dqn23H0vMCsM&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2Fqn23H0vMCsM%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=21d07d84db7f4d66a55297735025d6d1&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube

Rob , 3 days ago

I suspect Buzzfeed were in the grip of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and perhaps you overestimate their professionalism.

David Habakkuk -> Rob , 3 days ago

Rob,

You may very well be right. There may be a large element of 'amateur night out' about this.

But then I come back to the question of who decided that the dossier be published, and who, if anyone, was consulted before the decision was made. For the reasons I gave, I am reasonably confident that those on this side who had been in one way or another complicit in its production and covert dissemination were taken aback by the publication.

It is not clear to me whether anything significant can be inferred from the publicly available evidence about whether those on your side who had been complicit were involved in the decision to publish without taking even elementary precautions, or whether the 'Buzzfeed' people just had a rush of blood to the head.

blue peacock -> David Habakkuk , 3 days ago

David

I suspect the decision to publish the dossier was political. It was required to enable Clapper, Brennan, and others to opine on national media and create further media hysteria prior to the vote as well as to justify the counter-intelligence investigations underway. They were throwing the kitchen sink to sink Trump's electoral chances. I don't think a lot of thought was given about the legal ramifications.

This seems to be a pattern. Leak information. Then use the leaked story to justify actions like apply for a FISA warrant or fan the media flames.

Cynthia Anne , 4 days ago

And now they are turning on one another. Hayden just slammed Clapper for making too much of losing the security clearance the he abuse for political reasons.

Pat Lang Mod -> Cynthia Anne , 4 days ago

Looks like both Clapper and Haydon made the same comment about Brennan. they said "his rhetoric was becoming a problem. Ah, the USAF intel rats are swimming for the shore. Lets see how many others (not all USAF) decide to try to save themselves.

blue peacock -> Pat Lang , 4 days ago

Col. Lang

I find it incredulous that former leaders of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies have gained paid access to powerful media platforms and they have used it to launch vicious attacks on a POTUS.

I find it amazing that McCabe and Peter Strzok are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars on social media platforms.

IMO, everyone on the list that Sarah Sanders noted, should not just lose their clearance but should be testifying to a grand jury.

MP98 -> blue peacock , 3 days ago

Not really incredulous. Just expected behavior from swamp creatures whose self-assumed importance and "rights" (that the rest of us peasants don't have) are coming under threat.

David Habakkuk -> blue peacock , 3 days ago

blue peacock

It seems to me absolutely appalling, and I am also appalled that people on this side appear to have been playing a central role in all this.

One question. It seems to me that if what seems likely to be true does prove true, a range of these people must have committed very serious offences indeed.

However, I am too ignorant to know what precisely those offences might be. If you, or anyone else, had a clear understanding, I would be interested.

English Outsider -> David Habakkuk , 3 days ago

"It seems to me absolutely appalling, and I am also appalled that people on this side appear to have been playing a central role in all this."

That says it all. We got the more discreditable side of the affair outsourced to us. Ugh. Is that all we're fit for now in the UK? White helmets and Khan Sheikhoun and Steele, all the scrubby stuff? Is that what the famous "Special Relationship" now consists of? We get to do the scrubby stuff because it's what we're fit for and we can be relied upon to keep it quiet?

Because at least on the American side there are people concerned about the political/PR involvement of parts of their own Intelligence Community, and seeking to have it looked into. Here - am I right? - it's dead silence.

I've been permitted to say before on SST that I don't think the Americans are going to resolve this affair satisfactorily until more light is cast on the UK side. But I also think that, for our own sakes, we should be looking at what exactly our IC does, and in particular, how much UK political involvement there was in what is now clear was a direct PR attack on an American President.

Pat Lang Mod -> English Outsider , 3 days ago

I strongly suspect that Steele has a future as a novelist.

blue peacock -> David Habakkuk , 3 days ago

David

I'm not a lawyer and have no experience with the federal criminal statutes. Having said that I suspect that the following could be considered crimes:

There may also be certain professional agreements with the government that may have been violated. The only way any of these people will face a grand jury is if Donald Trump chooses to take action. Left to the natural devices of the law enforcement institutions nothing will happen and they will sweep everything under the rug. The intensity of Trump's tweets and the accusations therein are rising. If the GOP retains the House and Jim Jordan becomes speaker, then there may be a possibility that Sessions, Rosenstein and Wray may be fired and another special counsel appointed who will then convene a grand jury.

Considering what has been uncovered by Congressional investigators and the DOJ IG, I am truly surprised that Sessions has resisted the appointment of a special counsel. But of course that could go the way of the Owens inquiry in your country.

[Sep 16, 2018] A typical White helmet rescues always had a small diesel fire and usually some white smoke, a bunch of rescuers who ran into the building while the commenter gave a speech, and then rescuers ran the rescued infants past the camera while the narrator gave a 'moral' speech.

Sep 16, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Charles Wood , Sep 16, 2018 2:19:48 AM | link

The White Helmets as a brand had their website first registered by Ali Weiner of Purpose Inc (Brooklyn advertising agency) on 2014-08-11T19:50:31Z

I had noticed their activity shortly after that date but it wasn't labelled White Helmets as such. I recall a series of setpiece rescues with someone who looked like Hadi Alabdullah giving a running comment and speeches denouncing Assad.

The setpiece rescues always had a small diesel fire and usually some white smoke, a bunch of rescuers who ran into the building while the commenter gave a speech, and then rescuers ran the rescued infants past the camera while the narrator gave a 'moral' speech.

guidoamm , Sep 16, 2018 1:07:32 AM | link

Peter Au 1 @ 10

Regarding snuff videos, I always wondered whether or not this operation overlapped:

US Gov Spent $500M For Al Qaeda Propaganda Videos

[Sep 15, 2018] BBC is skanky state propaganda

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The myth of BBC being some standard for news reporting died with the advent of the availability of international and independent news in Western countries ..."
"... Ironic when the BBC has been ceaselessly pushing fake news for at least 15 years, with disastrous results. (Iraq; Libya; what caused the deficit and who should be forced to pay it down; Russia/Syria false flags; Corbyn A/S.) ..."
"... I find it impossible to watch BBC News, primarily because most of the editorial staff and senior correspondents seem to be working for MI5/6 and are more interested in disseminating Geo-political propaganda than upholding their journalistic responsibilities as defined in the BBC charter. ..."
"... The book is obviously part of a propaganda campaign. It seems hugely fortuitous that Mark Urban should have had "hours" of interviews with Skripal before the poisoning incident. ..."
"... Isn't it much more likely that the Urban "interviews" would have happened after the event? But Urban can't say that because that would lead to demands from other journalists or news bodies to have access to Skripal. ..."
"... I'm open to alternative hypotheses but right now I think the most likely explanation for Urban's pre-poisoning contact with Sergei Skripal is that, at the time, it was assumed the Orbis dossier would be a key component of the successful takedown of Trump and Urban was putting together a mutually flattering account by interviewing the main players. ..."
"... With regard to your tongue-in-cheek point. Urban could have interviewed Skripal anytime after Trump was gone, unless he believed Skripal might be unavailable (for some reason). The fact he interviewed Skripal before does indicate foresight. If Urban really did interview Skripal before the event then he would be wiser to pull the book and burn every copy in existence (as well as all his notes). ..."
"... Urban pretends to research a book exposing Russia and part of his research is to interview Skripal. His objective is to find dirt on Putin in order to swing the war in Syria in favour of USUKIS bombing Assad to smithereens, bayonets bums etc. ..."
"... Interestingly Mark Urbans' book on Sergei Skripal was available to purchase on Amazon in July. I added it to my Amazon wishlist on 28/7/18. I've just looked at my wishlist and was rather surprised to find it is no longer available. It has been pulled. ..."
"... Can't help thinking that the answer to all this lies in Estonia. Sergei went to Estonia in June 2016, Pablo was in Estonia, the Estonians passed on sigint about Trump-Russian collusion in the summer of 2016. A Guardian article of 13 April 2017 said: ..."
"... No doubt in my mind that the Skripal affair is a planned operation carried out by US/UK intelligence. What has actually taken place is still to be determined, but the propaganda operation itself is clear. ..."
"... I know about Ireland, and I agree, it was NOT a nerve agent. That said, I don't believe anyone was 'attacked', including the Skripals. ..."
"... All foreign correspondents of major newspapers too work with MI6. Nobody who is close to them has any kind of doubt about this. ..."
"... I despise everyone who says that free markets are the solution for the problems of the third world. What they mean is mass starvation and an enormous population cull. There are international "foundations" that pay academics and politicians large amounts of money to spout this obscene line. One of them is called the John Templeton Foundation. They have had their fangs in to British universities for a long time. ..."
"... When the Tories talk about 'free markets', they are talking about markets free from democracy. ..."
Aug 30, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

Dave , August 28, 2018 at 17:41

BBC is skanky state propaganda. The myth of BBC being some standard for news reporting died with the advent of the availability of international and independent news in Western countries. The main thing that BBC used to have which propped up the illusion of it being a respectable news source is that there was no competition or alternative to compare its narratives against. Since that time is over, so is BBC's masquerading as an impartial or accurate news source.

Xavi , August 28, 2018 at 18:40

Agree, Dave. That's what's informing the push to rubbish dissenting sites as fake news and eventually have them removed.

Ironic when the BBC has been ceaselessly pushing fake news for at least 15 years, with disastrous results. (Iraq; Libya; what caused the deficit and who should be forced to pay it down; Russia/Syria false flags; Corbyn A/S.)

Ken Kenn , August 28, 2018 at 21:49

Well I was convinced of fake BBC news during 9/11 and not for the reasons of building 7 coming down too early but the fact that the female journalist was facing a camera standing in front of a glass window and there was no reflection of her or the camera person from the glass. Not even a faint shadow.

That's when I knew the BBC were employing vampires and have been ever since.

Green Screen technology I discovered later. All the On the spot reporters are at it apparently. Or repeating Reuters or PA.

Deb O'Nair , August 28, 2018 at 00:52

I find it impossible to watch BBC News, primarily because most of the editorial staff and senior correspondents seem to be working for MI5/6 and are more interested in disseminating Geo-political propaganda than upholding their journalistic responsibilities as defined in the BBC charter. People should not only boycott the BBC but refuse to pay the license fee on the grounds that it's a compulsory political subscription.

frankywiggles , August 28, 2018 at 09:48

Careful, Craig

BBC world affairs editor 'fed up' with complaints directed at the corporation's news output

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/aug/28/bbc-news-is-not-biased-in-brexit-reporting-says-john-simpson

D_Majestic , August 28, 2018 at 14:35

Of course BBC News is not biased. Most of the time it is not even factual.

Brendan , August 28, 2018 at 10:34

Dear Mark,
In a BBC article on 4 July 2018, you wrote: "I have not felt ready until now to acknowledge explicitly that we had met, but do now that the book is nearing completion."

Could you please explain that comment? I do not see why your acknowledgement of your meetings with Sergei Skripal should be delayed until your book is nearing completion.

If you felt that it was right to reveal those meetings in July, then why was it not right to do so in March, soon after the poisoning occurred? What difference would it have made if you had done so four months earlier?

I cannot think of any negative consequences of an earlier acknowledgement of the meetings. In fact, disclosures of any possible conflict of interest are generally considered to be desirable in journalism, regardless of whether the conflict of interest is real.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 11:00

The book is obviously part of a propaganda campaign. It seems hugely fortuitous that Mark Urban should have had "hours" of interviews with Skripal before the poisoning incident.

Isn't it much more likely that the Urban "interviews" would have happened after the event? But Urban can't say that because that would lead to demands from other journalists or news bodies to have access to Skripal.

And that can't happen because either Skripal would be asked about what happened on the day of the poisoning, or can't be guaranteed to stick to the script, or is no longer alive. And that leads to a suspicion that whatever Skripal is supposed to have said in his interviews with Urban has really just been made up by the British security services.

Kay , August 28, 2018 at 14:42

I'm open to alternative hypotheses but right now I think the most likely explanation for Urban's pre-poisoning contact with Sergei Skripal is that, at the time, it was assumed the Orbis dossier would be a key component of the successful takedown of Trump and Urban was putting together a mutually flattering account by interviewing the main players.

Tongue in cheek, it'd be worth asking Urban if his decision to cover the Skripal poisoning in his new book was made before or after the Skripals were actually poisoned.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 15:59

The consensus seems to be that it was an anti-Russia book, but that doesn't conflict with what you say (there is overlap, your view is just more specific). But, I just find it hard to believe that Urban and the conspirators would waste their time "counting their chickens ". Not least because such a book would form a handy list of traitors (together with confessions) if Trump were to prevail and it fell into the right hands. This is "101 – How to Organise a Revolution" (secrecy / don't put anything in writing); surely British security services know that?

With regard to your tongue-in-cheek point. Urban could have interviewed Skripal anytime after Trump was gone, unless he believed Skripal might be unavailable (for some reason). The fact he interviewed Skripal before does indicate foresight. If Urban really did interview Skripal before the event then he would be wiser to pull the book and burn every copy in existence (as well as all his notes).

Regardless, it looks like the master of the universe are losing their ability to create reality.

Brendan , August 28, 2018 at 10:37

Last month, Mark Urban was promoting the reports that the Russian assassins had been identified from CCTV footage:

"There are now subjects of interest in the police Salisbury investigation. ( ) analytic and cyber techniques are now being exploited against the Salisbury suspects by people with a wealth of experience in complex investigations."
https://twitter.com/MarkUrban01/status/1020366761848385536

That story originated with a report by PA, which Security Minister Ben Wallace called "ill informed and wild speculation". https://mobile.twitter.com/BWallaceMP/status/1019906962786484225

Or as Craig Murray put it, "Unnamed source close to unnamed British police officers tells unnamed Press Association journalist Britain knows the unnamed Russian agents ".
https://twitter.com/CraigMurrayOrg/status/1019854966327005184

Even Urban's colleagues had to admit that "The BBC has not been able to independently confirm the story."
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-44883803

Still, that didn't stop Mark Urban from reporting the story almost as fact.

Tom , August 28, 2018 at 10:38

The BBC relies on it's interpretation of the Act because it is held for the purposes of 'journalism, art or literature.' but this relies on a usually unrelated precedent and the opinions of a number of Judges which contradict this view. I'm in the process of challenging this with ICO but don't expect anything will change until another supreme court ruling:

https://medium.com/@tomcoady/bbc-foi-exemption-for-the-purposes-of-art-journalism-or-literature-c39e4fa3e36

Ian Fantom , August 28, 2018 at 10:41

I've put in a Freedom of Information request regarding meetings with Skripal other than any that were for the purpose of BBC news journalism. (https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/mark_urbans_non_journalistic_mee )

Made By Dom , August 28, 2018 at 11:04

Can I play Devil's Advocate ?

I can see the value in asking writers, journalists and artists to pose exactly the same questions as Eccles' original letter but I'm not convinced about Craig's email.

A quick google shows me that a man named Mark Urban has written a book on the Skripals. Isn't it likely that Urban was keeping the interviews to himself in order to keep his book alive?

It wouldn't surprise me if Urban cares far more about his writing career than his job at the BBC. I'm sure most journalists would rather be authors. He's written a number of books on war and military intelligence. If his sources have nothing to do with the BBC then why should he answer to an on line mob?

craig Post author , August 28, 2018 at 11:18

" Isn't it likely that Urban was keeping the interviews to himself in order to keep his book alive?"
No, entirely unlikely. a chance to plug his forthcoming book and his Skripal contacts to a massive worldwide televion audience was eschewed.
The book is now about the Skripal attack. Presumably that was not the original subject he was researching, as it hadn't happened yet. The book will just be a rehash of the "noble defector – Putin revenge" line and none of the questions I asked about the genesis of his involvement will be answered in it.

SA , August 28, 2018 at 11:29

"Presumably that was not the original subject he was researching, as it hadn't happened yet." Or it was prescience ie that it was part of the planning for the incident?

Chris Hemmings , August 28, 2018 at 14:41

@BBC, Summer 2017, in an executive office:
"Hey Mark, why don't you go down to have a chat with this guy in Salisbury. I have a hunch that a story might be going to happen involving him, you know, as an ex-Soviet spy. Spend time with him, get to know him, be able to write in depth about him. Say it's for a book ."

giyane , August 28, 2018 at 11:46

Urban is never one-sided in his BBC reports on the Middle East. I would rather have him as Foreign Secretary than a bumbling idiot like Hubris Johnson or a Tory racketeer Hunt, because however clunky the formula of BBC balance Urban is at least pretending to be governed by normal rules. After Thatcher went anyone with half a brain left the Conservative party, leaving dolts like Johnson and nasties like May and Cameron to pick up the pieces after Blair and Brown.

There's money to be made from Russian billionaires and tory shit will follow the money like flies on d**t**d.

Urban pretends to research a book exposing Russia and part of his research is to interview Skripal. His objective is to find dirt on Putin in order to swing the war in Syria in favour of USUKIS bombing Assad to smithereens, bayonets bums etc.

Tory shit Hubris Johnson finds this political research floating around the Foreign Office and decides to twist it into Russia murders Skripal by Novichok. Unfortunately Johnson is already known to be a liar and gravy-trainer Tory and nobody believes him at all. Mrs May , realising that Johnson, Fox, Rees-Mogg and Hunt are completely bonkers, does Chequers her own way.

ZigZag Wanderer , August 28, 2018 at 12:26

Interestingly Mark Urbans' book on Sergei Skripal was available to purchase on Amazon in July. I added it to my Amazon wishlist on 28/7/18. I've just looked at my wishlist and was rather surprised to find it is no longer available. It has been pulled.

From memory the books description said that Mark had interviewed Skripal 'extensively' during 2017 and also mentioned the 'new' spying war now happening between Britain and Russia.

A quick search revealed a new version of the book ( with an altered title ) will be available in early October .. details here. https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/mark-urban/the-skripal-files

Oh dear . panic stations !

Sharp Ears , August 28, 2018 at 11:16

Salisbury poisoning: Skripals 'were under Russian surveillance'
Mark Urban Diplomatic and defence editor, Newsnight

4 July 2018

'My meetings with Sergei Skripal

I met Sergei on a few occasions last summer and found him to be a private character who did not, even under the circumstances then prevailing, wish to draw attention to himself.

He agreed to see me as a writer of history books rather than as a news journalist, since I was researching one on the post-Cold War espionage battle between Russia and the West.

Information gained in these interviews was fed into my Newsnight coverage during the early days after the poisoning. I have not felt ready until now to acknowledge explicitly that we had met, but do now that the book is nearing completion.

As a man, Sergei is proud of his achievements, both before and after joining his country's intelligence service.

He has a deadpan wit and is remarkably stoical given the reverses he's suffered in his life; from his imprisonment following conviction in 2006 on charges of spying for Britain, to the loss of his wife Liudmila to cancer in 2012, and the untimely death of his son Alexander (or Sasha) last summer.'

...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44717835

Agent Green , August 28, 2018 at 12:27

Laughable given that the whole world and virtually all heads of State were under US surveillance by the NSA – at least until Edward Snowden made all his revelations.

KEVIN GLENNIE , August 28, 2018 at 11:18

I have pasted and copied your Email regarding the above with a few slight alterations, it will be interesting to see the response I receive if any being just a concerned citizen of the U.

Niki Henry , August 28, 2018 at 11:21

Is this not a matter for the Police? (Even if you're not too sure if they'd do anything about it) These would be files that are to do with an attempted murder case. And definitely not Journalism if the story is fabricated.

Paul Baker , August 28, 2018 at 11:28

It feels as if you are moving in the right direction in linking Sergei to Steele. I'm intrigued by the very early media references to Sergei wanting to return home to see his elderly mother for perhaps the last time. He had apparently written to Putin making his request but again according to newspapers hadn't received a reply.

I would suggest Julia was bringing the answer via her own secret services contacts, her boyfriend and his mother, apparently Senior in the Russian Intelligence Agency. Perhaps a sentimental man Sergei was aware his mother couldn't travel so the plea to Putin was his best bet.

Such a request must have disturbed MI6 if Sergei had anything at all to do with the Steele dossier because inevitably if he returned to Russia he'd be debriefed by his old colleagues. But how can you rely on a mercenary double agent? If he decided he might want to stay in Russia with his family that might well have been attractive, away from the lonely existence in a Salisbury cul de sac with only spies for company. But the Steele dossier has great potential to turn sour on the British.

It's author was a Senior spy and Head of the Russian Desk for some years. It is – perhaps you'd agree? – inconceivable that he didn't require permission to prepare it, especially as much of it was based on his experience as a spy in Russia. Yet it's equally inconceivable that the Agency bosses didn't know the identity of the commissioners or the use to which it would be put in the US election – to boost Clinton's bid. If she'd won everything would have been fine but as it is any discussion of foreign interference in that election would have to include MI6 leading the list (they probably didn't tell any politician?) To have Sergei supporting and highlighting that embarrassment would be problematic for US-UK relations. Of course Sergei may have had other nuggets to expose as well as Steele.

Soon after Julia's arrival the pair fell ill. They both survived but are now locked away, presumably for life and never able to explain their side of the story.

It was a bodged job with a poor cover story from the start and could only be carried because of D Notices and media complicity. Is his mother still alive? Would he still like to see her before she dies? Would Russia allow it? Would MI6 allow it? I think that's 3 yeses and a resounding No.

Sharp Ears , August 28, 2018 at 11:39

Following the deaths of 55 Palestinians on the Gaza 'border' and the wounding of thousands, in this video, Urban asks the questions but the Israeli government spokesman, David Keyes, is allowed to spout all the usual propaganda against Hamas.

Gaza deaths: Who's to blame? – BBC Newsnight
Published on 15 May 2018
Subscribe 256K
Fresh protests against Israel are expected in the Palestinian territories, a day after Israeli troops killed 58 people in the Gaza Strip.
David Keyes is the spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mark Urban asked him whether it was appropriate for the US to open their embassy on the 70th anniversary of Israel's creation, a day that is hugely controversial for the Palestinian people.

Newsnight is the BBC's flagship news and current affairs TV programme – with analysis, debate, exclusives, and robust interviews.
Website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsnight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1dec5XO53k

Mr Keyes' pronounced American accent was heard. The Occupation was not mentioned. A Palestinian voice was not heard.

This is another of his videos. On the same subject and on the opening of the Israeli Embassy in Jerusalem. This time, Jonathan Conricus spoke for the IDF.

Israel says. Same old. Same old. BBC. ZBC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WdqoPKKkD8

Charles Bostock , August 28, 2018 at 15:58

"Urban asks the questions but the Israeli government spokesman, David Keyes, is allowed to spout all the usual propaganda against Hamas."

Yes indeed : Urban asked the questions and allowed the interviewee to answer. Perhaps you would have preferred him to interrupt the interviewee continually 'a la Today programme, or to have shouted at him similarly to the way I understand some people shout at customers inside or outside supermarkets?

Peter , August 28, 2018 at 11:39

This may or may not be relevant regarding Russia, chemical weapons and BBC/MSM bovine effluent:

"US Poised to Hit Syria Harder: The Russian Defense Ministry issued a statement on Aug. 25 stating that the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham militants had brought eight containers of chlorine to Idlib in order to stage a false-flag attack with the help of UK intelligence agencies. A group of Tahrir al-Sham fighters trained to handle chemical warfare agents by the UK private military company Olive arrived in the suburbs of the city of Jisr ash-Shugur, Idlib, 20 km. from the Turkish border."

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/08/27/us-poised-to-hit-syria-harder.html

Jeremn , August 28, 2018 at 11:42

Can't help thinking that the answer to all this lies in Estonia. Sergei went to Estonia in June 2016, Pablo was in Estonia, the Estonians passed on sigint about Trump-Russian collusion in the summer of 2016. A Guardian article of 13 April 2017 said:

"Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump's inner circle and Russians, sources said. The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included Germany, Estonia and Poland."

Perhaps not the Dossier, as such, but some material on collusion?

Paul Greenwood , August 28, 2018 at 12:00

John Paul Jones also fought for the Russians and was a Rear-Admiral. He was buried in Paris 1792 and disinterred 1905 and relocated to USA

wonky , August 29, 2018 at 10:29

..then he met Jimmy Page in the 1960s and the rest is history..

Agent Green , August 28, 2018 at 12:11

No doubt in my mind that the Skripal affair is a planned operation carried out by US/UK intelligence. What has actually taken place is still to be determined, but the propaganda operation itself is clear.

Paul Carrom , August 28, 2018 at 12:12

Definitely done by the UK.

Doodlebug , August 28, 2018 at 14:53

What did the UK have against Dawn and Charlie? (Please don't say you subscribe to all that bottle-finding bullshit).

mark golding , August 28, 2018 at 17:40

Catch my last post Doodlebug, sadly MI6 diabolical elements can be traced back to Ireland in the 70's early 80's assassinations theRealTerror (theRealElvis) understands.

Doodlebug , August 28, 2018 at 18:06

I know about Ireland, and I agree, it was NOT a nerve agent. That said, I don't believe anyone was 'attacked', including the Skripals.

Jo , August 29, 2018 at 11:59

Being used as practice and to establish more "evidence"

N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:24

Often it's been open. There was the BBC monitoring station at Caversham Park. The BBC's Foreign Broadcast Information Service split the world into two parts with the CIA.

All foreign correspondents of major newspapers too work with MI6. Nobody who is close to them has any kind of doubt about this.

N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:20

Theresa May says a no deal Brexit "wouldn't be the end of the world".

  1. This is not a negotiating strategy. This is not a pantomime where one giant on the stage can wink to his supporters (using the British media) without his opponent (EU27) noticing.
  2. The subconscious doesn't work well with negation. Whatever you do, please DON'T imagine an elephant at this time.
  3. I would love to know what the preparations are at Trinity College, Cambridge, for food shortages. They own the port of Felixstowe, which handles more than 40% of Britain's containerised trade. They also own a 50% stake in a portfolio of Tesco stores. Soon food distribution will be what everyone is talking about. I am never going to stop making the point that the god of the Tory party is Thomas Malthus.
N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:38

Oh dear.. Theresa May in Africa:

" As a Prime Minister who believes both in free markets and in nations and businesses acting in line with well-established rules and principles of conduct, I want to demonstrate to young Africans that their brightest future lies in a free and thriving private sector. "

I despise everyone who says that free markets are the solution for the problems of the third world. What they mean is mass starvation and an enormous population cull. There are international "foundations" that pay academics and politicians large amounts of money to spout this obscene line. One of them is called the John Templeton Foundation. They have had their fangs in to British universities for a long time.

They are keen on Prince Philip, the guy who said he wanted to come back as a virus so he could kill a large part of the population. Never trust anyone who has received a Templeton scholarship or prize or who has anything to do with these people or with the message that free markets and the private sector are the key to "development"

Nuno Strybes , August 28, 2018 at 12:43

When the Tories talk about 'free markets', they are talking about markets free from democracy.

May's rhetoric is laughable .basically all her speeches read : 'the sky is green, the snow is black etc etc' -- totally detached from reality and a spent political force, as their recent membership numbers showed, with more revenues from legacies left in wills than from actual living members.

Ros Thorpe , August 28, 2018 at 12:30

I agree with the Skripal relatives that Sergei is dead. He hasn't been seen or heard of and would have called his mother. Mind boggling deception at all levels and I struggle to believe any of it.

N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:47

Sergei Skripal could be in US custody, either in the US itself or in a US facility somewhere.

If he is dead, then the rehospitalisation of Charlie Rowley may be to assist with the narrative. "Once you've had a drop of Novvy Chockk, you may recover but you can fall down ill at any time, and here's an Expert with a serious voice to confirm it."

Nuno Strybes , August 28, 2018 at 12:38

I follow this blog closely, particularly in relation to the Skripal case, but this is my first comment. I just watched Sky News piece on 'super recognisers' and couldn't help but wonder why, in an age of powerful facial recognition technology, the police and security services seem to have drawn such a blank. The surveillance state in the UK is known to be one of the most advanced in the world but when it comes to this highly important geopolitical crisis our technological infrastructure seems to be redundant to the point where 'human eyes' are deemed to be more accurate than the most powerful supercomputers available. Psychologically, all humans have an inherent facial recognition ability from a very young age, but the idea that some police officers have this ability developed to such an extent that they supercede computer recognition is, i feel, laughable. To me this announcement through the ever subservient Sky News reeks of desperation on the part of the ;official story'. Are we about to be shown suspects who, although facial recognition technology fails to identify them, a 'super recogniser' can testify that it actually is person A or person B and we are all supposed to accept that? Seems either a damning indictment of the judicial process, or a damning indictment of the ŁŁŁŁŁ's of taxpayers money that is spent on places like GCHQ etc whose technology is now apparently no better than a highly perceptive human brain. Give me a break !

Trowbridge H. Ford , August 28, 2018 at 13:08

Why no interest in how the Coopers died in Egypt? We will soon be told by HMG that the Russians somehow dd it too., thanks to Urban's research?

giyane , August 28, 2018 at 13:49

People do die Trowbridge. I know you haven't, but you have the motivation of outliving your persecutors. With Muckin about with Isis gone and covert operations isn't social work Kissinger looking as though he's on daily blood transfusions, you have rejected Trump for some reason. But Trump has undone much of John McCain's worst mischief in one year. If McCain was an example of a politician, we don't need politicians.

Trowbridge H. Ford , August 28, 2018 at 14:16

Give me an example, other than the Coopers. of a healthy couple one day that is found dying the next day like the Skripals.

And while i tried on another site to be generous about McCain. he got Navy Secretary John Lehman, Jr. to scare the Soviets for prevailing in the Vietnam War so much about what NATO was up to in the fallout from shooting Swedish PM Olof Palme that Moscow gave up the competition for fear that it would blow up the world, helping bring on the crappy one we have.

McCain was a continuing Cold Warrior who we don't need since we still have Trump who is just trying to do it another way.

Trowbridge H. Ford , August 28, 2018 at 15:03

Oh, I forget that couple in Amesbury. Looks like the Porton Down Plague is spread overseas.

Posting on this site in like playing bridge online – the cards are stacked against you.

Doodlebug , August 28, 2018 at 15:26

"Give me an example, other than the Coopers. of a healthy couple one day that is found dying the next day like the Skripals."

Will a 17 year old and his step-father do?

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6918378/brit-lad-17-in-a-coma-on-family-holiday-in-spain-may-have-been-poisoned-by-cockroach-pesticide/

They both survived, but one or other (quite possibly both) would have died without medical intervention.

[Sep 15, 2018] In view of neoliberal MSM witch hunt, the book Journalists for Hire by Udo Ufkotte is now even more important that at the time of its publication

Notable quotes:
"... Robinson talks like he has given up on impeachment by what he calls a powerless and spineless Congress. Maybe he's thinking of something quicker and cleaner than a coup, something that could be carried out by a small group of conspirators within an agency trained in removing uncooperative heads of state? ..."
"... Since deep state conspirators routinely smear all those who demand evidence as "Russian agents," maybe non-conspirators should use the same tactic on them, e.g.: Is Robinson on the CIA payroll? Because anyone who agrees with anything the CIA says is obviously working for the CIA, right? ..."
Aug 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

alley cat, August 16, 2018 at 1:58 pm

From the WaPo op-ed "God Bless the Deep State," by Eugene Robinson:

Democrats in Congress are powerless; the Republican leadership, spineless. Experienced government officials know that their job is to serve the president. But what if the president does not serve the best interests of the nation?

In this emergency [emphasis mine], the loyal and honorable deep state has a higher duty. It's called patriotism.

Is Robinson really suggesting a military coup? That would take a lot of planning and organization and would be almost impossible to keep secret. Some honest military officer might find out and put the kibosh on it, like Kirk Douglas did in Frankenheimers's classic political thriller, Seven Days in May .

Robinson talks like he has given up on impeachment by what he calls a powerless and spineless Congress. Maybe he's thinking of something quicker and cleaner than a coup, something that could be carried out by a small group of conspirators within an agency trained in removing uncooperative heads of state?

Since deep state conspirators routinely smear all those who demand evidence as "Russian agents," maybe non-conspirators should use the same tactic on them, e.g.: Is Robinson on the CIA payroll? Because anyone who agrees with anything the CIA says is obviously working for the CIA, right?

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

I'm still looking for an English copy of Journalists for Hire by Udo Ufkotte.

Frederike , August 17, 2018 at 6:34 pm

There is only one article that is translated into English: "The world upside down" 2006, http://www.ulfkotte.de/18.html
Journalists for Hire is available in German only. (I was able to buy a copy last year.)

Frederike , August 17, 2018 at 6:47 pm

http://it-book.org/pdf/journalists-for-hire You can download the ebook in English

[Sep 15, 2018] JFK Assassination Link Found To Recent Financial Swindle by Michael Collins Piper

Looks like JFK murder was an interception of interests of CIA with the interests of organized crime
Notable quotes:
"... Here's the story: When Oswald applied for a room in New Orleans he told what CIA-connected writer Priscilla McMillan described as "another of his funny, pointless lies," that is, that Oswald said he worked for the Leon Israel Company. McMillan insisted Oswald had no connection with the company. We do know the company was in the coffee import business. We don't know why Oswald claimed he worked there. And maybe he did. ..."
"... The principal figure behind the company, Samuel Israel Jr. -- evidently grandfather of the current Samuel Israel -- was closely connected to Clay Shaw, the New Orleans businessman unsuccessfully prosecuted in 1969 by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison for complicity in the JFK assassination. ..."
"... The possible Israeli connection to the Samuel Israel, III money scandal is interesting considering that -- according to Jewish-American JFK researcher A. J. Weberman -- Jim Garrison, in an unpublished novel, suggested Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, was behind the JFK assassination -- something Garrison did not mention elsewhere. ..."
"... Garrison evidently became aware Clay Shaw had Mossad connections through service on the board of the shadowy Permindex corporation. ..."
"... In light of revelations in the 1980s (theretofore unknown) that JFK was working to stop Israel's secret drive to assemble an arsenal of nuclear weapons, Shaw's Permindex engagement is intriguing. In fact, Permindex chairman, Louis Bloomfield was a functionary of liquor baron and Meyer Lansky crime syndicate figure Sam Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress and -- with Bronfman -- a major patron of Israel's nuclear weapons program, among a group of U.S. and Canadian millionaires who bankrolled the project in the '50s to the tune of $250 million today. ..."
Jul 07, 2008 | www.americanfreepress.net

Although the media reported on the bizarre case of Samuel Israel III -- an East Coast hedge fund operator who swindled investors out of $450 million and who disappeared after attempting to fake his own suicide -- what the media has not reported is the connection of Israel's family to circumstances surrounding the assassination of John E Kennedy.

The media has mentioned Israel is a scion of a distinguished New Orleans Jewish family. Not mentioned is that Israel's family enterprise, the Leon Israel Company, popped up in a mysterious way in connection to activities of JFK's alleged assassin, New Orleans native Lee Harvey Oswald, in that city in the summer of 1963. While details of Oswald's New Orleans sojourn are thoroughly documented, his link to the Israel Company seems taboo.

Here's the story: When Oswald applied for a room in New Orleans he told what CIA-connected writer Priscilla McMillan described as "another of his funny, pointless lies," that is, that Oswald said he worked for the Leon Israel Company. McMillan insisted Oswald had no connection with the company. We do know the company was in the coffee import business. We don't know why Oswald claimed he worked there. And maybe he did.

What is puzzling is that JFK assassination researchers avoid exploring the Israel Company. Although researchers dissect other picayune details about Oswald's life in New Orleans, no researchers will mention the Israel connection.

The principal figure behind the company, Samuel Israel Jr. -- evidently grandfather of the current Samuel Israel -- was closely connected to Clay Shaw, the New Orleans businessman unsuccessfully prosecuted in 1969 by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison for complicity in the JFK assassination. Israel was vice president of the Board of Commissioners of the Port of New Orleans and on the Council of the Lower Mississippi River Port Interests (putting him in trade executive Clay Shaw's sphere).

Israel also won the French Medal of Merit for his service in the U.S. Army in Europe, at the time Shaw was decorated by the French for his service there. It is likely Shaw and Israel knew each other as early as World War II.

Was Oswald promised a job at the Israel Company -- arranged by Shaw -- or was Oswald employed by the company? If so, how? Did this company play a role in manipulating Oswald in New Orleans? These are questions that need to be answered.

At present day, Samuel Israel III is on the lam, many believe in Israel which welcomes Jewish criminals fleeing prosecution in the United States. Note, though: Israel says he is a Christian, despite his background.

The possible Israeli connection to the Samuel Israel, III money scandal is interesting considering that -- according to Jewish-American JFK researcher A. J. Weberman -- Jim Garrison, in an unpublished novel, suggested Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, was behind the JFK assassination -- something Garrison did not mention elsewhere.

Garrison evidently became aware Clay Shaw had Mossad connections through service on the board of the shadowy Permindex corporation.

In light of revelations in the 1980s (theretofore unknown) that JFK was working to stop Israel's secret drive to assemble an arsenal of nuclear weapons, Shaw's Permindex engagement is intriguing. In fact, Permindex chairman, Louis Bloomfield was a functionary of liquor baron and Meyer Lansky crime syndicate figure Sam Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress and -- with Bronfman -- a major patron of Israel's nuclear weapons program, among a group of U.S. and Canadian millionaires who bankrolled the project in the '50s to the tune of $250 million today.

Another Permindex figure was banker Tibor Rosenbaum, longtime Mossad director for finance and arms procurement, whose Geneva bank was a Mossad proprietary and money laundry for Lansky crime syndicate profits. ★

Michael Collins Piper is a contributing editor for AFP.

[Sep 14, 2018] European media writing pro-US stories under CIA pressure - German journo

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD - Operation Mockingbird was (IS) a secret campaign by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to influence media. Begun in the 1950s, it was initially organized by Cord Meyer and Allen W. Dulles, and was later led by Frank Wisner after Dulles became the head of the CIA. The organization recruited leading American journalists into a network to help present the CIA's views, and funded some student and cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts. As it developed, it also worked to influence foreign media and political campaigns, in addition to activities by other operating units of the CIA. In addition to earlier exposés of CIA activities in foreign affairs, in 1966 Ramparts magazine published an article revealing that the National Student Association was funded by the CIA. The United States Congress investigated, and published its report in 1976. Other accounts were also published. The media operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis's 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire. ..."
"... the secret societies, the banks, the oil families and other super rich powerful groups of people all call the shots in secret, doesn't matter who the "elected" president is, they are going to do what they want to do, unless, people know the truth... ..."
"... It wouldn't surprise me if this also applied on Swedish media. For decades our journalism was very neutral showing two sides of the story, but nowdays, last 7-8 years, things have changed. Swedish media has to a high degree become incredible one-sided in the writing of world politics... I started to notice the change some 7-8 years ago. Of course I find expectations like the municipal Television station SVT that still seems two-sided, but most written press in Sweden have become rotten, very rotten. ..."
"... The US's MIC has to find other ways to make money. This MIC could spend money on developing outer space programs, go the depths of the oceans, and study the fauna and flora on the earth. This nonsense of creating and making enemies on earth has to stop. The world is too small for this NONSENSE. ..."
"... Who has built the first concentration camp? It was the British Empire during the war against the Boers. The British put women, children and old people in these camps to make the Boers surrender. ..."
Oct 18, 2014 | www.youtube.com

German journalist and editor Udo Ulfkotte says he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, adding that noncompliance ran the risk of being fired. Ulfkotte made the revelations during interviews with RT and Russia Insider.


Abel Danger , 3 years ago

OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD - Operation Mockingbird was (IS) a secret campaign by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to influence media. Begun in the 1950s, it was initially organized by Cord Meyer and Allen W. Dulles, and was later led by Frank Wisner after Dulles became the head of the CIA. The organization recruited leading American journalists into a network to help present the CIA's views, and funded some student and cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts. As it developed, it also worked to influence foreign media and political campaigns, in addition to activities by other operating units of the CIA. In addition to earlier exposés of CIA activities in foreign affairs, in 1966 Ramparts magazine published an article revealing that the National Student Association was funded by the CIA. The United States Congress investigated, and published its report in 1976. Other accounts were also published. The media operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis's 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire.

2dogarage , 1 year ago

Dead at 56... RIP brave man

Aljo , 2 years ago

the secret societies, the banks, the oil families and other super rich powerful groups of people all call the shots in secret, doesn't matter who the "elected" president is, they are going to do what they want to do, unless, people know the truth...

John Zook , 2 years ago

Being of German decent my sympathies are with the people of Germany. Not to say that the Russian people haven't had a bad deal, of course they have under the Bolshevik Jews who nearly destroyed Russia for the sake of Zionist ideology.

The people of Germany deserve better than this. They need to overthrow American control of their government and their media and replace it with pro German people who will serve the interests of Germany, not that of the vicious prostitute Washington and their pimps. Not that of the corrupt child molesting swine in Belgium who control the E.U.

They need to do something about it now and decisively take back control of their own country. Germany must stop being a puppet controlled by the worst criminal element in the world.... the CIA. Freedom for Germany!

Владимир Порфирьевич , 3 years ago

The EU pawns are ruled by the US lords! and The EU has Imposed the sanctions on Russia and thanks to that destroys the European economies because it is good for the US economy!

The US has weaken the EU companies so the Americans have weak competitors in Europe and on the agreement between the European Union and the United States the American companies and economy will gain but European companies and farms will lost and many Europeans will lost their jobs for the sake of US welfare!

The US manufacturers will earning and developing but the Europeans will go bankrupt and lost their jobs!

Christian Christensen , 2 years ago

It wouldn't surprise me if this also applied on Swedish media. For decades our journalism was very neutral showing two sides of the story, but nowdays, last 7-8 years, things have changed. Swedish media has to a high degree become incredible one-sided in the writing of world politics... I started to notice the change some 7-8 years ago. Of course I find expectations like the municipal Television station SVT that still seems two-sided, but most written press in Sweden have become rotten, very rotten.

Olav Larsen , 3 years ago (edited)

Good for you, coming clean about Germany's role in all this. Germany pretending to be innocent since WW2 but they're just as involved as any of the other usual suspects. And when I say Germany, I don't mean ordinary citizens but the intelligence media and political establishment.

colin porter , 2 years ago

I wouldn't mind if America was controlling the world if they had any moral integrity. The country was born through the genocide of the natives and the re population of the country with slaves. Covertly funding and supporting dictators tyrants and terrorists since the end of the second world war as part of their foreign policy. Training illiterate Afghan farmers in terrorist tactics to fight the Russians in a proxy war encouraging Jihad to get more Muslims to fight the Russians creating what we call today modern radical extremism. Funny how it became immoral when American blood was shed. Funny how all of Saddam's transgressions were ignored while he was at war with Iran and how stopping the war with Iran suddenly made these actions unacceptable to America(how did Saddam gain power again?).

The really astounding thing to me is how the American public seem to have this idea of being the bastion of freedom and democracy. But then Again everyone in my country seems to be similarly ignorant about our own foreign policy and atrocities committed in the name of Empire.

We killed more than Hitler did and were a lot worse. Just most of our victims were brown or black so don't seem to matter. You are only really evil if you commit Genocide against white European Jews. Non whites don't seem to matter.

Ro Nom , 3 years ago (edited)

Brave man. Corporate news is what we get in the western world. I did not know Europe did not have a free press also. Russia has government news, which is more free than our military industrial complex and corporate news. The big military industries want wars and endless wars. Our government is a puppet on their strings. I would rather have a government in control rather than a government under the control of military industries which creates endless wars to feed this military corporate monster.

This is a small planet. We are all inter connected. This nonsense of creating and making enemies on this little planet has to stop. We have to learn to get all along.

The US's MIC has to find other ways to make money. This MIC could spend money on developing outer space programs, go the depths of the oceans, and study the fauna and flora on the earth. This nonsense of creating and making enemies on earth has to stop. The world is too small for this NONSENSE.

Qrayon , 2 years ago

Herr Ulfkotte is a man of courage, but when he says that the BND was formed by the CIA, he doesn't mention that the CIA has roots in the Gehlen Spy network of the 3rd Reich after WW2.

Justus v. Blutacker , 3 years ago

Who has built the first concentration camp? It was the British Empire during the war against the Boers. The British put women, children and old people in these camps to make the Boers surrender.

The same is true for the Americans in WW2 in regard to German and Japanese civilians. (Just two examples of many!) These f*** Anglo-Saxons killed millions of people just for the heck of it -- in Dresden, Hiroshima, many smaller places all around the world... -- and they keep doing it in several Arabian countries these days. Of course, other empires, like the Russian, or the German, did evil deeds in their history but they took the responsibility. I hope that the Anglo-Saxons once will have their own 'Nuremberg'.

[Sep 14, 2018] English Translation of Udo Ulfkotte s Bought Journalists Suppressed

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... My guess is that this book is just too dangerous to allow it to become part of the debate on "fake news" and "Russiagate." Of course now the CIA doesn't even have to exclusively – "own"- journalists as fronts when ex-CIA heads are being hired outright by MSM as pundits. I just wish someone with access would post an English language PDF version online. It would be a real contribution to free thought and free speech to do so. ..."
"... Western elites realize what they could have, what they could do and what they could get away with, but only if they reinvent the political system Hitler created. If they defeat every enemy abroad who might stop them, next they'll do to their own people what the Nazis did to those they didn't want alive ..."
"... Journos have long been pliant enablers for Intel agencies. It's strange how Dr. Ulfkotte's revelations have been taken as some signifier of further Western moral decay/decadence. ..."
"... The real story here, which the media pretends not to notice, is that if Intelligence services and corporations did not finance newspapers they would cease to exist. The old business model whereby newspapers covered their costs by selling advertising and paid circulation is finished. Under that model there were, to an extent, incentives for the publisher to preserve a modicum of credibility in order to keep readership, as well as reasons to publish sensational stories to beat competition. ..."
"... The days that Ulfkotte recalled were times when it took lots of money and careful preparation to put spooks into the newsroom, nowadays the papers are only too happy to publish the CIA's PR and very grateful if the government pays their journalists' salaries. ..."
"... To understand how journalism is bought, go analyze the output of the Uk's Daily Telegraph. They literally sell space to lobbyists and for several years outraged BTL comment would tear the articles to shreds. The whole UK Press prostitutes itself whenever there is a US war on i.e. all the time. It really is about time the CIA were unmasked – they do not serve our interests, they serve only their own . ..."
Sep 14, 2018 | off-guardian.org

intergenerationaltrauma says February 11, 2018

The rather obvious suppression of the English version of what was a "best seller" in Germany suggests that the Western system of thought manipulation and consent manufacture sees itself as weaker and more vulnerable than one might at first imagine.

We can see from a year+ of "Russiagate" that Western media is a clown-show, much of so called "alternative media" included.

My guess is that this book is just too dangerous to allow it to become part of the debate on "fake news" and "Russiagate." Of course now the CIA doesn't even have to exclusively – "own"- journalists as fronts when ex-CIA heads are being hired outright by MSM as pundits. I just wish someone with access would post an English language PDF version online. It would be a real contribution to free thought and free speech to do so.

Google Talpiot Program says January 30, 2018
Just like "200 years together" by Solzhenitsyn which was never officially published in English despite Andrei having authored many works which were big sellers. Just an example of other private business and corporations are often fully responsible for pro-establishment censorship.
Harry Stotle says January 15, 2018
The treatment of the book aroused suspicion because of its content – ie supine news outlets forever dancing to the tune of western military imperatives.

Ongoing support for illegal wars tell us that the MSM has hardly been at the forefront of informing readers why war criminals like Hilary and Obama keep getting away with it. In fact Obama, just like Kissinger was awarded a peace prize – so obviously something has gone very wrong somewhere.

It may be, although it seems unlikely that the mis-handling of an important theme like this is simply due to oversight by the publisher (as Matt claims) but neither is it beyond the realms of possibility that somebody has had a word with someone in the publishing world, perhaps because they are not overly keen on the fact Udo Ulfkotte has deviated from the media's mono-narrative about why it is necessary for the US to destabilise countries and kill so many of their citizens.

Lets face it – it would be harder for the pattern to be maintained if the MSM was not so afraid of telling the truth, or at least be more willing to hold to account politicians as the consequences of their disastrous policies unfold for all to see.

Maybe you want to have a go at answering the obvious question begged by such self evident truths – why are the MSM usually lying?

Marcus says January 20, 2018
The book was never published in English. It was advertised, and then withdrawn. That is suppression...
Michael McNulty says January 14, 2018
Somebody said banning books is the modern form of book burning, and like Heinrich Heine said two centuries ago, "Where they burn books, in the end, they start burning people."

Western elites realize what they could have, what they could do and what they could get away with, but only if they reinvent the political system Hitler created. If they defeat every enemy abroad who might stop them, next they'll do to their own people what the Nazis did to those they didn't want alive. If enough water sources are lost to fracking, and enough food sources lost through poisoned seas and forest fires, many people will go to their camps as refuge but few will survive them. This ecological destruction is for future population reduction.

In the US they use newspeak to say what the Nazis described with more honesty. Their master race became the indispensable nation, their world domination became full spectrum dominance, and Totalerkrieg became the global war on terror. There will be others.

jones says January 12, 2018
Farzad Basoft anyone ? Journos have long been pliant enablers for Intel agencies. It's strange how Dr. Ulfkotte's revelations have been taken as some signifier of further Western moral decay/decadence.
summitflyer says January 15, 2018
Maybe I am taking what you wrote out of context but I don't find it strange at all .It is just that someone, Udo, on the inside has become a whistle blower , and confirmed what most suspected .The establishment can't have that.

See John Swinton on the independence of the press at http://constitution.org/pub/swinton_press.htm

Connect says January 12, 2018
As the economy growth has this so-called invisible hand, journalism also has an 'invisible pen'. One of the questions that need an answer: how come feminists are so anti-Putin and anti-Russia? Easy to connect to dots?
bevin says January 11, 2018
The real story here, which the media pretends not to notice, is that if Intelligence services and corporations did not finance newspapers they would cease to exist. The old business model whereby newspapers covered their costs by selling advertising and paid circulation is finished. Under that model there were, to an extent, incentives for the publisher to preserve a modicum of credibility in order to keep readership, as well as reasons to publish sensational stories to beat competition.

Those days are gone: none of the newspapers make financial profits, they now exist because they have patrons. They always did, of course, but now they have nothing else- the advertisers have left and circulation is diminishing rapidly.

The days that Ulfkotte recalled were times when it took lots of money and careful preparation to put spooks into the newsroom, nowadays the papers are only too happy to publish the CIA's PR and very grateful if the government pays their journalists' salaries.

As to competition that is restricted to publishers competing to demonstrate their loyalty to the government and their ingenuity in candy coating its propaganda.

Anyone doubt that Luke Harding will be in the running for a Pulitzer? Or perhaps even the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Serge Lubomudrov says January 11, 2018
For those whose German is not good enough (like me, unfortunately), but know Russian, there's a Russian translation: https://www.litres.ru/udo-ulfkotte/prodazhnye-zhurnalisty-lubaya-pravda-za-vashi-dengi/
vexarb says January 9, 2018
For what it's worth, I skimmed through this very long link by Matt, and could find no mention of poison gas -- certainly no denunciation -- just horrific conventional arms : Der Spiegel 1984: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13508659.html

Also for what it's worth, the German publisher's blurb which I got Google to translate above, says there is much more to the book than old Soddem: the author names names and points to organizations.

Now, without any evidence, based only on my faulty memory and highly biased interpretation of events strung together on a timeline, here is my conspiracy story about a very nice country called Iraq and a very nasty Iraqi called Saddam who came to a very nasty end at the hands of his much more nasty friends, who first gave him a boost and then put in the boot.

George Cornell says January 9, 2018
That is more than plausible. Unfortunately. Hard not to sympathize with the Iraqis and feel shame for what has been done in the name of the US and UK. Rotten to the core, and sanctimonious to boot.
rtj1211 says January 9, 2018
To understand how journalism is bought, go analyze the output of the Uk's Daily Telegraph. They literally sell space to lobbyists and for several years outraged BTL comment would tear the articles to shreds. The whole UK Press prostitutes itself whenever there is a US war on i.e. all the time. It really is about time the CIA were unmasked – they do not serve our interests, they serve only their own .
Carrie says January 9, 2018
The Guardian sells space to lobbyists too. Not ad space – article space. It's literally hiring itself out to whomever wants to buy the right to publish an article under its name.
Brian Steere says January 8, 2018
Well one things stands out in bold and that is the fear that such a revelation is associated with. 'Broad spectrum dominance' of a central intelligent agency is a reversal of the wholeness of being expressing through all its parts.

Fake intelligence is basically made up to serve a believed goal. The terrorism of fear generates the goal of a self-protection that sells true relationship to 'save itself'.

This goes deep into what we take to be our mind. The mind that thinks it is in control by controlling what it thinks.

If I can observe this in myself at will, is it any surprise I can see it in our world?

What is the fear that most deeply motivates or drives the human agenda?
I do not ask this of our superficial thinking, but of a core self-honesty that cannot be 'killed' but only covered over with a thinking-complex.

And is it insane or unreal to be moved by love?

We are creatures of choice and beneath all masking, we are also the creator of choice.
But the true creative is not framed into a choosing between, but feeling one call as the movement of it.

When the 'intelligence' of a masking narrative no longer serves, be the willingness for what you no longer claim to have, and open to being moved from within.

candideschmyles says January 8, 2018
I am so tired of the simmering fury that lives inside me. This bubbling cauldron brim full of egregious truths, images and accounts accumulated over nearly 40 years of looking behind the headlines. I disagree that the usurpation of journalists and media organisations is in any way a recent phenomena. It certainly predates my emergent mind. And even the most lauded of anti-establishment hacks and film makers self-censored to some degree. True, the blatant in your face propaganda and thought control agenda has accelerated, but it was always there. I do not believe Chomsky, Oliver Stone, Pilger and their like could have done much more than they have, that is to guide us in a direction counter to the official narrative. And to insinuate they are gatekeepers, when our heads never stretch above the parapet, is really just a reflection of our own frustration that despite their work the only change remains for the worse.
Yet I fear worse is to come. Our safe bitching in glorious anonymity has been all that we have had as solace to the angst that pervades us, the other 1%. But the the thumbscrew is tightening. We may be as little as months away from any dissent being entirely removed from the internet by AI algorithms. I have already been receiving warnings on several sites anyone here would call legitimate that have had their security certificates removed and the statement that the site may contain malicious code etc. How prepared are we for blackout?
Serge Lubomudrov says January 8, 2018
The publisher even removed the 2 year old news announcement about the book! Though the twit is still there. Probably, overlooked.

https://twitter.com/saumacus/status/950468330086858757

summitflyer says January 8, 2018
A foundation should be set up in remembrance of Udo and sponsored by all true journalists and truth seekers. Maybe some day there will be a Udo Ulfkotte award to the bravest journalist of the year .Wouldn't that be something .Udo's work would not have been in vain . That would throw a monkey wrench into orgs like the Guardian and their ilk .Just dreaming out loud maybe , but with good intentions.
Alun Thomas says January 8, 2018
Original German version can be found here: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=ABA05365ABE35FD446D6F83B149A32A2
Unfortunately no english version, but other controversial texts have sometimes been crowd-translated, maybe something like this may happen
Chris G says January 8, 2018
Thank you Alun for the link to the German edition, which I have managed to download (naughty me!) I think the suggestion of retranslating important sections and dressing these in some commentary for (presumably legitimate) publication on e.g. Off-G would be a good idea. I'm quite fluent in German and would be glad to help.
Mods: do you see any legal pitfalls?
Admin says January 8, 2018
That depends on who holds the rights to the English language version and the original and whether they would want to take issue. If it's Ulfkotte's family they may be happy to see his work get some sort of airing in English. If it's his publishers we can imagine they will see things differently – as indeed would whoever it is that seems to want the book buried.
Martin Read says January 8, 2018
Tried to get to that site and was told that I couldn't via my Virgin provider because of a High Court order. Somebody moved a bit quickly.
Carrie says January 8, 2018
Me too! My Broadband provider is blocking access due to a High Court injunction.

@ChrisG & @Alun Thomas – can you guys still get there? It might be a country or region thing.

Alun Thomas says January 8, 2018
I heard it is blocked in many western countries, as the site is well known for its disregard for copyright. Fortunately not the case where I am (NZ). If you're technically inclined, a VPN or anonymising application may help, although a VPN that 'exits' in a western area won't get you any further ahead.
George Cornell says January 8, 2018
I had no problem, but provider in Canada
Arrby says January 11, 2018
One hopes. I also hold out hope for F. William Engdahl's "Geheimakte NGOs." Here's a Dissident Voice article in which Engdahl discusses the role of NGOs in aiding and abetting the US regime change program:

https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/07/the-us-empire-the-cia-and-the-ngos/

I also recommend, highly, Stephen Gowans's article about social networking in the service of the US regime change program:

"Overthrow Inc.: Peter Ackerman's quest to do what the CIA used to do, and make it seem progressive" by Stephen Gowans
https://gowans.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/overthrow-inc-peter-ackerman%E2%80%99s-quest-to-do-what-the-cia-used-to-so-and-make-it-seem-progressive/

Frank says January 8, 2018
Yes, it has also been interesting to note that in 2015 the Guardian published a review of Richard Sakwa's book 'Frontline Ukraine' in which the author was critical of both NATO and the EU, in fomenting this crisis. The 2014 'coup' which was carried out in February 2014 was, according to the independent geopolitical publication, Strator, 'the most blatant in history.' The appraisal which was carried out by Guardian journalist Jonathon Steele was generally favourably disposed to Sakwa's record of events; however, Mr Steele now rarely publishes anything in the Guardian. Read into this what you like.

As to Sakwa's latest book,'' Russia Against the Rest'', – nothing, not a peep, it doesn't exist, it never existed, it never will exist. It would appear to be the case that the Guardian is now fully integrated into the military/surveillance/media-propaganda apparatus. The liberal gatekeeper as to what is and what isn't acceptable. Its function is pure to serve the interests of the powerful, in much the same way as the church did in the middle ages. The media doesn't just serve the interests power it is also part of the same structure of dominance, albeit the liberal wing of the ruling coalition.

During the British war against the Boers in South Africa, at the turn of the 19/20 century, the then Manchester Guardian took a brave and critical stand against the UK government. This lead to its offices in Manchester being attacked by jingoistic mobs, as was the home of the then editor C.P.Scott, whose family needed police protection. In those days 'Facts were Sacred', unlike the present where opposing views are increasingly ignored or suppressed.

Hugh O'Neill says January 8, 2018
Having just watched the documentary film tribute to I.F. Stone, "All Governments Lie", I was struck by the fact that no-one mentioned Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone journalist (who outed General McChrystal, but whose Mercedes went mysteriously out of control, hit a tree and exploded, throwing the engine 200 yards clear of the wreck ). Here was a film about control and self-censorship, yet no-one even breathed the acronyms C.I.A. or FBI. Matt Taibbi referred to a silent coup, but none dared to mention the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK. These doyens of Truth included the thoroughly dodgy Noam Chomsky. Finally, the Spartacus website suggests that the saintly I.F. Stone was in the pay of the CIA. Other terms unspoken were CIA Operation Mockingbird or Operation Northwoods. There was a clip of 9/11, but zero attempt to join up all the dots.
RIP Udo Ulfkotte. CIA long ago developed a dart to induce all the signs of a heart attack, so one is naturally somewhat suspicious. Lies and assassinations are two sides of the same coin.
Harry Stotle says January 8, 2018
The only thing harder to find than Udo Ulfkotte's book is a Guardian review of it.

I daresay any mention of this book, BTL, would immediately be moderated (i.e censored) followed by a yellow or red card for the cheeky commentator.
The level of pretence on this forum has now reached epic proportions, and seems to cuts both ways, ie. commentators pretending that there are not several subjects which are virtually impossible to discuss in any depth (such as media censorship), and moderators pretending that 'community standards' is not simply a crude device to control conversational discourse, especially when a commentators point of view stray beyond narrow, Guardian approved borders.

Books, such as 'Bought Journalists' (which expose the corruption at the heart of western media) are especially inconvenient for the risible 'fake news' agenda currently being rammed down the readerships throat – some of these people at the Guardian have either absolutely no insight, or no shame.

Harry Stotle says January 8, 2018
This piece put me in mind of Daniele Gansers seminal book, 'NATOs secret armies' Of course Off-G picked up on it but I can't find any commentary from the Guardian
https://off-guardian.org/2015/07/17/natos-secret-armies-gladio-in-western-europe/

Ulfkotte and Ganser in their ways are both telling a similar story – NATO, i.e an arm of the US military industrial complex are mass murderers and sufficiently intimidating to have most western journalists singing from the same hymn sheet.

Since the Guardian follows the party line it is only possible to send coded or cryptic messages (BTL) should commentators wish to deviate from the approved narrative.
For example, I was 'pre-moderated' for having doubts about the veracity of the so called 'Parsons Green tube bomb', especially the nature of the injuries inflicted on a young model who looked like she was suffering from toothache.
https://www.thenational.ae/image/policy:1.628812:1505494262/wo16-web-parsons-green.JPG?f=16×9&w=1024&$p$f$w=e135eda

My guess is NATO's secret army are still in full swing but there is no chance the Guardian will pick up on it – they're too busy whipping up antipathy towards Iran.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/05/west-ignores-iranian-people-power-peril#comments

George Cornell says January 8, 2018
Been there, done that. What ordinarily happens if the submission is proper and cannot be censored on the basis of impropriety or foulmouthedness or any other good reason, but exposes a Guardian sacred cow in an embarrassing light, is that it is said to be off topic. Now this is really unaccountable, and truly subjective.

The community in community standards is "them" and has close ties to the 1%, if I hazard a guess.

[Sep 14, 2018] The book Journalists for Hire How the CIA Buys the News Dr. Udo Ulfkotte was "privished"

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Anyone who claims there are no conspiracies, that there are no behind-the-scenes efforts by powerful people to suppress information that would expose their efforts at global domination, is full of crap. ..."
"... How many CIA-paid journalists do you have on staff at the Washington Post? ..."
"... The author who was a deputy editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine and worked there for 17 years turns whistleblower and spills the beans on the corruption of German media by US lobby agencies which have CIA backing. ..."
"... The news is always given a pro American slant and journalists can look forward to rewards for their efforts. Should they not collude then their career is over. Corrupted German journalists are named and shamed. The EU is also revealed to be equally corrupt . ..."
"... German journalists assigned to EU reporting have to sign a document stating that they will never write anything negative about the EU. The level of manipulation by the EU is also frightening. ..."
"... This situation reeks of Stasi or Asian plutocratic realms. We want our freedom back! What are you people (including colluding Amazon) trying to cover up? Shame on you! ..."
"... The collussion of corporate media and Western intelligence is a taboo subject one must surmise. It suggests that our power structure realizes it has a rather fragile hold on the popular mind when the CIA morphs into the former KGB to simply suppress and disappear unacceptable reporting. ..."
"... I would suggest that the absolute silence by MSM about this book and its censorship validates the authors contentions that much of MSM reporting is right out of the Western intelligence agencies and has nothing whatsoever to do with reality on the ground. ..."
Sep 14, 2018 | www.amazon.com

Steven Yates 5.0 out of 5 stars August 7, 2017 Format: Hardcover

This book was "privished"

No, I haven't read the book, because it is priced completely out of my reach. I am giving it five stars anyway because of what I've read *about* it, as I've followed its author's saga -- the blackout by German media of the original German edition Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalists) for a couple of years now, raids by German police on the author's house, his noting how he feared for his life, and his finally being found dead on January 13 of this year "from a heart attack" (he was only 56, and because it is possible to kill someone in ways that look like a heart attack, some people believe he was murdered).

The fate of a whistleblower against one of the world's most powerful organizations in a controlled society being passed off as a democracy?

Two things are abundantly clear:

(1) The English translation of this book has been "privished." There are a couple of good recent discussions of what it means to "privish" a book, but Amazon will not allow me to link to them. So let's just say: the purpose of "privishing" is make a book with an unwanted message disappear without a trace by limiting information about it, destroying its marketability by printing too few copies, and refusing reprint rights, so that the copies available are too expensive for readers of ordinary means (which is nearly all of us).

(2) Anyone who claims there are no conspiracies, that there are no behind-the-scenes efforts by powerful people to suppress information that would expose their efforts at global domination, is full of crap.

XXX, September 30, 2017 Format: Paperback
Sell this book so we can buy it!

Amazon, you are a tool of the State. This book is available in English at a market competitive price. Why do you refuse to make it available to your customers?

How many CIA-paid journalists do you have on staff at the Washington Post? To the reviewer who asked how much money the author will see from the exhorbotant price of the book, he won't see any because he is dead.

He died of hearth issues shortly after the publication of the book. He did have a history of heart ailments so I am not implying a sinister act. You can find an good interview with him on YouTube if they haven't removed it.

XXX, November 11, 2017 Format: Paperback
Dynamite

Have read this book in German but as far as I know it is no longer available in bookshops in Germany either. The author who was a deputy editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine and worked there for 17 years turns whistleblower and spills the beans on the corruption of German media by US lobby agencies which have CIA backing.

The news is always given a pro American slant and journalists can look forward to rewards for their efforts. Should they not collude then their career is over. Corrupted German journalists are named and shamed. The EU is also revealed to be equally corrupt .

German journalists assigned to EU reporting have to sign a document stating that they will never write anything negative about the EU. The level of manipulation by the EU is also frightening. The author himself was part of the set up and even received a prestigious reward for his pro America efforts but eventually became disgusted by the system and his collusion in it.

I pre ordered the book last year in English on Amazon as my son wanted to read it but I kept receiving emails from Amazon changing publication dates and eventually they informed me that they were unable to access the book. There is no doubt that the book is dynamite and has been suppressed because of this.

XXX, July 31, 2017 Format: Hardcover
Tyranny in America Writ Large In A Super-Large Price

Somebody has set the price of this book -- available in English though it is -- so high as to make it unavailable. I wonder, if some rich or extremely extravagant person were to bye this book at the $1300 price it's offered at, would the author ever see a dime of that?

This situation reeks of Stasi or Asian plutocratic realms. We want our freedom back! What are you people (including colluding Amazon) trying to cover up? Shame on you!

XXX, August 16, 2017 Format: Paperback
Second book I've wanted that's been banned

Second book I've wanted that's been banned by Amazon. Shame on you, Mr. Bezos. Unfortunately for you, more people are waking up to this. The cracks are starting to show.

bossaboy on November 19, 2017
The suppression of the English language version of this book is censorship of the most Orwellian kind.

I have been awaiting the English version of this book for several years now, watching with interest while the publishing date was delayed multiple times. As a best seller in Germany one had to wonder why it would take years to translate the book to English unless there were forces working against publication. Well, low and behold it is finally set to publish in May 2017 when it again doesn't and finally disappears from sight. The obvious suppression of this book is censorship of the press and of course speaks volumes about Western "freedom of the press" as a fantasy.

The collussion of corporate media and Western intelligence is a taboo subject one must surmise. It suggests that our power structure realizes it has a rather fragile hold on the popular mind when the CIA morphs into the former KGB to simply suppress and disappear unacceptable reporting.

I would suggest that the absolute silence by MSM about this book and its censorship validates the authors contentions that much of MSM reporting is right out of the Western intelligence agencies and has nothing whatsoever to do with reality on the ground.

Somewhere in the great beyond Orwell is smiling and thinking "I told you so."

[Sep 14, 2018] Russian translation of the book

Sep 14, 2018 | www.litmir.me

ЛитМир - Электронная Библиотека > Ульфкотте Удо > Продажные журналисты. Любая правда за ваши деньги

[Sep 14, 2018] Woodward is a career CIA agent as documented in many articles, such as this

Notable quotes:
"... Retired USAF Col. Fletcher Prouty revealed that the "Pentagon Papers" were a planned CIA leak to shift blame for the failed war in Vietnam from the CIA to the Pentagon. The documents were real, but only certain documents were released. ..."
"... Nixon was ousted with the help of covert CIA agent Bob Woodward, working undercover as a reporter at the CIA co-founded "Washington Post". Gerald Ford became President, who just happened to be a member of the discredited Warren Commission that engineered the cover-up of the JFK assassination! ..."
Sep 14, 2018 | www.unz.com

Carlton Meyer , says: Website September 14, 2018 at 4:30 am GMT

Woodward is a career CIA agent as documented in many articles, such as this:

https://kennedysandking.com/articles/bob-woodward

He graduated from the CIA university (aka Yale) then went to CIA basic training as a naval intelligence officer for five years, then to the Washington Post. This is why he was allowed White House access by the Trump Neocons, despite is record as a back stabber to those who oppose the Neocon agenda. The Washington Post itself was co-founded by the CIA. Woodward was a key player in the last CIA coup when Nixon was ousted, not too long after they disposed of troublesome President Kennedy. I noted some of this in my 2010 blog:

Retired USAF Col. Fletcher Prouty revealed that the "Pentagon Papers" were a planned CIA leak to shift blame for the failed war in Vietnam from the CIA to the Pentagon. The documents were real, but only certain documents were released. Prouty wrote the other reason for this "leak" was to upset the Nixon administration, which it was trying to destabilize in hopes of ousting Nixon.

That President was upset that the CIA refused to provide him with requested documents concerning the Bay of Pigs and the JFK assassination. Nixon also angered the "Power Elite" by withdrawing American troops from their profitable business venture in Vietnam and improving relations with Red China.

Nixon was ousted with the help of covert CIA agent Bob Woodward, working undercover as a reporter at the CIA co-founded "Washington Post". Gerald Ford became President, who just happened to be a member of the discredited Warren Commission that engineered the cover-up of the JFK assassination!

Justsaying , says: September 14, 2018 at 4:59 am GMT
This piece makes Trump look like a credible president – that is, if he is to be judged by his campaign promises to the American electorate who voted him in. This is only partly true. Recall that Trump did make unequivocal promises: "We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn't be involved with,". and "We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn't be involved with," Not long after such promises, he announced he would be sending more troops to Afghanistan. His bombing of Syria and illegally keeping American boots in that country surely flies in the face of such promises especially in light of statements that American troops will not leave that country any time soon, in keeping with America's zeal for fighting Israel's wars. This piece portrays Trump as intrepid and true to his word. Yet, like many of his predecessors, the morbid fear of the pro-Israeli lobby remains a defining feature of US foreign policy matters. Neither can Trump exonerate himself from the ongoing tragedy in Yemen emboldening the Saudis and their Emirati allies with the sale of billions of dollars of arms to these medieval monarchies, not to mention the logistical support given them by the US.

[Sep 14, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media

Notable quotes:
"... The US media has send journalists to Salisbury very early. For example Ellen Barry, NYT. These journalists have influenced the official narrative to a decisive extent. ..."
"... Paul Craig Roberts: The CIA Owns the US and European Media ..."
"... One of the best books I have ever read is "Bought Journalists" : https://www.globalresearch.ca/english-translation-of-udo-ulfkottes-bought-journalists-suppressed/5601857 ..."
"... I recommend everyone to watch the video on Liane's link: https://youtu.be/sGqi-k213eE 15 minutes well worth watching. ..."
Sep 14, 2018 | www.theblogmire.com

Liane Theuer says: August 20, 2018 at 9:09 am

The US media has send journalists to Salisbury very early. For example Ellen Barry, NYT. These journalists have influenced the official narrative to a decisive extent.

On March 9 ABC News has send their chief reporter Terry Moranto to Salisbury. This is the video : https://abcnews.go.com/International/video/soldiers-heading-scene-poisoning-attack-england-53638197

He used the Snap Fitness CCTV to establish the „fact" that the Skripals went from Zizzis through Market Walk to the bench.

Rob, just another false translation of what Putin said about traitors. Listen to Moran´s interpretation at 2:00 in the video. Quote : Vladimir Putin's held a town hall session and he was asked about this five's that had been traded and he said, and this is almost a direct quote : „They will kick the bucket. Trust me. They betrayed their colleagues, their brothers in arms. And they took thirty pieces of silver and are gonna choke on all that." [End quote]

At 3:00 Terry Moran shows the CCTV of Snap Fitness. It´s outside at the right side of the entrance.

Noone says: August 20, 2018 at 5:03 am
Paul Craig Roberts: The CIA Owns the US and European Media

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/08/18/the-cia-owns-the-us-and-european-media/

Liane Theuer says: August 20, 2018 at 7:38 am
One of the best books I have ever read is "Bought Journalists" : https://www.globalresearch.ca/english-translation-of-udo-ulfkottes-bought-journalists-suppressed/5601857
Miheila says: August 20, 2018 at 10:01 am
Noone & Liane:
Excellent articles, thanks.
I recommend everyone to watch the video on Liane's link: https://youtu.be/sGqi-k213eE 15 minutes well worth watching.

[Sep 11, 2018] Why I Don't Speak of the Fake News of "9-11" Anymore by Edward Curtin

Sep 11, 2018 | www.unz.com

Over the next few days, as the government and the media accused Osama bin Laden and 19 Arabs of being responsible for the attacks, I told a friend that what I was hearing wasn't believable; the official story was full of holes. I am a born and bred New Yorker with a long family history rooted in the NYC Fire and Police Departments, one grandfather having been the Deputy Chief of the Fire Department, the highest ranking uniformed firefighter, and the other a NYPD cop; a niece and her husband were NYPD detectives deeply involved in the response to that day's attacks. Hearing the absurd official explanations and the deaths of so many innocent people, including many hundreds of firefighters, cops, and emergency workers, I felt a suspicious rage. It was a reaction that I couldn't fully explain, but it set me on a search for the truth. I proceeded in fits and starts, but by the fall of 2004, with the help of the extraordinary work of David Ray Griffin, Michael Ruppert, and other early skeptics, I could articulate the reasons for my initial intuition. I set about creating and teaching a college course on what had come to be called 9/11.

But I no longer refer to the events of that day by those numbers. Let me explain why.

By 2004 I had enough solid evidence to convince me that the U.S. government's claims (and The 9/11 Commission Report ) were fictitious. They seemed so blatantly false that I concluded the attacks were a deep-state intelligence operation whose purpose was to initiate a national state of emergency to justify wars of aggression, known euphemistically as "the war on terror." The sophistication of the attacks, and the lack of any proffered evidence for the government's claims, suggested that a great deal of planning had been involved.

Yet I was chagrined and amazed by so many people's insouciant lack of interest in questioning and researching the most important world event since the assassination of President Kennedy. I understood the various psychological dimensions of this denial, the fear, cognitive dissonance, etc., but I sensed something else as well. For so many people their minds seemed to have been "made up" from the start. I found that many young people were the exceptions, while most of their elders dared not question the official narrative. These included many prominent leftist critics of American foreign policy, such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Alexander Cockburn, and others, whose defenses of the official government and media explanations (when they even made such defenses; often they just trashed skeptics as "9/11 conspiracy nuts," to quote Cockburn) totally lacked any scientific or logical rigor or even knowledge of the facts. Now that seventeen years have elapsed, this seems truer than ever. There is a long list of leftists who refuse to examine matter to this very day. And most interestingly, they also do the same with the assassination of JFK, the other key seminal event of recent American history.

I kept thinking of the ongoing language and logic used to describe what had happened that terrible day in 2001 and in the weeks to follow. It all seemed so clichéd and surreal, as if set phrases had it been extracted from some secret manual, phrases that rung with an historical resonance that cast a spell on the public, as if mass hypnosis were involved. People seemed mesmerized as they spoke of the events in the official language that had been presented to them.

So with the promptings of people like Graeme MacQueen, Lance deHaven-Smith, T.H. Meyer, et al., and much study and research, I have concluded that my initial intuitive skepticism was correct and that a process of linguistic mind-control was in place before, during, and after the attacks. As with all good propaganda, the language had to be insinuated over time and introduced through intermediaries. It had to seem "natural" and to flow out of events, not to precede them. And it had to be repeated over and over again.

In summary form, I will list the language I believe "made up the minds" of those who have refused to examine the government's claims about the September 11 attacks and the subsequent anthrax attacks.

Pearl Harbor . As pointed out by David Ray Griffin and others, this term was used in September 2000 in The Project for the New American Century's (PNAC) report, "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (p.51). Its neo-con authors argued that the U.S. wouldn't be able to attack Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. "absent some catastrophic event – like a new Pearl Harbor." Then on January 11, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's "Space Commission" warned that the U.S. could face a "space Pearl Harbor" if it weren't careful and didn't increase space security. Rumsfeld urged support for the proposed U.S. national missile defense system opposed by Russia and China and massive funding for the increased weaponization of space. At the same time he went around handing out and recommending Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962) by Roberta Wohlstetter, who had spent almost two decades working for The Rand Corporation and who claimed that Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack that shocked U.S. leaders. Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor – those words and images dominated public consciousness for many months before 11 September 2001, and of course after. The film Pearl Harbor , made with Pentagon assistance and a massive budget, was released on May 25, 2001 and was a box office hit. It was in the theatres throughout the summer. The thought of the attack on Pearl Harbor (not a surprise to the U.S. government, but presented as such) was in the news all summer despite the fact that the 60 th anniversary of that attack was not until December 7, 2001, a more likely release date. So why was it released so early? Once the September 11 attacks occurred, the Pearl Harbor analogy was "plucked out" of the social atmosphere and used constantly, beginning immediately. Another "Day of Infamy," another surprise attack blared the media and government officials. A New Pearl Harbor! George W. Bush was widely reported to have had the time that night, after a busy day of flying hither and yon to avoid the terrorists who for some reason had forgotten he was in a classroom in Florida, to allegedly use it in his diary, writing that "the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century took place today. We think it is Osama bin Laden." Shortly after the 50 th anniversary of Pearl Harbor on December 7 th , Bush then formerly announced, referencing the attacks of September 11, that the U. S. would withdraw from the ABM Treaty. The examples of this Pearl Harbor/ September 11 analogy are manifold, but I am summarizing, so I will skip giving them. Any casual researcher can confirm this. Homeland . This strange un-American term, another WW II word associated with another enemy – Nazi Germany – was also used many times by the neo-con authors of "Rebuilding America's Defenses." I doubt any average American referred to this country by that term before. Of course it became the moniker for The Department of Homeland Security, marrying home with security to form a comforting name that simultaneously and unconsciously suggests a defense against Hitler-like evil coming from the outside. Not coincidentally, Hitler introduced it into the Nazi propaganda vernacular at the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Both usages conjured up images of a home besieged by alien forces intent on its destruction; thus preemptive action was in order. Now the Department of Homeland Security with its massive budget is lodged permanently in popular consciousness. Ground Zero . This is a third WWII ("the Good War") term first used at 11:55 A.M. on September 11 by Mark Walsh (aka "the Harley Guy" because he was wearing a Harley-Davidson tee shirt) in an interview on the street by a Fox News reporter, Rick Leventhal. Identified as a Fox free-lancer, Walsh also explained the Twin Towers collapse in a precise, well-rehearsed manner that would be the same illogical and anti-scientific explanation later given by the government: "mostly due to structural failure because the fire was too intense." Ground zero – a nuclear bomb term first used by U.S. scientists to refer to the spot where they exploded the first nuclear bomb in New Mexico in 1945 – became another meme adopted by the media that suggested a nuclear attack had occurred or might in the future if the U.S. didn't act. The nuclear scare was raised again and again by George W. Bush and U.S. officials in the days and months following the attacks, although nuclear weapons were beside the point in terms of the 11 September attacks, but surely not as a scare tactic and as part of the plan to withdraw from the ABM treaty that would be announced in December. But the conjoining of "nuclear" with "ground zero" served to raise the fear factor dramatically. Ironically, the project to develop the nuclear bomb was called the Manhattan Project and was headquartered at 270 Broadway, NYC, a few short blocks north of the World Trade Center. The Unthinkable . This is another nuclear term whose usage as linguistic mind control and propaganda is brilliantly analyzed by Graeme MacQueen in the penultimate chapter of his very important book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception . He notes the patterned use of this term before and after September 11, while saying "the pattern may not signify a grand plan . It deserves investigation and contemplation." He then presents a convincing case that the use of this term couldn't be accidental. He notes how George W. Bush, in a major foreign policy speech on May 1, 2001, "gave informal public notice that the United States intended to withdraw unilaterally from the ABM Treaty"; Bush said the U.S. must be willing to "rethink the unthinkable." This was necessary because of terrorism and rogue states with "weapons of mass destruction." PNAC also argued that the U.S. should withdraw from the treaty. A signatory to the treaty could only withdraw after giving six months notice and because of "extraordinary events" that "jeopardized its supreme interests." Once the September 11 attacks occurred, Bush rethought the unthinkable and officially gave formal notice on December 13 to withdraw the U.S. from the ABM Treaty, as previously noted. MacQueen specifies the many times different media used the term "unthinkable" in October 2001 in reference to the anthrax attacks. He explicates its usage in one of the anthrax letters – "The Unthinkabel" [sic]. He explains how the media that used the term so often were at the time unaware of its usage in the anthrax letter since that letter's content had not yet been revealed, and how the letter writer had mailed the letter before the media started using the word. He makes a rock solid case showing the U.S. government's complicity in the anthrax attacks and therefore in the Sept 11 attacks. While calling the use of the term "unthinkable" in all its iterations "problematic," he writes, "The truth is that the employment of 'the unthinkable' in this letter, when weight is given both to the meaning of this term in U.S. strategic circles and to the other relevant uses of the term in 2001, points us in the direction of the U.S. military and intelligence communities." I am reminded of Orwell's point in 1984: "a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words." Thus the government and media's use of "unthinkable" becomes a classic case of "doublethink." The unthinkable is unthinkable. 9/11 . This is the key usage that has reverberated down the years around which the others revolve. It is an anomalous numerical designation applied to an historical event, and obviously also the emergency telephone number. Try to think of another numerical appellation for an important event in American history. It's impossible. But if you have a good historical sense, you will remember that the cornerstone for the Pentagon was lain on September 11, 1941, three months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and that the CIA engineered a coup against the Allende government in Chile on Sept 11, 1973. Just strange coincidences? The future editor of The New York Times and Iraq war promoter, Bill Keller, introduced the emergency phone connection on the morning of September 12th in a NY Times op-ed piece, "America's Emergency Line: 911." The linkage of the attacks to a permanent national emergency was thus subliminally introduced, as Keller mentioned Israel nine times and seven times compared the U.S. situation to that of Israel as a target for terrorists. His first sentence reads: "An Israeli response to America's aptly dated wake-up call might well be, 'Now you know.'" By referring to September 11 as 9/11, an endless national emergency fear became wedded to an endless war on terror aimed at preventing Hitler-like terrorists from obliterating us with nuclear weapons that could create another ground zero or holocaust. Mentioning Israel ("America is proud to be Israel's closest ally and best friend in the world," George W. Bush would tell the Israeli Knesset) so many times, Keller was not very subtly performing an act of legerdemain with multiple meanings. By comparing the victims of the 11 September attacks to Israeli "victims," he was implying, among other things, that the Israelis are innocent victims who are not involved in terrorism, but are terrorized by Palestinians, as Americans are terrorized by fanatical Muslims. Palestinians/Al-Qaeda. Israel/U.S. Explicit and implicit parallels of the guilty and the innocent. Keller tells us who the real killers are. His use of the term 9/11 is a term that pushes all the right buttons, evoking unending social fear and anxiety. It is language as sorcery. It is propaganda at its best. Even well-respected critics of the U.S. government's explanation use the term that has become a fixture of public consciousness through endless repetition. As George W. Bush would later put it, as he connected Saddam Hussein to "9/11" and pushed for the Iraq war, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." All the ingredients for a linguistic mind-control smoothie had been blended.

I have concluded – and this is impossible to prove definitively because of the nature of such propagandistic techniques – that the use of all these words/numbers is part of a highly sophisticated linguistic mind-control campaign waged to create a narrative that has lodged in the minds of hundreds of millions of people and is very hard to dislodge.

It is why I don't speak of "9/11" any more. I refer to those events as the attacks of September 11, 2001, which is a mouth-full and not easily digested in the age of Twitter and texting. But I am not sure how to be more succinct or how to undo the damage, except by writing what I have written here.

Lance deHaven-Smith puts it well in Conspiracy Theory in America .

The rapidity with which the new language of the war on terror appeared and took hold; the synergy between terms and their mutual connections to WW II nomenclatures; and above all the connections between many terms and the emergency motif of "9/11" and "9-1-1" – any one of these factors alone, but certainly all of them together – raise the possibility that work on this linguistic construct began long before 9/11 .It turns out that elite political crime, even treason, may actually be official policy.

Needless to say, his use of the words "possibility" and "may" are in order when one sticks to strict empiricism. However, when one reads his full text, it is apparent to me that he considers these "coincidences" part of a conspiracy. I have also reached that conclusion. As Thoreau put in his underappreciated humorous way, "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk."

The evidence for linguistic mind control, while the subject of this essay, does not stand alone, of course. It underpins the actual attacks of September 11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks that are linked. The official explanations for these events by themselves do not stand up to elementary logic and are patently false, as proven by thousands of well-respected professional researchers from all walks of life – i.e. engineers, pilots, scientists, architects, and scholars from many disciplines (see the upcoming 9/11 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth, to be released September 11, 2018). To paraphrase the prescient Vince Salandria, who said it long ago concerning the government's assassination of President Kennedy, the attacks of 2001 are "a false mystery concealing state crimes." If one objectively studies the 2001 attacks together with the language adopted to explain and preserve them in social memory, the "mystery" emerges from the realm of the unthinkable and becomes utterable. "There is no mystery." The truth becomes obvious.

How to communicate this when the corporate mainstream media serve the function of the government's mockingbird (as in Operation Mockingbird), repeating and repeating and repeating the same narrative in the same language; that is the difficult task we are faced with, but there are signs today that breakthroughs are occurring, as growing numbers of international academic scholars are pushing to incorporate the analysis of the official propaganda surrounding 11 September 2001 into their work within the academy, a turnabout from years of general silence. And more and more people are coming to realize that the official lies about 11 September are the biggest example of fake news in this century. Fake news used to justify endless wars and the slaughter of so many innocents around the world.

Words have a power to enchant and mesmerize. Linguistic mind-control, especially when linked to traumatic events such as the September 11 and the anthrax attacks, can strike people dumb and blind. It often makes some subjects "unthinkable" and "unspeakable" (to quote Jim Douglass quoting Thomas Merton in JFK and the Unspeakable : the unspeakable "is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said.").

We need a new vocabulary to speak of these terrible things. Let us learn, as Chief Joseph said, to speak with a straight tongue, and in language that doesn't do the enemies work of mind control, but snaps the world awake to the truth of the mass murders of September 11, 2001 that have been used to massacre millions across the world.

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/

[Sep 10, 2018] American Pravda 9-11 Conspiracy Theories by Ron Unz

Notable quotes:
"... Hartford Courant ..."
"... . Moreover, a 2014 book by Prof. Graeme MacQueen that I only very recently discovered has made a reasonably persuasive case that the Anthrax killings were intimately connected to the 9/11 attacks themselves, greatly magnifying the malfeasance of our media elites. ..."
"... Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and others have estimated that with interest the total long-term cost of our two recent wars may reach as high as $5 or $6 trillion, or as much as $50,000 per American household, mostly still unpaid. Meanwhile, economist Edward Wolff has calculated that the Great Recession and its aftermath cut the personal net worth of the median American household to $57,000 in 2010 from a figure nearly twice as high three years earlier. Comparing these assets and liabilities, we see that the American middle class now hovers on the brink of insolvency, with the cost of our foreign wars being a leading cause. ..."
"... Author James Bovard has described our society as an "attention deficit democracy," and the speed with which important events are forgotten once the media loses interest might surprise George Orwell. ..."
"... As President George W. Bush began inexorably moving America toward the Iraq War in 2002, I realized with a terrible sinking feeling that the notoriously pro-Israel Neocon zealots had somehow managed to seize control of the foreign policy of his administration, a situation I could never have imagined even in my worst nightmare ..."
"... Weekly Standard ..."
"... Lenin in Zurich ..."
"... The Terror Enigma ..."
"... 9/11: The Big Lie ..."
"... Popular Mechanics ..."
"... Red Ice Radio ..."
"... Fahrenheit 9/11 ..."
"... Zionism, Militarism, and the Decline of US Power ..."
"... This unfortunate conspiracy of silence finally ended in 2009 when Dr. Alan Sabrosky, former Director of Studies at the US Army War College, stepped forward and publicly declared that the Israeli Mossad had very likely been responsible for the 9/11 attacks, writing a series of columns on the subject, and eventually presenting his views in a number of media interviews, along with additional analyses . ..."
"... Sabrosky focused much attention upon a certain portion of a Dutch documentary film on the 9/11 attacks produced several years earlier. In one fascinating interview, a professional demolition expert named Danny Jowenko who was largely ignorant of the 9/11 attacks immediately identified the filmed collapse of WTC Building 7 as a controlled-demolition, and the remarkable clip was broadcast worldwide on Press TV ..."
"... Guns & Butter ..."
"... The late Alan Hart , a very distinguished British broadcast journalist and foreign correspondent, also broke his silence in 2010 and similarly pointed to the Israelis as the likely culprits in the 9/11 attacks, and those interested may wish to listen to his extended interview . ..."
"... JFK-9/11: 50 Years of the Deep State ..."
"... But oddly enough, without making much effort at all, the American government did quickly round up and arrest some 200 Israeli Mossad agents , many of whom had been based in exactly the same geographical locations as the purported 19 Arab hijackers. Furthermore, NYC police arrested some of these agents publicly celebrating the 9/11 attacks , while others were caught driving vans in the New York area containing explosives or their residual traces. Most of these Mossad agents refused to answer any questions, and many of those who did failed polygraph tests, but under political pressure all were eventually released and deported back to Israel. ..."
"... One month after the 9/11 attacks, an Israeli intelligence officer and a local Jewish activist were caught attempting to sneak weapons and explosives into the Mexican Parliament building, a story that naturally produced several banner-headlines in leading Mexican newspapers at the time but which was totally ignored by the American media. Eventually, under massive political pressure, all charges were dropped and the Israeli agent deported back home. ..."
Sep 10, 2018 | www.unz.com

... ... ...

Although immigration and Hispanic crime were perennial topics in that HBD group, for a few years after the 9/11 attacks the latter issue was almost entirely displaced by feverish exchanges on Muslim terrorism and the accompanying Clash of Civilizations. Once again, I was invariably on the short end of a 99-to-1 divide, with nearly all the others in the group claiming that destruction of the World Trade Center conclusively proved that we needed to close our borders to foreign immigrants. I pointed out that since the Arab hijackers involved hadn't been immigrants, but had generally entered our country on tourist visas, maybe the "War on Terrorism" should be renamed the "War on Tourism," and we should protect America by completely closing our borders to the horrifying risks of the latter. Yet everyone ignored my sage advice.

The 9/11 attacks themselves had astonished me as much as everyone else on the HBD list, but aside from carefully reading the developing story in the New York Times and my other morning newspapers, I was too busy with my work to otherwise follow the topic. At first, everyone seemed certain that there would soon be a wave of follow-up attacks by the dozens or perhaps even hundreds of other Islamic terrorists remaining in our country, but nothing like that ever happened. After a few weeks had gone by without any further explosions, even small ones, I told the other HBD listmembers that I now strongly suspected every last Al Qaeda terrorist in America had probably died in the suicide attacks of September 11th, and there wasn't a single remaining operative left behind to commit further mayhem. Many of the others disagreed with me, but as the months and eventually the years went by, my surprising hypothesis turned out to be correct.

There was one important exception to this pattern, but it actually served to confirm the rule. As I wrote a few years ago in my original "American Pravda" article:

Consider the almost forgotten anthrax mailing attacks in the weeks after 9/11, which terrified our dominant East Coast elites and spurred passage of the unprecedented Patriot Act, thereby eliminating many traditional civil-libertarian protections. Every morning during that period the New York Times and other leading newspapers carried articles describing the mysterious nature of the deadly attacks and the complete bafflement of the FBI investigators. But evenings on the Internet I would read stories by perfectly respectable journalists such as Salon 's Laura Rozen or the staff of the Hartford Courant providing a wealth of additional detail and pointing to a likely suspect and motive.

Although the letters carrying the anthrax were purportedly written by an Arab terrorist, the FBI quickly determined that the language and style indicated a non-Arab author, while tests pointed to the bioweapons research facility at Ft. Detrick, Md., as the probable source of the material. But just prior to the arrival of those deadly mailings, military police at Quantico, Va., had also received an anonymous letter warning that a former Ft. Detrick employee, Egyptian-born Dr. Ayaad Assaad, might be planning to launch a national campaign of bioterrorism. Investigators quickly cleared Dr. Assaad, but the very detailed nature of the accusations revealed inside knowledge of his employment history and the Ft. Detrick facilities. Given the near-simultaneous posting of anthrax envelopes and false bioterrorism accusations, the mailings almost certainly came from the same source, and solving the latter case would be the easiest means of catching the anthrax killer.

Who would have attempted to frame Dr. Assaad for bioterrorism? A few years earlier he had been involved in a bitter personal feud with a couple of his Ft. Detrick coworkers, including charges of racism, official reprimands, and angry recriminations all around. When an FBI official shared a copy of the accusatory letter with a noted language-forensics expert and allowed him to compare the text with the writings of 40 biowarfare lab employees, he found a perfect match with one of those individuals. For years I told my friends that anyone who spent 30 minutes with Google could probably determine the name and motive of the likely anthrax killer, and most of them successfully met my challenge.

This powerful evidence received almost no attention in the major national media, nor is there any indication that the FBI ever followed up on any of these clues or interrogated the named suspects. Instead, investigators attempted to pin the attacks on a Dr. Steven Hatfill based on negligible evidence, after which he was completely exonerated and won a $5.6 million settlement from the government for its years of severe harassment. Later, similar hounding of researcher Bruce Ivins and his family led to his suicide, after which the FBI declared the case closed, even though former colleagues of Dr. Ivins demonstrated that he had had no motive, means, or opportunity. In 2008, I commissioned a major 3,000-word cover story in my magazine summarizing all of this crucial evidence, and once again almost no one in the mainstream media paid the slightest attention.

Unlike the 9/11 attacks themselves, I had closely followed the Anthrax terrorism, and was shocked by the strange silence of the government investigators and our leading newspapers. At the time, I generally assumed that the attacks were totally unconnected with 9/11 and merely opportunistic, but I simply couldn't understand how a few minutes a day of reading Salon and the Hartford Courant on the web could seemingly solve the front-page whodunit that was baffling everyone at the FBI and the New York Times . It was around that point when I started to wonder whether the elite media publications I had always relied upon were merely "Our American Pravda" under a different name . Moreover, a 2014 book by Prof. Graeme MacQueen that I only very recently discovered has made a reasonably persuasive case that the Anthrax killings were intimately connected to the 9/11 attacks themselves, greatly magnifying the malfeasance of our media elites.

In theoretical physics, new scientific breakthroughs often occur when known objects are found to behave in inexplicable ways, thereby suggesting the existence of previously unsuspected forces or particles. In evolutionary biology, when a biological organism appears to be acting against its own genetic interests, we may safely assume that it has probably fallen under the control of a different organism, typically a parasite, which has hijacked the host and is directing its activities toward different ends. While I couldn't be entirely sure what was happening to the politics and media of my own country, something very odd and disturbing was certainly taking place.

Things soon became even much worse. Since the 9/11 attacks had apparently been organized by Osama bin Laden and he was based in Afghanistan under Taliban protection, our attack on that country at least seemed rational. But suddenly there also soon appeared talk of attacking Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

At first I couldn't believe what was taking place, simply awed by the breathtaking power and dishonesty of "our American Pravda," with the establishment media so easily transforming black into white and night into day. Once again, quoting from my original article of that title:

The circumstances surrounding our Iraq War demonstrate this, certainly ranking it among the strangest military conflicts of modern times. The 2001 attacks in America were quickly ascribed to the radical Islamists of al-Qaeda, whose bitterest enemy in the Middle East had always been Saddam Hussein's secular Baathist regime in Iraq. Yet through misleading public statements, false press leaks, and even forged evidence such as the "yellowcake" documents, the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies utilized the compliant American media to persuade our citizens that Iraq's nonexistent WMDs posed a deadly national threat and required elimination by war and invasion. Indeed, for several years national polls showed that a large majority of conservatives and Republicans actually believed that Saddam was the mastermind behind 9/11 and the Iraq War was being fought as retribution. Consider how bizarre the history of the 1940s would seem if America had attacked China in retaliation for Pearl Harbor.

True facts were easily available to anyone paying attention in the years after 2001, but most Americans do not bother and simply draw their understanding of the world from what they are told by the major media, which overwhelmingly -- almost uniformly -- backed the case for war with Iraq; the talking heads on TV created our reality. Prominent journalists across the liberal and conservative spectrum eagerly published the most ridiculous lies and distortions passed on to them by anonymous sources, and stampeded Congress down the path to war.

The result was what my late friend Lt. Gen. Bill Odom rightly called the "greatest strategic disaster in United States history." American forces suffered tens of thousands of needless deaths and injuries, while our country took a huge step toward national bankruptcy. Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and others have estimated that with interest the total long-term cost of our two recent wars may reach as high as $5 or $6 trillion, or as much as $50,000 per American household, mostly still unpaid. Meanwhile, economist Edward Wolff has calculated that the Great Recession and its aftermath cut the personal net worth of the median American household to $57,000 in 2010 from a figure nearly twice as high three years earlier. Comparing these assets and liabilities, we see that the American middle class now hovers on the brink of insolvency, with the cost of our foreign wars being a leading cause.

But no one involved in the debacle ultimately suffered any serious consequences, and most of the same prominent politicians and highly paid media figures who were responsible remain just as prominent and highly paid today. For most Americans, reality is whatever our media organs tell us, and since these have largely ignored the facts and adverse consequences of our wars in recent years, the American people have similarly forgotten. Recent polls show that only half the public today believes that the Iraq War was a mistake.

Author James Bovard has described our society as an "attention deficit democracy," and the speed with which important events are forgotten once the media loses interest might surprise George Orwell.

As President George W. Bush began inexorably moving America toward the Iraq War in 2002, I realized with a terrible sinking feeling that the notoriously pro-Israel Neocon zealots had somehow managed to seize control of the foreign policy of his administration, a situation I could never have imagined even in my worst nightmare .

Throughout the 1990s and even afterward, I'd been on very friendly terms with the Neocons in NYC and DC, working closely with them on issues relating to immigration and assimilation. Indeed, my December 1999 article "California and the End of White America" had not only appeared as one of the longest cover stories ever published in Commentary , their intellectual flagship, but had even been cited as the centerpiece of its annual fund-raising letter.

I and my other DC friends were well aware of the fanatical views most Neocons held on Israel and Middle Eastern policy. Indeed, their foreign policy obsessions had been a regular staple of our jokes and ridicule, but since it seemed unimaginable that they would ever be given any authority in that sphere, their beliefs had seemed a relatively harmless eccentricity. After all, could anyone possibly imagine fanatical libertarians being placed in total control of the Pentagon, allowing them to immediately disband the American armed forces as a "statist institution"?

Moreover, the complete ideological triumph of the Neocons after the 9/11 attacks was all the more shocking given their recent political missteps. During the 2000 presidential campaign, nearly all of the Neocons had aligned themselves with Sen. John McCain, whose battle with Bush for the Republican nomination had eventually turned quite bitter, and as a consequence, they had been almost totally been frozen out of high-level appointments. Both Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were then widely regarded as Bush Republicans, lacking any significant Neocon ties, and the same was true for all the other top administration figures such as Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice, and Paul O'Neil. Indeed, the only Neoconservative figure offered a Cabinet spot was Linda Chavez, and not only was the Labor Department always regarded as something of a boobie prize in a GOP Administration, but she was ultimately forced to withdraw her nomination due to her "nanny problems." The highest-ranking Neocon serving under Bush was Rumsfeld Deputy Paul Wolfowitz, whose seemingly inconsequential appointment had been almost totally ignored by everyone.

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Most of the Neocons themselves certainly seemed to recognize the catastrophic defeat they had suffered in the 2000 election. Back in those days, I was on very friendly terms with Bill Kristol, and when I stopped by his office at the Weekly Standard for a chat in the spring of 2001, he seemed in a remarkably depressed state of mind. I remember that at one point, he took his head in his hands and wondered whether it was time for him to just abandon the political battle, resigning his editorship and taking up a quiet post at a DC thinktank. Yet just eight or ten months later, he and his close allies were on their way to gaining overwhelming influence in our government, an eirie parallel to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Lenin in Zurich . The totally fortuitous 9/11 attacks and the outbreak of war had suddenly allowed a small but committed ideological faction to seize control of a gigantic country.

A thorough account of the Neocons and their takeover of the Bush Administration in the aftermath of 9/11 is provided by Dr. Stephen J. Sniegoski in his 2008 book The Transparent Cabal, conveniently available on this website:

The Transparent Cabal The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel Stephen J. Sniegoski • 2008 • 178,000 Words

Oddly enough, for many years after 9/11, I paid very little attention to the details of the attacks themselves. I was entirely preoccupied with building my content-archiving software system , and with the little time I could spend on public policy matters, I was totally focused to the ongoing Iraq War disaster, as well as my terrible fears that Bush might at any moment suddenly extend the conflict to Iran. Despite Neocon lies, shamelessly echoed by our corrupt media, neither Iraq nor Iran had had anything whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks, so those events gradually faded in my consciousness, and I suspect the same was true for most other Americans. Al Qaeda had largely disappeared, with Bin Laden perhaps hiding in a cave somewhere. Despite endless Homeland Security "threat alerts," there had been absolutely no further Islamic terrorism on American soil, and relatively little anywhere else outside the Iraq charnel house. So the precise details of the 9/11 plots had become almost irrelevant to me.

Others I knew seemed to feel the same way. Virtually all the exchanges I had with my old friend Bill Odom, the three-star general who had run the NSA for Ronald Reagan, had concerned the Iraq War and risk it might spread to Iran, as well as the bitter anger he felt toward Bush's perversion of his beloved NSA into an extra-constitutional tool of domestic espionage. When the New York Times broke the story of the massive extent of domestic NSA spying, Gen. Odom declared that President Bush should be impeached and NSA Director Michael Hayden court-martialed. But in all the years prior to his untimely passing in 2008 , I don't recall the 9/11 attacks themselves even once coming up as a topic in our discussions.

During those same years, I'd also grown quite friendly with Alexander Cockburn , whose Counterpunch webzine seemed a very rare center of significant opposition to our disastrous foreign policy towards Iraq and Iran. I do recall that he once complained to me in 2006 about the "conspiracy nuts" of the 9/11 Truth movement who were endlessly harassing his publication, and I extended my sympathies. Each of us move in different political circles, and that brief reference may have been the first and only time I heard of the 9/11 Truthers during that period, causing me to regard them more like an eccentric UFO cult than anything else.

Admittedly, I'd occasionally heard of some considerable oddities regarding the 9/11 attacks here and there, and these certainly raised some suspicions. Most days I would glance at the Antiwar.com front page, and it seemed that some Israeli Mossad agents had been caught while filming that plane attacks in NYC, while a much larger Mossad "art student" spy operation around the country had also been broken up around the same time. Apparently, FoxNews had even broadcast a multi-part series on the latter subject before that expose was scuttled and "disappeared" under ADL pressure.

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But I wasn't sure about the credibility of those claims, though it did seem plausible that Mossad had known of the attacks in advance and allowed them to proceed, recognizing the huge benefits that Israel would derive from the anti-Arab backlash. I think I was vaguely aware that Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo had published The Terror Enigma , a very short book about some of these strange facts, bearing the provocative subtitle "9/11 and the Israeli Connection," but I never considered reading it. In 2007, Counterpunch itself published a fascinating follow-up story about that arrest of that group of Israeli Mossad agents in NYC, who were caught filming and apparently celebrating the plane attacks on that fateful day, which turned out to be a much broader operation than I had previously realized. But all these details remained a little fuzzy in my mind next to my overriding concerns about wars in Iraq and Iran.

However

Moreover, around that same time I'd stumbled across an astonishing detail of the 9/11 attacks that demonstrated the remarkable depths of my own ignorance. In a Counterpunch article, I'd discovered that immediately following the attacks, their supposed terrorist mastermind

, even declaring that no good Muslim would have committed such a deed.

Once I checked around a little and fully confirmed that fact , I was flabbergasted. 9/11 was not only the most successful terrorist attack in the history of the world, but may have been greater in its physical magnitude than all such previous terrorist operations combined. The entire purpose of terrorism is to allow a small organization to show the world that it can inflict serious losses upon a powerful state, and I had never previously heard of any terrorist leader denying his role in a successful operation, let alone the greatest in history. Something seemed extremely wrong in the media-generated narrative that I had previously accepted. I began to wonder if I had been as deluded as the tens of millions of Americans in 2003 and 2004 who naively believed that Saddam had been the mastermind behind the September 11th attacks. We live in a world of illusions generated by our media, and I suddenly felt that I had noticed a tear in the paper-mache mountains displayed in the background of a Hollywood sound-stage. If Osama was probably not the author of 9/11, what other huge falsehoods had I blindly accepted?

A couple of years later, I came across a very interesting column by Eric Margolis, a prominent Canadian foreign policy journalist purged from the broadcast media for his strong opposition to the Iraq War. He had long published a weekly column in the Toronto Sun and when that tenure ended, he used his closing appearance to run a double-length piece expressing his very strong doubts about the official 9/11 story .

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In addition, an old friend of mine with strong connections to elite French circles at some point shared what he regarded as an amusing anecdote. He mentioned that at a private dinner party in Paris attended by influential political and media figures, France's former Defense Minister had told the other disbelieving guests that the Pentagon had been struck by a missile rather than a civilian jetliner. My friend explained that the minister in question was widely regarded as extremely intelligent and level-headed, thereby proving that even the most highly reputable individuals may sometimes believe in utterly crazy things.

But I interpreted those same facts very differently. France probably possessed one of the four or five best intelligence service in the world, and surely a French Defense Minister would be privy to better information about true events than a typical media pundit. In fact, one of the earliest books sharply questioning the official 9/11 narrative was 9/11: The Big Lie by French journalist Thierry Meyssan, which appeared in 2002 and similarly argued that the Pentagon had been struck by a missile, perhaps suggesting that it may have been partly influenced by leaks coming from French Intelligence.

I eventually shared that account of the French minister's private opinions with a very well-connected American individual, someone in our elite Establishment with whom I'd become a little friendly. His reaction made it clear that he held the same highly unorthodox views about the 9/11 attacks, although he had never publicly voiced them lest he risk losing his elite Establishment membership card.

Over the years, all these discordant claims had gradually raised my suspicions about the official 9/11 story to extremely strong levels, but it was only very recently that I finally found the time to begin to seriously investigate the subject and read eight or ten of the main 9/11 Truther books, mostly those by Prof. David Ray Griffin, the widely acknowledged leader in that field. And his books, together with the writings of his numerous colleagues and allies, revealed all sorts of very telling details, most of which had previously remained unknown to me. I was also greatly impressed by the sheer number of seemingly reputable individuals of no apparent ideological bent who had become adherents of the 911 Truth movement over the years.

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I certainly attempted to locate contrary books supporting the official 9/11 story, but the only one widely discussed was a rather short volume published by Popular Mechanics magazine, whose lead researcher turned out to be the cousin of Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff. None of the writers appeared to have any serious academic credentials, and they seemed to generally ignore or deflect some of the strongest pieces of evidence provided by the numerous scholars and experts involved in the 9/11 Truth movement. Hence, I hardly found their analysis persuasive, and half-wondered whether Homeland Security had quietly arranged the publication, which might help explain the extremely odd nepotistic coincidence. Popular magazines simply do not carry the scientific weight of research professors at major universities. Perhaps the holes in the official 9/11 narrative were so numerous and large that no serious scholar could be found to defend it.

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When utterly astonishing claims of an extremely controversial nature are made over a period of many years by numerous seemingly reputable academics and other experts, and they are entirely ignored or suppressed but never effectively refuted, reasonable conclusions seem to point in an obvious direction. Based on my very recent readings in this topic, the total number of separate near-fatal anomalies in the official 9/11 story has now grown enormously long, probably numbering in the many dozens. Most of these individual items seem reasonably likely and if we decide that even just two or three of them are correct, we must totally reject the narrative that so many of us have believed for so long. The numerous Griffin books, beginning with his important 2004 volume had spent 29 years at the CIA , rising to become of its senior figures as Director of its Office of Regional and Political Analysis, with 200 research analysts serving under him. In August 2006, he published a remarkable 2,700 word article explaining why he no longer believed the official 9/11 story and felt sure that the 9/11 Commission Report constituted a cover-up, with the truth being quite different. The following year, he provided a forceful endorsement to many other highly-regarded former US intelligence officers .

We might expect that if a former intelligence officer of Christison's rank were to denounce the official 9/11 report as a fraud and a cover-up, such a story would constitute front-page news. But it was never reported anywhere in our mainstream media, and I only stumbled upon it nearly a decade later.

Even nearly all of our supposed "alternative" media outlets were nearly as silent. Throughout the 2000s, Christison and his wife Kathleen, also a former CIA analyst, had been regular contributors to Counterpunch , publishing many dozens of articles there and certainly were its most highly-credentialed writers on intelligence and national security matters. But editor Alexander Cockburn refused to publish any of their 9/11 skepticism, so it never came to my attention at the time. Indeed, when I mentioned Christison's views to current Counterpunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair a couple of years ago, he was stunned to discover that the friend he had regarded so very highly had actually become a "9/11 Truther." When media organs serve as ideological gatekeepers, widespread ignorance becomes unavoidable.

For those so interested, Christison's 2006 article mentioned the strong evidence he found in a C-Span broadcast of a two-hour panel discussion on the September 11th terrorist attacks , and especially cited the documentary Loose Change as an excellent summary of many of the flaws in the official 9/11 case. The full "Final Cut" version of that film is conveniently available on YouTube:

With so many gaping holes in the official story of the events seventeen years ago, each of us is free to choose to focus on those we personally consider most extreme and obvious. Danish Chemistry professor Niels Harrit was one of the scientists who analyzed the debris of the destroyed buildings and detected the residual presence of nano-thermite, a military-grade explosive compound, and I found him quite credible during his hour long interview on Red Ice Radio . The notion that an undamaged hijacker passport was found in an NYC street after the massive, fiery destruction of the skyscrapers is totally absurd, as was the highly incriminating contents of the hijacker luggage recovered in a lost airline bag. And the testimonies of the dozens of firefighters who heard explosions just before the collapse of the buildings seems totally inexplicable under the official story. The sudden total collapse of Building Seven, never hit by any jetliners is also extremely implausible.

Let us now suppose that the overwhelming weight of evidence is correct, and concur with high-ranking former CIA intelligence analysts, distinguished academics, and experienced professionals that the 9/11 attacks were not what they appeared to be. We recognize the extreme implausibility that three huge skyscrapers in New York City suddenly collapsed at free-fall velocity into their own footprints after just two of them were hit by airplanes, and also that a large civilian jetliner probably did not strike the Pentagon leaving absolutely no wreckage and only a small hole. What actually did happen, and more importantly, who was behind it?

The first question is obviously impossible to answer without an honest and thorough official investigation of the evidence. In the absence of that, numerous, somewhat conflicting hypotheses have been advanced and debated within the confines of the 9/11 Truth community. But the second question is probably the more important and relevant one, and I think it has always represented a source of extreme vulnerability to 9/11 Truthers.

The most typical approach, as generally followed in the numerous Griffin books, is to avoid the issue entirely and focus solely on the gaping flaws in the official narrative. This is a perfectly acceptable position but leaves all sorts of serious doubts. What organized group would have been sufficiently powerful and daring to carry off an attack of such vast scale against the central heart of the world's sole superpower? And how were they then able to orchestrate such a massively effective media and political cover-up, even enlisting the participation of the American government itself?

The much smaller slice of 9/11 Truthers who choose to address this "whodunit" question seem to be overwhelmingly concentrated among rank-and-file grassroots activists rather than the prestigious experts, and they usually answer "inside job!" Their widespread belief seems to be that the top political leadership of the Bush Administration, probably including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had organized the terrorist attacks, either with or without the knowledge of their nominal but ignorant superior, President George W. Bush. The suggested motives included justification for military attacks against various countries, supporting the financial interests of the powerful oil industry and military-industrial complex, and enabling the destruction of traditional American civil liberties. Since the vast majority of politically-active Truthers seem to come from the far left of the ideological spectrum, these sorts of notions seem logical and almost self-evident.

Although not explicitly endorsing those Truther conspiracies, filmmaker Michael Moore's leftist box office hit Fahrenheit 9/11 seemed to raise such similar suspicions. His small budget documentary earned an astonishing $220 million by suggesting that the very close business ties between the Bush family, Cheney, the oil companies, and the Saudis were responsible for the Iraq War aftermath of the terrorist attacks, with the domestic crackdown on civil liberties being part-and-parcel of the right-wing Republican agenda.

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Unfortunately, this apparently plausible picture seems to have almost no basis in reality. During the drive to the Iraq War, I read Times articles interviewing numerous top oil men in Texas who expressed total puzzlement at why America was planning the attack, saying that they could only assume that President Bush knew something that they themselves did not. Saudi Arabian leaders were adamantly opposed to an American attack on Iraq, and made every effort to prevent it. Prior to his joining the Bush Administration, Cheney had served as CEO of Halliburton, an oil services giant, and his firm had heavily lobbied for the lifting of U.S. economic sanctions against Iraq. Prof. James Petras, a scholar of strong Marxist leanings, published an excellent 2008 book entitled Zionism, Militarism, and the Decline of US Power in which he conclusively demonstrated that Zionist interests rather than those of the oil industry had dominated the Bush Administration in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

As for Michael Moore's film, I remember at the time sharing a laugh with a (Jewish) friend of mine, both of us finding it ridiculous that a government so overwhelmingly permeated by fanatically pro-Israel Neocons was being portrayed as in thrall to the Saudis. Not only did the plot of Moore's film indicate the fearsome power of Jewish Hollywood, but its huge success demonstrated that most of the American public had apparently never heard of the Neocons.

Bush critics properly ridiculed the president for his tongue-tied statement that the 9/11 terrorists had attacked America "for its freedoms" and Truthers have reasonably branded as implausible the claims that the massive attacks were organized by a cave-dwelling Islamic preacher. But the suggestion that that they were led and organized by the top figures of the Bush Administration seems even more preposterous.

Cheney and Rumsfeld had both spent decades as stalwarts of the moderate pro-business wing of the Republican Party, each serving in top government positions and also CEOs of major corporations. The notion that they capped their careers by joining a new Republican administration in early 2001 and immediately began organizing a gigantic false-flag terrorist attack upon the proudest towers of our largest city together with our own national military headquarters, hoping to kill many thousands of Americans in the process, is too ridiculous to even be part of a leftist political satire.

Let's step back a bit. In the entire history of the world, I can think of no documented case in which the top political leadership of a country launched a major false-flag attack upon its own centers of power and finance and tried to kill large numbers of its own people. The America of 2001 was a peaceful and prosperous country run by relatively bland political leaders focused upon the traditional Republican goals of enacting tax-cuts for the rich and reducing environmental regulations. Too many Truther activists have apparently drawn their understanding of the world from the caricatures of leftist comic-books in which corporate Republicans are all diabolical Dr. Evils, seeking to kill Americans out of sheer malevolence, and Cockburn was absolutely correct to ridicule them at least on that particular score.

Consider also the simple practicalities of the situation. The gigantic nature of the 9/11 attacks as postulated by the Truth movement would have clearly required enormous planning and probably involved the work of many dozens or even hundreds of skilled agents. Directing CIA operatives or special military units to organize secret attacks against civilian targets in Venezuela or Yemen is one thing, but ordering them to mount attacks against the Pentagon and the heart of New York City would be fraught with stupendous risk.

Bush had lost the popular vote in November 2000 and had only reached the White House because of a few dangling chads in Florida and the controversial decision of a deeply divided Supreme Court, so most of the American media regarded his new administration with considerable hostility for those reasons. If the first act of such a newly-sworn presidential team had been directing the CIA or the military to prepare attacks against New York City and the Pentagon, surely those orders would have been regarded as issued by a group of lunatics, and immediately leaked to the hostile national press.

The whole scenario of top American leaders being the masterminds behind 9/11 is beyond ridiculous, and those 9/11 Truthers who make or imply such claims -- doing so without a single shred of solid evidence -- have unfortunately played a major role in discrediting their entire movement. In fact, the common meaning of the "inside job" scenario is so patently absurd and self-defeating that one might even suspect that the claim was encouraged by those seeking to discredit the entire 9/11 Truth movement as a consequence.

On the other hand, it does seem entirely plausible that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other top Bush leaders may have been manipulated into taking certain actions that inadvertently furthered the 9/11 plot, while a few lower-level Bush appointees might have been more directly involved, perhaps even as outright conspirators. But that is not the normal meaning of the "inside job" accusation.

So where do we now stand? It seems very likely that the 9/11 attacks were the work of an organization far more powerful and professionally-skilled than a rag-tag band of nineteen random Arabs armed with box-cutters, but also the attacks were clearly not the work of the American government itself. So who actually attacked our country on that fateful day seventeen years ago, killing thousands of our fellow citizens?

Effective intelligence operations are concealed in a hall of mirrors, often extremely difficult for outsiders to discern, and false-flag terrorist attacks certainly fall into this category. But applying a different metaphor, the complexities of such events may be seen as a Gordian Knot, almost impossible to disentangle, but which may sometimes easily be cut by asking the simple question "Who benefited?"

America and most of the world certainly did not, and the disastrous legacy of that fateful day have transformed our own society and much of the entire world. The endless American wars soon unleashed have already cost us many trillions of dollars and set our nation on the road to bankruptcy, while killing or displacing many millions of innocent Middle Easterners. Most recently, that flood of desperate refugees has begun engulfing Europe, and the peace and prosperity of that ancient continent is now under severe threat.

Our traditional civil liberties and constitutional protections have been drastically eroded, and our society placed on the road to becoming an outright police state, with American citizens now passively accepting unimaginable infringements on their personal freedoms, all originally begun under the guise of preventing terrorism.

I find it difficult to think of any country in the world that clearly gained as a result of the 9/11 attacks and America's military reaction, with one single, solitary exception.

During 2000 and most of 2001, America was a peaceful prosperous country, but a certain small Middle Eastern nation had found itself in an increasingly desperate situation. Israel then seemed to be fighting for its life against the massive waves of domestic terrorism that constituted much of the Second Intifada.

According to many analysts, Ariel Sharon had deliberately provoked that Palestinian uprising in September 2000 by marching to the Temple Mount backed by a thousand armed police, and the resulting violence and polarization of Israeli society had successfully installed him as Prime Minister in early 2001. But once in office, his notoriously harsh measures failed to prevent a wave of continuing attacks, increasingly made by from suicide-bombers, and there was a widespread opinion that the violence would soon trigger a huge outflow of Israeli citizens, perhaps producing a death-spiral for the Jewish state. Iraq, Iran, Libya, and other major Muslim powers were supporting the Palestinians with money, rhetoric, and sometimes even weapons, and it appeared that Israeli society was beginning to crumble. I remember hearing from some of my DC friends that numerous Israeli policy experts were suddenly seeking berths at Neocon thinktanks so that they could relocate to America.

Sharon was a notoriously bloody and reckless leader, with a long history of being willing to undertake strategic gambles of astonishing boldness, sometimes betting everything on a single roll of the dice. He had spent decades seeking the Prime Ministership, and having finally obtained it, he now had his back to the wall, with no obvious source of rescue in sight.

The 9/11 attacks changed everything. Suddenly the world's sole superpower was fully mobilized against Arab and Muslim terrorist movements, especially those connected with the Middle East. Sharon's close Neocon political allies in America used the unexpected crisis as an opportunity to seize control of America's foreign policy and national security apparatus, with an NSA staffer later reporting that Israeli generals freely roamed the halls of the Pentagon without any security controls. Meanwhile, the excuse of preventing domestic terrorism was used to implement newly centralized American police controls that were employed to harass or even shut down various anti-Zionist political organizations. One of the Israeli Mossad agents arrested by the police in New York City as he and his fellows were celebrating the 9/11 attacks and producing a souvenir film of the burning World Trade Center towers told the officers that "Terrorism is now America's problem." And so it immediately became.

General Wesley Clark reported that soon after the 9/11 attacks he was informed that a secret military plan had somehow come into being under which America would attack and destroy seven major Muslim countries over the next few years, including Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya, which coincidentally were all of Israel's strongest regional adversaries and the leading supporters of the Palestinians. As America began to expend enormous oceans of blood and treasure attacking all of Israel's enemies after 9/11, Israel itself no longer had as much need to do so, and partly as a consequence, almost no other nation in the world has so enormously improved its strategic and economic situation during the last seventeen years, even while a large fraction of the American population has become completely impoverished during that same period and our country burdened with an insurmountable national debt. A parasite can often grow fat even as its host suffers and declines.

As I have emphasized, for many years after the 9/11 attacks I paid little attention to its details and had only the vaguest notion that there existed an organized 9/11 Truth movement. But if someone had ever told me that the terrorist attacks had been false-flag events and someone other than Osama had been responsible, my immediate guess would have been Israel and its Mossad.

Certainly no other nation in the world can remotely match Israel's track-record of remarkably bold high-level assassinations and false-flag attacks, terrorist and otherwise, against other countries, certainly including America and its military. Furthermore, the enormous dominance of Jewish and pro-Israel elements in the American establishment media and increasingly that of many other major countries in the West has long ensured that even when the solid evidence of such attacks were discovered, very few ordinary Americans would ever hear of them.

The pattern of behavior is really quite remarkable. During the 1940s, even prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, the various Zionist factions assassinated Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, and made unsuccessful attempts to kill President Harry S. Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin , while even discussing the possible assassination of Prime Minister Winston Churchill . There seems considerable evidence that the Israeli Mossad subsequently played a central role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy because of the enormous pressure he was applying to persuade Israel to abandon its nuclear weapons plans. Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky warned the American government that Israel was planning to assassinate President George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s due to the bitter conflict over financial aid, and apparently those warnings were taken seriously . As recently as 2012, the editor of the main Jewish newspaper in Atlanta publicly called for the assassination of President Barack Obam a over his policy differences with Israel.

The history of military and terrorist attacks is even more striking. One of history's largest terrorist attacks prior to 9/11 was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Zionist militants dressed as Arabs, which killed 91 people and largely destroyed the structure. In the famous Lavon Affair of 1954 , Israeli agents launched a wave of terrorist attacks against Western targets in Egypt, intending to have them blamed on anti-Western Arab groups. In 1950, there are strong claims that Israeli Mossad agents launched a wave of false-flag terrorist bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad, successfully using those violent methods to help persuade Iraq's large thousand-year Jewish community to emigrate to the Jewish state. In 1967, Israel launched a deliberate air and sea attack against the U.S.S. Liberty , intending to leave no survivors, and ultimately killing or wounding over 200 American servicemen before word of the attack got out and it was called off.

The enormous extent of pro-Israel influence in world political and media circles meant that none of these brutal attacks ever drew serious retaliation, and in nearly all cases, they were quickly thrown down the memory hole, so that today probably no more than one in a hundred Americans is aware of them. Most of these secret attacks against American and other Western targets came to light due to chance circumstances, so we may easily suspect that many other attacks of a similar nature have never become part of the historical record.

Once we accept that the 9/11 attacks were probably a false-flag operation, an absolutely central clue to the likely perpetrators has been their extraordinary success in ensuring that such a gigantic wealth of enormously suspicious evidence has been totally ignored by virtually the entire American media, whether liberal or conservative, left-wing or right-wing.

The only other such extreme cases that come to my mind almost invariably involve either Jewish issues or Israel. For example, virtually no Americans are today aware of the close Nazi-Zionist economic partnership of the 1930s that was a crucial factor in the creation of the State of Israel. Similarly, although our Western media has enshrined it as one of the central events of the twentieth century, there seems a good likelihood that the Jewish Holocaust of the Second World War is either substantially or almost entirely fraudulent . Even highly successful false-flag terrorist operations will tend to leave behind many individual clues, and possessing the media power to cause this evidence to vanish from perceived reality is an extraordinarily useful tool for such situations.

Meanwhile, in the particular case at hand, the considerable number of zealously pro-Israel Neocons situated just beneath the public surface of the Bush Administration in 2001 would have greatly facilitated both the successful organization of the attacks and their effective cover-up and concealment, with Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Scooter Libby, and Richard Perle merely among the most obvious names. Whether such individuals were knowing conspirators or merely had personal ties allowing them to be persuaded to take steps furthering the plot is entirely unclear.

Most of this information must surely be obvious within knowledgeable circles, and I strongly suspect that many individuals who had paid much greater attention than myself to the details of the 9/11 attacks may have quickly formed a tentative conclusion along these same times. But for obvious social and political reasons, there is an enormous reluctance to publicly point the finger of blame towards Israel on a matter of such enormous magnitude, so except for a few fringe activists here and there, they kept their suspicions to themselves and simply remained silent.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the 9/11 Truth movement probably feared they would be destroyed by media accusations of deranged anti-Semitism if they did expressed a whisper of such suspicions. This political strategy may have been necessary, but by failing to name any plausible culprit, they created a vacuum that was soon filled by "useful idiots" of the "inside job" persuasion, who pointed an accusing finger at Cheney and Rumfeld, and thereby did so much to discredit the entire 9/11 Truth movement.

This unfortunate conspiracy of silence finally ended in 2009 when Dr. Alan Sabrosky, former Director of Studies at the US Army War College, stepped forward and publicly declared that the Israeli Mossad had very likely been responsible for the 9/11 attacks, writing a series of columns on the subject, and eventually presenting his views in a number of media interviews, along with additional analyses .

Obviously, such explosive charges never reached the pages of my morning Times , but they did receive considerable transitory coverage in elements of the alternative media, and I remember seeing the links very prominently featured at Antiwar.com and widely discussed elsewhere. I had never previously heard of Sabrosky, so I consulted my archiving system and immediately discovered that he had a perfectly respectable record of publication on military affairs in mainstream foreign policy periodicals and had also held a series of academic appointments at prestigious institutions. Reading one or two of his articles on 9/11, I felt he made a rather persuasive case for Mossad involvement, with some of his information already known to me but much of it not.

Since I was very busy with my software work and had never spent any time investigating 9/11 or reading any of the books on the topic, my belief in his claims back then was obviously quite tentative. But now that I have finally looked into the topic in much greater detail and done a great deal of reading, I think it seems quite likely that his 2009 analysis was entirely correct.

I would particularly recommend his long 2011 interview on Iranian Press TV, which I first watched just a couple of days ago. He came across as highly credible and forthright in his claims: Here's a highly controversial clip from a much longer radio interview he did in 2010:

Sabrosky focused much attention upon a certain portion of a Dutch documentary film on the 9/11 attacks produced several years earlier. In one fascinating interview, a professional demolition expert named Danny Jowenko who was largely ignorant of the 9/11 attacks immediately identified the filmed collapse of WTC Building 7 as a controlled-demolition, and the remarkable clip was broadcast worldwide on Press TV and widely discussed on the Internet.

And by a very strange coincidence, just three days after Jowenko's broadcast video interview had received such heavy attention, he had the misfortune to die in a frontal collision with a tree in Holland . I'd suspect that the community of professional demolition experts is a small one, and Jowenko's surviving industry colleagues may have quickly concluded that bad luck might come to those who rendered controversial future opinions on the collapse of the three World Trade Center towers.

Meanwhile, the ADL soon mounted a huge and largely successful effort to have Press TV banned in the West for promoting "anti-Semitic conspiracy theories," even persuading YouTube to entirely eliminate its huge video archive of its past shows.

Most recently, Dr. Sabrosky provided an hour-long presentation at this June's Deep Truth video panel conference , during which he expressed considerable pessimism about America's political predicament, and suggested that the Zionist control over our politics and media had grown even stronger over the last decade.

His discussion was soon rebroadcast by Guns & Butter , a prominent progressive radio program, which as a consequence was soon purged from its home station after seventeen years of great national popularity and strong listener support.

The late Alan Hart , a very distinguished British broadcast journalist and foreign correspondent, also broke his silence in 2010 and similarly pointed to the Israelis as the likely culprits in the 9/11 attacks, and those interested may wish to listen to his extended interview .

One of the first writers to explore this topic was journalist Christopher Bollyn, and the details contained in his long series of newspaper articles are often quoted by other researchers. In 2012, he gathered together this material and published it in the form of a book entitled Solving 9-11 , thereby making his information on the possible role of the Israeli Mossad in the attacks available to a wider audience. However, his volume severely suffers from the typical lack of resources available to the writers on the political fringe, with very poor organization and frequent repetition of the same points due to its origins in a set of individual articles. So those who purchase it should be forewarned about these severe stylistic weaknesses.

Probably a much better compendium of the very extensive evidence pointing to the probable Israeli hand behind the 9/11 attacks has been more recently provided by French journalist Laurent Guyénot, both in his 2017 book JFK-9/11: 50 Years of the Deep State and also his 8,500 word article "9/11 was an Israeli Job" that is being published as a companion piece to this one. His background in 9/11 Truth issues vastly exceeds my own very limited investigation of the subject and he provides a far greater wealth of detail than I could possibly include in this simple summary. While I wouldn't necessarily agree with all his claims and analysis, the overall account is certainly consistent with my own.

I think I might as well add a couple of nuggets of my own in support of the Israeli Mossad Hypothesis.

We would normally expect that terrorist attacks resulting in the complete destruction of three gigantic office buildings in New York City and an aerial assault on the Pentagon would be an operation of enormous size and scale, involving very considerable organizational infrastructure and manpower. Yet in the aftermath of the attacks, the US government undertook great efforts to locate and arrest the surviving Islamic conspirators, but scarcely managed to find a single one. Apparently, they had all died in the attacks themselves or otherwise simply vanished into thin air.

But oddly enough, without making much effort at all, the American government did quickly round up and arrest some 200 Israeli Mossad agents , many of whom had been based in exactly the same geographical locations as the purported 19 Arab hijackers. Furthermore, NYC police arrested some of these agents publicly celebrating the 9/11 attacks , while others were caught driving vans in the New York area containing explosives or their residual traces. Most of these Mossad agents refused to answer any questions, and many of those who did failed polygraph tests, but under political pressure all were eventually released and deported back to Israel.

There is also another fascinating tidbit that I have very rarely seen mentioned. One month after the 9/11 attacks, an Israeli intelligence officer and a local Jewish activist were caught attempting to sneak weapons and explosives into the Mexican Parliament building, a story that naturally produced several banner-headlines in leading Mexican newspapers at the time but which was totally ignored by the American media. Eventually, under massive political pressure, all charges were dropped and the Israeli agent deported back home. I remember first encountering this extremely suspicious incident in the early 2000s on an fringe Hispanic-activist website , and the scanned front pages of the Mexican newspapers reporting the dramatic events were once available elsewhere on the Internet, but after all these years I can no longer easily locate them. The details of this incident are obviously rather fragmentary and perhaps garbled, but certainly quite intriguing.

One might speculate that if Islamic terrorists had followed up their 9/11 attacks by also destroying the Mexican parliament building a month later, Latin American support for America's military invasions in the Middle East would have been enormously greater. Furthermore, any scenes of such massive destruction in the Mexican capital by Arab terrorists would surely have been broadcast non-stop on Univision, America's dominant Spanish-language network, fully solidifying Hispanic support for President Bush's military endeavors.

I doubt that I've spent more than just a few weeks of my total time reading and researching that complex topic, most of that only very recently. I am sure that numerous readers far more knowledgeable than myself will notice various serious errors in my discussion and generously assist in correcting those. Furthermore, my preparation of this analysis was unfortunately cut short by the approach of an particular anniversary date, so that under different circumstances my presentation would have been far more complete and more polished. But I felt there would be some benefits in making this material immediately available to others, even though many might already be familiar with most or all of this information.

Readers should therefore regard this as a preliminary version of my article, which I may render into a more polished form within the next couple of days, a practice that I have never previously followed.

Related Reading:

9/11 was an Israeli Job by Laurent Guyénot 9/11 Contradictions by David Ray Griffin

American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part II -- Who Did It?

American Pravda: Holocaust Denial Our American Pravda

[Sep 10, 2018] Here's The Criticism Jeff Bezos and Amazon Actually Deserve

Notable quotes:
"... Citing CIA documents, Bernstein wrote that during the previous 25 years "more than 400 American journalists have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency." He added: "The history of the CIA's involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception." ..."
"... Amazon has always been and will always remain a front for the deep state shenanigans. This company makes no money, and yet has one of the biggest market caps in the world. As to this that the Washington compost, traditional CIA media, has been purchased by no other than bezos himself, and that leaving any doubt aside, the same CIA just awarded him $600Mio per year to give them some disposable computing power. And then suddenly you hear all these stories about government agencies willing to make the same move... ..."
"... It looks like Bezos is a CIA asset. ..."
"... That it's about modern slavery, in a runup to the 4th industrial revolution. (in which these workers will be fired) ..."
"... I'm particularly troubled by Jeff Bezos and his connections with the CIA and deep state. The CEO of Amazon did not purchase the Washington Post in 2013 because he expected newspapers to make a lucrative resurgence. He purchased the long-trusted U.S. newspaper for the power it would ensure him in Washington and because it could be wielded as a propaganda mouthpiece to extend his ability to both shape and control public opinion. ..."
"... And because the CIA and Bezos are partners I wouldn't hold your breath for any changes. We now have a form of government subsidized neo-slavery. ..."
"... Well, Amazon is not a business, it's a surveillance agency masquerading as a business. ..."
Sep 09, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
By Joe Jarvis via The Daily Bell

... ... ...

I agree with portions of a letter sent to Jeff Bezos on behalf of 100 of his employees .

They are against certain government contracts Amazon fulfills.

The employees raised concerns over the facial recognition software called Rekognition, developed by Amazon. Amazon sells the software to law enforcement and federal policing agencies.

But facial recognition software is basically an unwarranted unreasonable search. You shouldn't have to reveal your identity to the government without being suspected of a crime. And with this software, just going out into public means the government will defacto search you, and be able to track your whereabouts.

In the letter, employees also spoke out against Amazon providing services to Peter Thiel's company Palantir .

Palantir offers predictive policing tools. It analyzes vast amounts of data in order to map complex social connections and behavior patterns.

Palantir is almost like Minority Report the police might know you are going to commit a crime before you do

The technology is named after the crystal balls used by the dark lord Sauron and evil wizard Saruman to spy on middle earth in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings .

The letter reads:

Dear Jeff,

We are troubled by the recent report from the ACLU exposing our company's practice of selling AWS Rekognition, a powerful facial recognition technology, to police departments and government agencies. We don't have to wait to find out how these technologies will be used. We already know that in the midst of historic militarization of police , renewed targeting of Black activists, and the growth of a federal deportation force currently engaged in human rights abuses -- this will be another powerful tool for the surveillance state, and ultimately serve to harm the most marginalized

We call on you to:

Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there.

Amazon also contracts with the CIA, bringing in at least $600 million per year . They provide web services for high-security state secrets to the CIA and other U.S. spy agencies. Plus, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. So the CIA pays Amazon $600 million per year. Jeff Bezos is the founder and CEO of Amazon. And Jeff Bezos is the sole owner of the Washington Post. Does that sound like a conflict of interest to you?

It is also interesting to note that the Washington Post has long been associated with the CIA . Project Mockingbird was a CIA operation which paid American journalists to publish certain information and bury other facts, depending on the interests of the CIA.

After creation of the CIA in 1947, it enjoyed direct collaboration with many U.S. news organizations. But the agency faced a major challenge in October 1977, when -- soon after leaving the Washington Post -- famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein provided an extensive expose in Rolling Stone.

Citing CIA documents, Bernstein wrote that during the previous 25 years "more than 400 American journalists have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency." He added: "The history of the CIA's involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception."

Amazon and Jeff Bezos should be held accountable for providing oppressive tools to the government.

But they should not be criticized and punished for success, as Bernie Sanders' Stop BEZOS Act would do.

Then again if Bezos wants to make money from government contracts, maybe taking care of his employees from cradle to grave just comes with the territory. That money came from taxes. And taxes are are markedly different than free market revenue. "Customers" do not have direct control over how their tax dollars are spent. But apart from the government contracts, I could otherwise entirely remove my funding of Amazon in an instant by refusing to do business with it.

With government sources of funding, Amazon gift cards resembling a currency, and delivery "patrols" in your area , Amazon is looking more and more like a government

But that is a subject we will tackle next week. You don't have to play by the rules of the corrupt politicians, manipulative media, and brainwashed peers.

... ... ...


Adolfsteinbergovitch ,

Amazon has always been and will always remain a front for the deep state shenanigans. This company makes no money, and yet has one of the biggest market caps in the world. As to this that the Washington compost, traditional CIA media, has been purchased by no other than bezos himself, and that leaving any doubt aside, the same CIA just awarded him $600Mio per year to give them some disposable computing power. And then suddenly you hear all these stories about government agencies willing to make the same move...

It looks like Bezos is a CIA asset.

Reptil ,

No, calling out Bernie Sanders, that's a straw man tactic. And it's not accurate. Bernie attacked Jeff Bezos (and people like him) for NOT PAYING PROPER WAGES TO EMPLOYEES. And then that the taxpayers have to pay the extra to keep the employees from starving or becoming homeless. Which is something that can be prevented by..... proper wages.

How is that even possible? Well... it's a monopoly. Not a free market. So don't pretend it is (capitalism). It is not !!!!!!!!!!

And then it's not about something STUPID like "it's the poor attacking the rich." That's childish scaremongering, to hide the truth.

That it's about modern slavery, in a runup to the 4th industrial revolution. (in which these workers will be fired)

Yes, it's about the oligarchy trying to enslave the american people, with the PISSPOOR EXCUSE that for some reason, it's capitalism to not pay proper wages.

Ah yes and Jeff Bezos of course made a deal with the treacherous CIA, that part is true. That's fascism and high treason. But who's going to enforce that? Other oligarchs? Trump? The FBI? hahaha

William Binney had a great idea. To have the states secede from the Federation. Then form inter-state relationships. This way Washington DC will be bypassed.

But expect a fight. A tough one.

Let it Go ,

I'm particularly troubled by Jeff Bezos and his connections with the CIA and deep state. The CEO of Amazon did not purchase the Washington Post in 2013 because he expected newspapers to make a lucrative resurgence. He purchased the long-trusted U.S. newspaper for the power it would ensure him in Washington and because it could be wielded as a propaganda mouthpiece to extend his ability to both shape and control public opinion.

The article below supports the opinion that since buying the Post Bezos has used it to gain wealth and power and that Amazon is a job killing exploiter monster that needs to be stopped. http://Trump And Bezos Face Off Clash Of The Titans.html

Let it Go ,

It must be noted that retailers are closing stores all across America and the impact will be huge. Online retailer Amazon is by far the chief offender causing such grief. Over the last few years, stores such as Target and Macy's have even had to face a slew of dishonest shoppers trying to sneak defectives products purchased online back as exchanges and trading them for a fresh unbroken product. I have seen this costly abuse recommended by several online shoppers that see this as an "easy fix" while simply brushing aside the ethical issues it creates.

As stores close much of this space located in the large shopping malls that once flourished in commercial zones of suburbia will grow empty and abandoned. The article below is the second of a part-two series about the retail closings that are occurring across the country and contains a suggestion as to how we can blunt the damage it will create.

http://Online Transaction Fee Could Blunt Amazon's Edge html

MrBoompi ,

The American taxpayer should not have to pay for Amazon's or WalMarts shitty wages and refusal to provide more full time jobs with benefits. This has nothing to do with punishing success. And because the CIA and Bezos are partners I wouldn't hold your breath for any changes. We now have a form of government subsidized neo-slavery.

Scipio Africanuz ,

Now, before responding to this article, I find some folks who make asinine comments are preventing responses to their comments from being seen. That's fine, they can hide but they can't evade. I'll find out soon whether zerohedge is shadow banning comments, I'll call out asinine comments directly, I'll not respond to anyone anymore, until I understand what's really going on..

Back to the article, TDB makes a robust defense of capitalist "success" and that's fine. Bezos achieved his "success" on the back of the American tax payer. The rules of the game as structured, requires that he, and his oligarch buddies pay tax, just like mom and pop, no more, no less!

I believe in free exchange, and regulated markets. This means trade should be voluntary, and markets should run on honest weights and measures. I don't believe for a nanosecond, that markets should be unregulated, that breeds fraud, theft, and manipulation.

There can be no "free unregulated market", it's the utopia of the right, just as government dominated commerce, is the utopia of the left.

Now, Bezos is an ungrateful cronyist, and I say that without apology. He ought to learn a thing or two, from Henry Ford, and the Japanese thus - take care of your profit generators (employees), and your enabling environment (society), because they're your customers!

Exceptionalist economics have given capitalism a terrible reputation.

Folks often forget that man, by inherent nature, is a communist employing capitalism to create a compassionate society (socialism). The misunderstanding has cost millions of lives in the attempt to destroy capitalism, the very principle they ought to protect. The attempts are akin to closing the nasal and oral passage ways, and yet, hope to consume oxygen.

It'd be hilarious were it not so tragic...

pitz ,

Where's Amazon's profit though? Outside of AWS, they don't make any. Usually robber baron sort of companies are outrageously profitable. Amazon actually delivers their service at a loss, and subsidizes it through their only highly successful business, AWS, which is basically a glorified bank/subprime lender.

The Amazon P/E ratio is extremely irrational, but can the government be blamed for that?

Scipio Africanuz ,

Well, Amazon is not a business, it's a surveillance agency masquerading as a business. It doesn't have to make money as it's directly subsidised by the government, and boosted by the propaganda wing of the establishment, the MSM. Once you understand this, everything becomes clear, cheers...

[Sep 10, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig ROBERTS

Notable quotes:
"... by Paul Craig ROBERTS ..."
"... I was told by senior members of the staff that the Washington Post was a CIA asset. ..."
"... The CIA knew that Nixon's problem was that he could not exit the war without losing his conservative base, which was convinced of the nonsensical "Domino Theory." I have ..."
"... so the CIA succeeded in discrediting among both the leftwing and righwing Nixon's war management. With no one to defend him, Nixon was an easy target for the CIA. ..."
Sep 10, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

William Blum shares with us his correspondence with Washington Post presstitute Michael Birnbaum. As you can tell from Birnbaum's replies, he comes across as either very stupid or as a CIA asset.

When I received my briefing as staff associate, House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which required top secret clearance, I was told by senior members of the staff that the Washington Post was a CIA asset.

Watching the Washington Post's takedown of President Richard Nixon with the orchestrated Watergate story, that became obvious. President Nixon had made too many overtures to the Soviets and too many arms limitations agreements, and he opened to China. Watching President Nixon's peace initiatives water down the threat level from the Soviet Union and Maoist China, the military/security complex saw a threat to its budget and power and decided that Nixon had to go. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy had resulted in far too much skepticism about the Warren Commission Report, so the CIA decided to use the Washington Post to get rid of Nixon. To keep the clueless American left hating Nixon, the CIA used its assets in the leftwing to keep Nixon blamed for the Vietnam war, a war that Nixon inherited and did not want.

The CIA knew that Nixon's problem was that he could not exit the war without losing his conservative base, which was convinced of the nonsensical "Domino Theory." I have always wondered if the CIA concocted the "Domino Theory," as it so well served them. Unable to get rid of the war "with honor," Nixon was driven to brutal methods to force the North Vietnamese to accept a situation that he could depart without defeat and soiling America's "honor" and losing his conservative support base. The North Vietnamese wouldn't bend, but the US Congress did, and so the CIA succeeded in discrediting among both the leftwing and righwing Nixon's war management. With no one to defend him, Nixon was an easy target for the CIA.

Here is Blum's exchange with Birnbaum. It is possible that Birnbaum is neither stupid nor a CIA asset, but just a person wanting to hold on to a job. The last thing he can afford to do is to disabuse readers of the "Russian Threat" when Bezos' Amazon and Washington Post properties are dependent on the CIA's annual subsidy of $600 million disguised as a "contract."

The Anti-Empire Report # 159

Willian Blum

The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter:

July 18, 2018

Dear Mr. Birnbaum,

You write Trump "made no mention of Russia's adventures in Ukraine". Well, neither he nor Putin nor you made any mention of America's adventures in the Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014, which led to the justified Russian adventure. Therefore ?

If Russia overthrew the Mexican government would you blame the US for taking some action in Mexico?

William Blum

Dear Mr. Blum,

Thanks for your note. "America's adventures in the Ukraine": what are you talking about? Last time I checked, it was Ukrainians in the streets of Kiev who caused Yanukovych to turn tail and run. Whether or not that was a good thing, we can leave aside, but it wasn't the Americans who did it.

It is, however, Russian special forces who fanned out across Crimea in February and March 2014, according to Putin, and Russians who came down from Moscow who stoked conflict in eastern Ukraine in the months after, according to their own accounts.

Best, Michael Birnbaum

To MB,

I can scarcely believe your reply. Do you read nothing but the Post? Do you not know of high State Dept official Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador in Ukraine in Maidan Square to encourage the protesters? She spoke of 5 billion (sic) dollars given to aid the protesters who were soon to overthrow the govt. She and the US Amb. spoke openly of who to choose as the next president. And he's the one who became president. This is all on tape. I guess you never watch Russia Today (RT). God forbid! I read the Post every day. You should watch RT once in a while.

William Blum

To WB,

I was the Moscow bureau chief of the newspaper; I reported extensively in Ukraine in the months and years following the protests. My observations are not based on reading. RT is not a credible news outlet, but I certainly do read far beyond our own pages, and of course I talk to the actual actors on the ground myself – that's my job.

And: yes, of course Nuland was in the Maidan – but encouraging the protests, as she clearly did, is not the same as sparking them or directing them, nor is playing favorites with potential successors, as she clearly did, the same as being directly responsible for overthrowing the government. I'm not saying the United States wasn't involved in trying to shape events. So were Russia and the European Union. But Ukrainians were in the driver's seat the whole way through. I know the guy who posted the first Facebook call to protest Yanukovych in November 2013; he's not an American agent. RT, meanwhile, reports fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time. By all means consume a healthy and varied media diet – don't stop at the US mainstream media. But ask yourself how often RT reports critically on the Russian government, and consider how that lacuna shapes the rest of their reporting. You will find plenty of reporting in the Washington Post that is critical of the US government and US foreign policy in general, and decisions in Ukraine and the Ukrainian government in specific. Our aim is to be fair, without picking sides.

Best, Michael Birnbaum

- end of exchange -

Right, the United States doesn't play indispensable roles in changes of foreign governments; never has, never will; even when they offer billions of dollars; even when they pick the new president, which, apparently, is not the same as picking sides. It should be noticed that Mr Birnbaum offers not a single example to back up his extremist claim that RT "reports fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time." "All the time", no less! That should make it easy to give some examples.

For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And, yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem – Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast? Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that when they do it can seem rather weird.

To the casual observer, THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA indictments of July 14 of Russian intelligence agents (GRU) reinforced the argument that the Soviet government interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. Regard these indictments in proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at determining the winner.

The Russians did it (cont.)

Each day I spend about three hours reading the Washington Post. Amongst other things I'm looking for evidence – real, legal, courtroom-quality evidence, or at least something logical and rational – to pin down those awful Russkis for their many recent crimes, from influencing the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election to use of a nerve agent in the UK. But I do not find such evidence.

Each day brings headlines like these:

"U.S. to add economic sanctions on Russia: Attack with nerve agent on former spy in England forces White House to act"

"Is Russia exploiting new Facebook goal?"

"Experts: Trump team lacks urgency on Russian threat"

These are all from the same day, August 9, which led me to thinking of doing this article, but similar stories can be found any day in the Post and in major newspapers anywhere in America. None of the articles begins to explain how Russia did these things, or even WHY. Motivation appears to have become a lost pursuit in the American mass media. The one thing sometimes mentioned, which I think may have some credibility, is Russia's preference of Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But this doesn't begin to explain how Russia could pull off any of the electoral magic it's accused of, which would be feasible only if the United States were a backward, Third World, Banana Republic.

There's the Facebook ads, as well as all the other ads The people who are influenced by this story – have they read many of the actual ads? Many are pro-Clinton or anti-Trump; many are both; many are neither. It's one big mess, the only rational explanation of this which I've read is that they come from money-making websites, "click-bait" sites as they're known, which earn money simply by attracting visitors.

As to the nerve agents, it makes more sense if the UK or the CIA did it to make the Russians look bad, because the anti-Russian scandal which followed was totally predictable. Why would Russia choose the time of the World Cup in Moscow – of which all of Russia was immensely proud – to bring such notoriety down upon their head? But that would have been an ideal time for their enemies to want to embarrass them.

However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II.

But we're the Good Guys, ain't we?

For a defender of US foreign policy there's very little that causes extreme heartburn more than someone implying a "moral equivalence" between American behavior and that of Russia. That was the case during Cold War I and it's the same now in Cold War II. It just drives them up the wall.

After the United States passed a law last year requiring TV station RT (Russia Today) to register as a "foreign agent", the Russians passed their own law allowing authorities to require foreign media to register as a "foreign agent". Senator John McCain denounced the new Russian law, saying there is "no equivalence" between RT and networks such as Voice of America, CNN and the BBC, whose journalists "seek the truth, debunk lies, and hold governments accountable." By contrast, he said, "RT's propagandists debunk the truth, spread lies, and seek to undermine democratic governments in order to further Vladimir Putin's agenda."

And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S. government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski, "apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would interfere in the other's elections."

"Is this moral equivalence fair?" Malinowski asked and answered: "In short, no. Russia's interference in the United States' 2016 election could not have been more different from what the United States does to promote democracy in other countries."

How do you satirize such officials and such high-school beliefs?

We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance."

"Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and government-overthrows. The authors continue: "This narrative is churned out by propaganda outlets such as RT and Sputnik [radio station] it is deployed by isolationists who propound a U.S. retreat from global leadership."

"Isolationists" is what conservatives call critics of US foreign policy whose arguments they can't easily dismiss, so they imply that such people just don't want the US to be involved in anything abroad.

And "global leadership" is what they call being first in election-interferences and government-overthrows.

paulcraigroberts.org

Tags: CIA Print

[Sep 09, 2018] Intelligence community as Jesuits of MIC

Notable quotes:
"... Trump is just the mouthpiece of, and strong-armed by the Media Military Industrial Intelligence Complex (MMIIC). ..."
Sep 09, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

bjd | Sep 7, 2018 12:30:12 PM | link

@Bob (3)

That has been my take on affairs sine some time: Trump is just the mouthpiece of, and strong-armed by the Media Military Industrial Intelligence Complex (MMIIC).

Full disclosure: I despise Trump for a great number of reasons.

Even fuller disclosure: I despise with a vengeance the Intel community, which has taken over the media and the DNC and are the Jesuits of the MIC.

[Sep 09, 2018] Intelligence community as Jesuits of MIC

Notable quotes:
"... Trump is just the mouthpiece of, and strong-armed by the Media Military Industrial Intelligence Complex (MMIIC). ..."
Sep 09, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

bjd | Sep 7, 2018 12:30:12 PM | link

@Bob (3)

That has been my take on affairs sine some time: Trump is just the mouthpiece of, and strong-armed by the Media Military Industrial Intelligence Complex (MMIIC).

Full disclosure: I despise Trump for a great number of reasons.

Even fuller disclosure: I despise with a vengeance the Intel community, which has taken over the media and the DNC and are the Jesuits of the MIC.

[Sep 08, 2018] The Manafort and Cohen Convictions

Notable quotes:
"... Mueller's problem is that his entire investigation has been revealed to be permeated with illegality and dubious Constitutional premises. As the result of investigations by Congress, we know that as of December, 2015 British intelligence agencies were frantically signaling their fears about Donald Trump to Obama Administration intelligence officials, primarily the CIA of John Brennan. ..."
"... The British were demanding that Trump be taken out by whatever means because he was "soft on Russia." They were demanding that Trump be taken out by criminalizing the idea for which the American people ultimately voted, a rational relationship, rather than war, between the U.S. and Russia. ..."
"... By the early Spring, we now know Brennan was operating out of the CIA with a taskforce investigating Trump based on British "leads," despite multiple legal prohibitions against just such domestic activity by the CIA. ..."
"... That task force included Peter Strzok, the fired FBI agent who said he would do anything to prevent Trump's election. This operation included sending informants to plant fabricated evidence on peripheral figures in the Trump campaign, including George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. ..."
Sep 08, 2018 | larouchepac.com

The media posited that these two events, one by trial, one by plea, gave Robert Mueller new found credibility and "momentum' at a point where both were dissipating extremely rapidly. This claim, like the others we have examined here, has no relation to reality.

Mueller's problem is that his entire investigation has been revealed to be permeated with illegality and dubious Constitutional premises. As the result of investigations by Congress, we know that as of December, 2015 British intelligence agencies were frantically signaling their fears about Donald Trump to Obama Administration intelligence officials, primarily the CIA of John Brennan.

The British were demanding that Trump be taken out by whatever means because he was "soft on Russia." They were demanding that Trump be taken out by criminalizing the idea for which the American people ultimately voted, a rational relationship, rather than war, between the U.S. and Russia.

By the early Spring, we now know Brennan was operating out of the CIA with a taskforce investigating Trump based on British "leads," despite multiple legal prohibitions against just such domestic activity by the CIA.

That task force included Peter Strzok, the fired FBI agent who said he would do anything to prevent Trump's election. This operation included sending informants to plant fabricated evidence on peripheral figures in the Trump campaign, including George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. The fake evidence suggested that Trump was using Russian obtained "dirt" against Hillary Clinton. The evidence planting operations, mostly conducted on British soil, were designed to back up the bogus and otherwise evidence free and indefensible dossier authored by MI-6's Christopher Steele, paid for by the Clinton campaign, and promoted by the Department of State, Department of Justice, the FBI, and select reporters. The dirty British Steele dossier claimed that Trump had been compromised by Putin. Based on this, Trump was targeted in a full-set counterintelligence investigation by the FBI including surveillance of his campaign and anyone associated with it. The goal of this surveillance was to put those who were around Trump under an investigative microscope stretching back years to find any crime or misdeed for which they could be prosecuted. That is the illegal and unconstitutional backdrop to everything Robert Mueller has produced thus far. Nothing produced by Mueller has shown Trump to be a puppet of Putin as claimed by the British, the Clinton campaign, and the national news media. Nonetheless, the entire episode has damaged relations between the U.S. and Russia and between the U.S. and China, which was the British strategic goal in the first instance, continuing the dive into a new and dangerous Cold War. Trump has fought this at every step.

Paul Manafort was hired to handle delegate selection at the Republican National Convention and then as campaign manager. He worked for Trump for six months total until his legal problems became known and he resigned. He was charged by Mueller with tax, foreign agent registration act, and bank fraud offenses for his lobbying activities on behalf of the deposed government of Ukraine. That government was overthrown in coup in which John McCain played a critical role, a coup which empowered outright neo-Nazis. Christopher Steele, British intelligence, and the U.S. State Department also played major roles in the Ukraine regime change operation. Manafort was targeted by both Ukrainian and British intelligence because he, in effect, backed the perceived Russian side in the coup. For this, he was being investigated by the Obama Justice Department well prior to any campaign association with Donald Trump. Mueller simply adjusted the focus of this already political investigation, a focus aimed at turning Manafort into an asset against Trump by means of the terror of potential prison sentences numbering in the hundreds of years as the result of overcharged and duplicative indictments.

Michael Cohen, who worked with Trump as a lawyer, also had his share of prior legal problems, primarily related to taxes concerning his taxi medallion business in New York City. For months, the mainstream media has featured the claims of porn star Stormy Daniels claiming a one night stand with the future President, ten years ago, as if the nation could draw some lesson from Daniels about public virtue. Cohen apparently arranged to pay off Daniels and another woman concerning their allegations about sex with the President. Among other suspicious dealings, Cohen tape recorded conversations with his client, Donald Trump, during the campaign, a complete and total violation of legal ethics which would independently cost him his law license. For many months prior to his plea deal, Cohen has been a target of intense investigative interest based on his tax problems. In recent months, Cohen has repeatedly signaled that he was willing to betray the President and say whatever prosecutors in the Southern District of New York wanted him to say about Donald Trump in order to avoid jail. The problem is that prosecutors thought Cohen an obvious desperate liar and were not buying. Ultimately, the deal which Cohen struck has him claiming that candidate Trump asked him to pay hush money to the women, resulting in Federal Election Campaign Act violations. This is what the Justice Department claimed against John Edwards in a widely ridiculed and failed prosecution. It is exactly the type of claim by which the British and our Establishment impeached Bill Clinton.

Cohen hired long-time Clinton operative Lanny Davis to represent him in recent months and to make a deal. Following his plea, Davis claimed that Cohen had two made-up morsels to offer Mueller, in return for a reduced sentence, a claim that Trump knew about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer, and a claim that Cohen knew about Russian hacking of Hillary Clinton's emails. Davis has since admitted that both these claims were totally false and has had to walk them back publicly.

So, if you are tempted by the media t think that either of these "convictions" are germane to the President's fitness for office, or Robert Mueller's credibility, please, seek medical attention. The madness which now infects much of official Washington may have claimed you.

[Sep 02, 2018] Open letter to President Trump concerning the consequences of 11 September 2001 by Thierry Meyssan

Highly recommended!
Aug 30, 2018 | www.voltairenet.org

Mister President,

The crimes of 11 September 2001 have never been judged in your country. I am writing to you as a French citizen, the first person to denounce the inconsistencies of the official version and to open the world to the debate and the search for the real perpetrators.

In a criminal court, as the jury, we have to determine whether the suspect presented to us is guilty or not, and eventually, to decide what punishment he should receive. When we suffered the events of 9/11, the Bush Junior administration told us that the guilty party was Al-Qaďda, and the punishment they should receive was the overthrow of those who had helped them – the Afghan Taliban, then the Iraqi régime of Saddam Hussein.

However, there is a weight of evidence which attests to the impossibility of this thesis. If we were members of a jury, we would have to declare objectively that the Taliban and the régime of Saddam Hussein were innocent of this crime. Of course, this alone would not enable us to name the real culprits, and we would thus be frustrated. But we could not conceive of condemning parties innocent of such a crime simply because we have not known how, or not been able, to find the guilty parties.

We all understood that certain senior personalities were lying when the Secretary of State for Justice and Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, revealed the names of the 19 presumed hijackers, because we already had in front of us the lists disclosed by the airline companies of all of the passengers embarked - lists on which none of the suspects were mentioned.

From there, we became suspicious of the " Continuity of Government ", the instance tasked with taking over from the elected authorities if they should be killed during a nuclear confrontation. We advanced the hypothesis that these attacks masked a coup d'état, in conformity with Edward Luttwak's method of maintaining the appearance of the Executive, but imposing a different policy.

In the days following 9/11, the Bush administration made several decisions:

- the creation of the Office of Homeland Security and the vote for a voluminous anti-terrorist Code which had been drawn up long beforehand, the USA Patriot Act. For affairs which the administration itself qualifies as " terrorist ", this text suspends the Bill of Rights which was the glory of your country. It unbalances your institutions. Two centuries later, it validates the triumph of the great landowners who wrote the Constitution, and the defeat of the heroes of the War of Independence who demanded that the Bill of Rights must be added.

- The Secretary for Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, created the Office of Force Transformation, under the command of Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, who immediately presented a programme, conceived a long time earlier, planning for the control of access to the natural resources of the countries of the geopolitical South. He demanded the destruction of State and social structures in the half of the world which was not yet globalised. Simultaneously, the Director of the CIA launched the " Worldwide Attack Matrix ", a package of secret operations in 85 countries where Rumsfeld and Cebrowski intended to destroy the State structures. Considering that only those countries whose economies were globalised would remain stable, and that the others would be destroyed, the men from 9/11 placed US armed forces in the service of transnational financial interests. They betrayed your country and transformed it into the armed wing of these predators.

For the last 17 years, we have witnessed what is being given to your compatriots by the government of the successors of those who drew up the Constitution and opposed at that time - without success – the Bill of Rights. These rich men have become the super-rich, while the middle class has been reduced by a fifth and poverty has increased.

We have also seen the implementation of the Rumsfeld-Cebrowski strategy – phoney " civil wars " have devastated almost all of the Greater Middle East. Entire cities have been wiped from the map, from Afghanistan to Libya, via Saudi Arabia and Turkey, who were not themselves at war.

In 2001, only two US citizens denounced the incoherence of the Bush version, two real estate promoters – the Democrat Jimmy Walter, who was forced into exile, and yourself, who entered into politics and was elected President.

In 2011, we saw the commander of AfriCom relieved of his mission and replaced by NATO for having refused to support Al-Qaďda in the liquidation of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Then we saw NATO's LandCom organise Western support for jihadists in general and Al-Qaďda in particular in their attempt to overthrow the Syrian Arab Republic.

So the jihadists, who were considered as " freedom fighters " against the Soviets, then as " terrorists " after 9/11, once again became the allies of the deep state, which, in fact, they have always been.

So, with an immense upsurge of hope, we have watched your actions to suppress, one by one, all support for the jihadists. It is with the same hope that we see today that you are talking with your Russian counterpart in order to bring back life to the devastated Middle East. And it is with equal anxiety that we see Robert Mueller, now a special prosecutor, pursuing the destruction of your homeland by attacking your position.

Mister President, not only are you and your compatriots suffering from the diarchy which has sneaked into power in your country since the coup d'état of 11 September 2001, but the whole world is a victim.

Mister President, 9/11 is not ancient history. It is the triumph of transnational interests which are crushing not only your people, but all of humanity which aspires to freedom.

Thierry Meyssan brought to the world stage the debate on the real perpetrators of 11 September 2001. He has worked as a political analyst alongside Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mouamar Kadhafi. He is today a political refugee in Syria.

Thierry Meyssan

See : Memoranda for the President on 9/11: Time for the Truth -- False Flag Deep State Truth! , by : Kevin Barrett; Scott Bennett; Christopher Bollyn; Fred Burks; Steve De'ak; A. K. Dewdney; Gordon Duff; Aero Engineer; Greg Felton; James Fetzer; Richard Gage; Tom-Scott Gordon; David Ray Griffin; Sander Hicks; T. Mark Hightower; Barbara Honegger; Eric Hufschmid; Ed Jewett; Nicholas Kollerstrom; John Lear; Susan Lindauer; Joe Olson; Peter Dale Scott; Robert David Steele; and indirectly, Victor Thorn and Judy Wood.

Thierry Meyssan Political consultant, President-founder of the Réseau Voltaire ( Voltaire Network ). Latest work in French – Sous nos Yeux. Du 11-Septembre ŕ Donald Trump (Right Before our Eyes. From 9/11 to Donald Trump).

[Sep 02, 2018] In the Shadow of the CIA: Liberalism's Big Embarrassing Moment by PAUL BUHLE

Notable quotes:
"... It turned out that the grand banquets and conferences with literary-and-other luminaries, the New York Times ..."
"... The Partisan Review , Encounter and a considerable stream of literary or quasi-literary journals existed, as it turned out, with the help of intelligence-agency donations. ..."
"... The CIA's precursor body, full of leftwingers, had been ushered out of existence as the intelligence operation shifted from anti-fascist and slightly pro-communist to anti-communist and to the same degree, pro-fascist (or supportive of repressive anti-communist regimes). The guilty had to be finished off, in the ongoing Cold War, and McCarthyism had not finished the job. ..."
"... The 1950s offered plenty of opportunities for intellectuals and artists to curse Russian misdeeds, but a rather large number of opportunities for criticism of US actions as the overthrow of the Guatemalan government and the near-genocidal civilian massacres shortly to follow. Americans were called upon to gird their loins. They were also selectively offered all expense-paid junkets with, four star hotels, five star restaurants, and plenty of associated glamor. Better than that, or at least more lasting, were the contacts useful for lucrative book contracts and warm reviews in the big publications. ..."
"... Some, like Arendt (whose totemic Origins of Totalitarianism ..."
"... The widely-reported style of the Clinton Campaign, reporters kept at a distance with doors and windows shut while HRC addresses her donors, has a suspicious familiarity. So does the very character of the celebrity sheen, the carefully chosen famous important enough to be brought up to the stage, trusted enough not to object to the newest versions of hawkish Cold War liberalism. ..."
Aug 26, 2016 | www.counterpunch.org

The death of Warren Hinckle, a journalist long forgotten outside San Francisco, brings back Ramparts magazine's crowning moment, also one of crucial moments of postwar liberalism. At a stroke, in March, 1967, the presumptions of innocence by purportedly freedom-loving (albeit hawkish) prestigious intellectuals were stripped off.

It turned out that the grand banquets and conferences with literary-and-other luminaries, the New York Times -reported cocktail parties, indeed the whole egghead-celebrity thing, was at base a CIA operation called, without irony, the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

The list of collaborators was a long one, but Mary McCarthy, Irving Kristol, Leslie Fiedler, Dwight Macdonald, Sidney Hook and the Trillings, Diana and Lionel, among the most famous Americans, with European stars including Isaiah Berlin and Arthur Koestler at the top (Hannah Arendt in both categories). The Partisan Review , Encounter and a considerable stream of literary or quasi-literary journals existed, as it turned out, with the help of intelligence-agency donations.

The operation had been established at the down of the 1950s with CIA executive Cord Meyer, and a youngish intellectual very much in the news, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whose original, brainy scheme it may have been. Intellectuals and artists guilty of opposing fascism "too early" and supporting the Soviet Union in the present or past offered another considerable list including some of Hollywood's most talented writers and directors, also a handful of its stars (Lucille Ball might be the best remembered today), also musicians, singers, painters, novelists and most mortifying to some critics, the day's leading playwright, Arthur Miller.

The CIA's precursor body, full of leftwingers, had been ushered out of existence as the intelligence operation shifted from anti-fascist and slightly pro-communist to anti-communist and to the same degree, pro-fascist (or supportive of repressive anti-communist regimes). The guilty had to be finished off, in the ongoing Cold War, and McCarthyism had not finished the job.

The 1950s offered plenty of opportunities for intellectuals and artists to curse Russian misdeeds, but a rather large number of opportunities for criticism of US actions as the overthrow of the Guatemalan government and the near-genocidal civilian massacres shortly to follow. Americans were called upon to gird their loins. They were also selectively offered all expense-paid junkets with, four star hotels, five star restaurants, and plenty of associated glamor. Better than that, or at least more lasting, were the contacts useful for lucrative book contracts and warm reviews in the big publications.

It might have gone on for decades longer, if not for the Vietnam War, which most of leading intellectuals in the operation came to view as an unfortunate but understandable mistake in judgment. A handful, including Dwight Macdonald, actually rejoined the dissenters, and in his case, humiliated a small crowd around him attending a White House dinner by asking for petition signatures against the war. Ramparts ' revelations began with the National Student Association (NSA), a mostly reform-minded student group whose "witty" leaders carried out orders and cashed checks of origins unknown to members. As the scandal spread, CIA officials went public, confessing to deep ties not only to student groups but also to the AFL-CIO, whose leaders had heretofore denied any CIA funding for activities among leading unionists in the UK and across Europe, not to mention the rest of the world.

The ripples of the Ramparts revelations spread outward, with mostly hypocritical denials of knowledge by this or that participant. Some, like Arendt (whose totemic Origins of Totalitarianism had actually been funded by the Agency) made fun of the Congress members' pomposity while enjoying the lavish accommodations in a palace on Lake Como, Italy. An American counterpart to the CCF, the Committee for Cultural Freedom, shut down in embarrassment, although Schlesinger managed a transfer of funds and the franchise of the CCF to the smaller International Association for Cultural Freedom, which finally shut its doors in 1979.

Is all this far in the past, a mere historical footnote? The widely-reported style of the Clinton Campaign, reporters kept at a distance with doors and windows shut while HRC addresses her donors, has a suspicious familiarity. So does the very character of the celebrity sheen, the carefully chosen famous important enough to be brought up to the stage, trusted enough not to object to the newest versions of hawkish Cold War liberalism.

What lies ahead for these intellectuals and celebs is, first of all, White House photo-ops, and very possibly "Freedom" awards of assorted kinds. But there's another future, around the corner, when the next Vietnam (or Guatemala) becomes the source of quiet State Department calls for declarations of loyalty. Another country to be bombed, invaded and occupied in the name of "Freedom," perhaps this time the freedom of women, or a population to be saved from obliteration only by a massive military operation not likely to end in near time.

Secrecy and loyalty to the regime: as important to liberalism as to the Right, and perhaps more important. A world to be conquered, no matter how many victims, in the name of high ideals.

[Sep 02, 2018] How the CIA plotted against us

Notable quotes:
"... New Statesman and Nation ..."
"... In these pre- Encounter ..."
"... Twentieth Century ..."
Sep 02, 2018 | www.newstatesman.com

Have you seen Encounter ?" Mary McCarthy asked Hannah Arendt in October 1953, after reading the debut issue. "It is surely the most vapid thing yet, like a college magazine got out by long-dead and putrefying undergraduates." McCarthy was not alone in denigrating Encounter . Anthony Hartley, also in October 1953, remarked somewhat prophetically that "it would be a pity if Encounter , in its turn, were to become a mere weapon in the cold war". More mischievous was an item in the Sunday Times 's Atticus column, which referred to the magazine as "the police-review of American-occupied countries". And A J P Taylor, writing in the Listener , complained: "There is no article in the [first issue] which will provoke any reader to burn it or even to throw it indignantly into the waste-paper basket. None of the articles is politically subversive . . . All are safe reading for children."

It is a measure of Encounter 's success that it was able to ride these criticisms and establish itself in the "newborn Euro-American mind" as the leading review of its day. People still remember Nancy Mitford's famous article "The English aristocracy", a bitingly witty analysis of British social mores which introduced the distinction between "U and Non-U". Or Isaiah Berlin's four memorable essays on Russian literature, "A marvellous decade". Or Vladimir Nabokov on Pushkin, Irving Howe on Edith Wharton, David Marquand on "The Liberal revival", stories by Jorge Luis Borges, critical essays by Richard Ellmann, Jayaprakash Narayan, W H Auden, Arnold Toynbee, Bertrand Russell, Herbert Read, Hugh Trevor-Roper - some of the best minds of those decades.

The cultural side of Encounter (which political nymphomaniac Melvin Lasky sneeringly referred to as "Elizabeth Bowen and all that crap") thus secured its respectability among the intelligentsia. And yet, when it finally folded in 1991, few were willing to grant it a proper testimonial. It had become gouty, smug, anachronistic. Reeking of the cold war at a time when that conflict was all but exhausted, it had become a "whifflebird", the name one New York intellectual invented for a fabulous creature that "flies backward in ever decreasing circles until it flies up its own asshole and becomes extinct".

Encounter 's demise can be traced directly to its origins as part of the "high-minded low cunning" of those British and American intelligence agents responsible for running the cultural cold war. Meeting in Whitehall in early 1951, the top echelons of the CIA and MI6 discussed the idea of an "Anglo-American left-of-centre publication" aimed at penetrating the fog of neutralism which dimmed the judgement of so many British intellectuals, not least those close to the New Statesman . What they needed was a voice that could oppose the "soft-headedness" and "terrible simplifications" of Kingsley Martin's magazine, and its "spirit of conciliation and moral lassitude vis-a-vis Communism".

The Foreign Office's secret subventions to Tribune had been a gesture in this direction. In April 1950 Malcolm Muggeridge, after meeting its editor Tosco Fyvel, reported that Tribune was "obviously badly on the rocks, and I said that in the interests of the cold war [it] should be kept going as a counterblast to the New Statesman . Developed one of my favourite propositions - that the New Statesman 's great success as propagandist had been to establish the proposition that to be intelligent is to be Left, whereas almost the exact opposite is true."

The New Statesman and Nation was flourishing, its weekly circulation of 85,000 showing an impressive resilience to attempts to sap its "ideological hegemony". In these pre- Encounter days the CIA was dishing out secret subsidies to Michael Goodwin's journal Twentieth Century , on the specific understanding that it should address itself to rebutting the New Statesman 's positions. "I fully agree the New Statesman is an important target, and must be dealt with systematically," Goodwin told his backers in January 1952.

[Sep 02, 2018] The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited by James Petras

Notable quotes:
"... Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War ..."
"... Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter ..."
"... Encounter, New Leader, Partisan Review ..."
"... Partisan Review ..."
Nov 01, 1999

Topics: Imperialism

James Petras is the author of thirty-six books and several hundred refereed articles. His most recent book is The Left Strikes Back (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).

Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books), £20.

This book provides a detailed account of the ways in which the CIA penetrated and influenced a vast array of cultural organizations, through its front groups and via friendly philanthropic organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The author, Frances Stonor Saunders, details how and why the CIA ran cultural congresses, mounted exhibits, and organized concerts. The CIA also published and translated well-known authors who toed the Washington line, sponsored abstract art to counteract art with any social content and, throughout the world, subsidized journals that criticized Marxism, communism, and revolutionary politics and apologized for, or ignored, violent and destructive imperialist U.S. policies. The CIA was able to harness some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West in service of these policies, to the extent that some intellectuals were directly on the CIA payroll. Many were knowingly involved with CIA "projects," and others drifted in and out of its orbit, claiming ignorance of the CIA connection after their CIA sponsors were publicly exposed during the late 1960s and the Vietnam war, after the turn of the political tide to the left.

U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the "Democratic Left" and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.

The CIA, under the prodding of Sidney Hook and Melvin Lasky, was instrumental in funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a kind of cultural NATO that grouped together all sorts of "anti-Stalinist" leftists and rightists. They were completely free to defend Western cultural and political values, attack "Stalinist totalitarianism" and to tiptoe gently around U.S. racism and imperialism. Occasionally, a piece marginally critical of U.S. mass society was printed in the CIA-subsidized journals.

What was particularly bizarre about this collection of CIA-funded intellectuals was not only their political partisanship, but their pretense that they were disinterested seekers of truth, iconoclastic humanists, freespirited intellectuals, or artists for art's sake, who counterposed themselves to the corrupted "committed" house "hacks" of the Stalinist apparatus.

It is impossible to believe their claims of ignorance of CIA ties. How could they ignore the absence in the journals of any basic criticism of the numerous lynchings throughout the southern United States during the whole period? How could they ignore the absence, during their cultural congresses, of criticism of U.S. imperialist intervention in Guatemala, Iran, Greece, and Korea that led to millions of deaths? How could they ignore the gross apologies of every imperialist crime of their day in the journals in which they wrote? They were all soldiers: some glib, vitriolic, crude, and polemical, like Hook and Lasky; others elegant essayists like Stephen Spender or self-righteous informers like George Orwell. Saunders portrays the WASP Ivy League elite at the CIA holding the strings, and the vitriolic Jewish ex-leftists snarling at leftist dissidents. When the truth came out in the late 1960s and New York, Paris, and London "intellectuals" feigned indignation at having been used, the CIA retaliated. Tom Braden, who directed the International Organizations Branch of the CIA, blew their cover by detailing how they all had to have known who paid their salaries and stipends (397-404).

According to Braden, the CIA financed their "literary froth," as CIA hardliner Cord Meyer called the anti-Stalinist intellectual exercises of Hook, Kristol, and Lasky. Regarding the most prestigious and best-known publications of the self-styled "Democratic Left" ( Encounter, New Leader, Partisan Review ), Braden wrote that the money for them came from the CIA and that "an agent became the editor of Encounter " (398). By 1953, Braden wrote, "we were operating or influencing international organizations in every field" (398).

Saunders' book provides useful information about several important questions regarding the ways in which CIA intellectual operatives defended U.S. imperialist interests on cultural fronts. It also initiates an important discussion of the long-term consequences of the ideological and artistic positions defended by CIA intellectuals.

Saunders refutes the claims (made by Hook, Kristol, and Lasky) that the CIA and its friendly foundations provided aid with no strings attached. She demonstrates that "the individuals and institutions subsidized by the CIA were expected to perform as part of a propaganda war." The most effective propaganda was defined by the CIA as the kind where "the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own." While the CIA allowed their assets on the "Democratic Left" to prattle occasionally about social reform, it was the "anti-Stalinist" polemics and literary diatribes against Western Marxists and Soviet writers and artists that they were most interested in, funded most generously, and promoted with the greatest visibility. Braden referred to this as the "convergence" between the CIA and the European "Democratic Left" in the fight against communism. The collaboration between the "Democratic Left" and the CIA included strike-breaking in France, informing on Stalinists (Orwell and Hook), and covert smear campaigns to prevent leftist artists from receiving recognition (including Pablo Neruda's bid for a Nobel Prize in 1964 [351]).

The CIA, as the arm of the U.S. government most concerned with fighting the cultural Cold War, focused on Europe in the period immediately following the Second World War. Having experienced almost two decades of capitalist war, depression, and postwar occupation, the overwhelming majority of European intellectuals and trade unionists were anticapitalist and particularly critical of the hegemonic pretensions of the United States. To counter the appeal of communism and the growth of the European Communist Parties (particularly in France and Italy), the CIA devised a two-tier program. On the one hand, as Saunders argues, certain European authors were promoted as part of an explicitly "anticommunist program." The CIA cultural commissar's criteria for "suitable texts" included "whatever critiques of Soviet foreign policy and Communism as a form of government we find to be objective (sic) and convincingly written and timely." The CIA was especially keen on publishing disillusioned ex-communists like Silone, Koestler, and Gide. The CIA promoted anticommunist writers by funding lavish conferences in Paris, Berlin, and Bellagio (overlooking Lake Como), where objective social scientists and philosophers like Isaiah Berlin, Daniel Bell, and Czeslow Milosz preached their values (and the virtues of Western freedom and intellectual independence, within the anticommunist and pro-Washington parameters defined by their CIA paymasters). None of these prestigious intellectuals dared to raise any doubts or questions regarding U.S. support of the mass killing in colonial Indochina and Algeria, the witch hunt of U.S. intellectuals or the paramilitary (Ku Klux Klan) lynchings in the southern United States. Such banal concerns would only "play into the hands of the Communists," according to Sidney Hook, Melvin Lasky, and the Partisan Review crowd, who eagerly sought funds for their quasi-bankrupt literary operation. Many of the so-called prestigious anticommunist literary and political journals would long have gone out of business were it not for CIA subsidies, which bought thousands of copies that it later distributed free.

The second cultural track on which the CIA operated was much more subtle. Here, it promoted symphonies, art exhibits, ballet, theater groups, and well-known jazz and opera performers with the explicit aim of neutralizing anti-imperialist sentiment in Europe and creating an appreciation of U.S. culture and government. The idea behind this policy was to showcase U.S. culture, in order to gain cultural hegemony to support its military-economic empire. The CIA was especially keen on sending black artists to Europe -- particularly singers (like Marion Anderson), writers, and musicians (such as Louis Armstrong) -- to neutralize European hostility toward Washington's racist domestic policies. If black intellectuals didn't stick to the U.S. artistic script and wandered into explicit criticism, they were banished from the list, as was the case with writer Richard Wright.

The degree of CIA political control over the intellectual agenda of these seemingly nonpolitical artistic activities was clearly demonstrated by the reaction of the editors of Encounter (Lasky and Kristol, among others) with regard to an article submitted by Dwight MacDonald. MacDonald, a maverick anarchist intellectual, was a long-time collaborator with the CIA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter . In 1958, he wrote an article for Encounter entitled "America America," in which he expressed his revulsion for U.S. mass culture, its crude materialism, and lack of civility. It was a rebuttal of the American values that were prime propaganda material in the CIA's and Encounter 's cultural war against communism. MacDonald's attack of the "decadent American imperium" was too much for the CIA and its intellectual operatives in Encounter . As Braden, in his guidelines to the intellectuals, stated "organizations receiving CIA funds should not be required to support every aspect of U.S. policy," but invariably there was a cut-off point -- particularly where U.S. foreign policy was concerned (314). Despite the fact that MacDonald was a former editor of Encounter , the article was rejected. The pious claims of Cold War writers like Nicola Chiaromonte, writing in the second issue of Encounter, that "[t]he duty that no intellectual can shirk without degrading himself is the duty to expose fictions and to refuse to call 'useful lies,' truths," certainly did not apply to Encounter and its distinguished list of contributors when it came to dealing with the 'useful lies' of the West.

One of the most important and fascinating discussions in Saunders' book is about the fact that CIA and its allies in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) poured vast sums of money into promoting Abstract Expressionist (AE) painting and painters as an antidote to art with a social content. In promoting AE, the CIA fought off the right-wing in Congress. What the CIA saw in AE was an "anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent it was the very antithesis of socialist realism" (254). They viewed AE as the true expression of the national will. To bypass right-wing criticism, the CIA turned to the private sector (namely MOMA and its co-founder, Nelson Rockefeller, who referred to AE as "free enterprise painting.") Many directors at MOMA had longstanding links to the CIA and were more than willing to lend a hand in promoting AE as a weapon in the cultural Cold War. Heavily funded exhibits of AE were organized all over Europe; art critics were mobilized, and art magazines churned out articles full of lavish praise. The combined economic resources of MOMA and the CIA-run Fairfield Foundation ensured the collaboration of Europe's most prestigious galleries which, in turn, were able to influence aesthetics across Europe.

AE as "free art" ideology (George Kennan, 272) was used to attack politically committed artists in Europe. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (the CIA front) threw its weight behind abstract painting, over representational or realist aesthetics, in an explicit political act. Commenting on the political role of AE, Saunders points out: "One of the extraordinary features of the role that American painting played in the cultural Cold War is not the fact that it became part of the enterprise, but that a movement which so deliberately declared itself to be apolitical could become so intensely politicized" (275). The CIA associated apolitical artists and art with freedom. This was directed toward neutralizing the artists on the European left. The irony, of course, was that the apolitical posturing was only for left-wing consumption.

Nevertheless, the CIA and its cultural organizations were able to profoundly shape the postwar view of art. Many prestigious writers, poets, artists, and musicians proclaimed their independence from politics and declared their belief in art for art's sake. The dogma of the free artist or intellectual, as someone disconnected from political engagement, gained ascendancy and is pervasive to this day.

While Saunders has presented a superbly detailed account of the links between the CIA and Western artists and intellectuals, she leaves unexplored the structural reasons for the necessity of CIA deception and control over dissent. Her discussion is framed largely in the context of political competition and conflict with Soviet communism. There is no serious attempt to locate the CIA's cultural Cold War in the context of class warfare, indigenous third world revolutions, and independent Marxist challenges to U.S. imperialist economic domination. This leads Saunders to selectively praise some CIA ventures at the expense of others, some operatives over others. Rather than see the CIA's cultural war as part of an imperialist system, Saunders tends to be critical of its deceptive and distinct reactive nature. The U.S.-NATO cultural conquest of Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR should quickly dispel any notion that the cultural war was a defensive action.

The very origins of the cultural Cold War were rooted in class warfare. Early on, the CIA and its U.S. AFL-CIO operatives Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone (ex-communists) poured millions of dollars into subverting militant trade unions and breaking strikes through the funding of social democratic unions (94). The Congress for Cultural Freedom and its enlightened intellectuals were funded by the same CIA operatives who hired Marseilles gangsters to break the dockworkers' strikes in 1948.

After the Second World War, with the discrediting in Western Europe of the old right (compromised by its links to the fascists and a weak capitalist system), the CIA realized that, in order to undermine the anti-NATO trade unionists and intellectuals, it needed to find (or invent) a Democratic Left to engage in ideological warfare. A special sector of the CIA was set up to circumvent right-wing Congressional objections. The Democratic Left was essentially used to combat the radical left and to provide an ideological gloss on U.S. hegemony in Europe. At no point were the ideological pugilists of the democratic left in any position to shape the strategic policies and interests of the United States. Their job was not to question or demand, but to serve the empire in the name of "Western democratic values." Only when massive opposition to the Vietnam War surfaced in the United States and Europe, and their CIA covers were blown, did many of the CIA-promoted and -financed intellectuals jump ship and begin to criticize U.S. foreign policy. For example, after spending most of his career on the CIA payroll, Stephen Spender became a critic of U.S. Vietnam policy, as did some of the editors of Partisan Review. They all claimed innocence, but few critics believed that a love affair with so many journals and convention junkets, so long and deeply involved, could transpire without some degree of knowledge.

The CIA's involvement in the cultural life of the United States, Europe, and elsewhere had important long-term consequences. Many intellectuals were rewarded with prestige, public recognition, and research funds precisely for operating within the ideological blinders set by the Agency. Some of the biggest names in philosophy, political ethics, sociology, and art, who gained visibility from CIA-funded conferences and journals, went on to establish the norms and standards for promotion of the new generation, based on the political parameters established by the CIA. Not merit nor skill, but politics -- the Washington line -- defined "truth" and "excellence" and future chairs in prestigious academic settings, foundations, and museums.

The U.S. and European Democratic Left's anti-Stalinist rhetorical ejaculations, and their proclamations of faith in democratic values and freedom, were a useful ideological cover for the heinous crimes of the West. Once again, in NATO's recent war against Yugoslavia, many Democratic Left intellectuals have lined up with the West and the KLA in its bloody purge of tens of thousands of Serbs and the murder of scores of innocent civilians. If anti-Stalinism was the opium of the Democratic Left during the Cold War, human rights interventionism has the same narcotizing effect today, and deludes contemporary Democratic Leftists.

The CIA's cultural campaigns created the prototype for today's seemingly apolitical intellectuals, academics, and artists who are divorced from popular struggles and whose worth rises with their distance from the working classes and their proximity to prestigious foundations. The CIA role model of the successful professional is the ideological gatekeeper, excluding critical intellectuals who write about class struggle, class exploitation and U.S. imperialism -- "ideological" not "objective" categories, or so they are told.

The singular lasting, damaging influence of the CIA's Congress of Cultural Freedom crowd was not their specific defenses of U.S. imperialist policies, but their success in imposing on subsequent generations of intellectuals the idea of excluding any sustained discussion of U.S. imperialism from the influential cultural and political media. The issue is not that today's intellectuals or artists may or may not take a progressive position on this or that issue. The problem is the pervasive belief among writers and artists that anti-imperialist social and political expressions should not appear in their music, paintings, and serious writing if they want their work to be considered of substantial artistic merit. The enduring political victory of the CIA was to convince intellectuals that serious and sustained political engagement on the left is incompatible with serious art and scholarship. Today at the opera, theater, and art galleries, as well as in the professional meetings of academics, the Cold War values of the CIA are visible and pervasive: who dares to undress the emperor?

[Aug 31, 2018] Sources Go Quiet in Moscow

Notable quotes:
"... A quite astonishing article recently appeared in the New York Times, astonishing even by the standards of that newspaper, which featured Judith Miller and Michael Gordon in the Pentagon-sponsored lie machine that led up to the catastrophic war against Iraq. ..."
"... The article , entitled "Kremlin Sources Go Quiet, Leaving CIA in the Dark about Putin's Plans for Midterms," claims that the United States has had a number of spies close to the Russian president "who have provided crucial details" that have now stopped reporting at a critical time with midterm elections coming up. The reporting is sourced to " American officials familiar with the intelligence" who " spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal classified information." ..."
"... Having Brennan as a source is an indication that the two journalists were desperate and were willing to cite anyone. ..."
"... And then there are the narratives that the journalists accept to make their whole story credible. As the title of the article suggests, they believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin has a "plan" for America's midterm elections. To support that conjecture they cite recent assertions from both corporate and government leaders that there has been meddling in cyber systems and on social media over the past few months, though it is interesting to note that no evidence has been provided to link such activity to Russia. ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... And finally, then there is an odd whine from a former CIA Russia expert John Sipher blaming the intelligence failure on the likelihood that the Agency Station in Moscow is tiny and ineffective because "The Russians kicked out a whole bunch of our people" in their expulsion of sixty American diplomats/spies in March. Sipher is inter alia confirming to Moscow that many of those expelled were, in fact, CIA. ..."
"... persona non grata ..."
"... Featured image is from the author. ..."
Aug 31, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

by Philip M. Giraldi

A quite astonishing article recently appeared in the New York Times, astonishing even by the standards of that newspaper, which featured Judith Miller and Michael Gordon in the Pentagon-sponsored lie machine that led up to the catastrophic war against Iraq.

The article , entitled "Kremlin Sources Go Quiet, Leaving CIA in the Dark about Putin's Plans for Midterms," claims that the United States has had a number of spies close to the Russian president "who have provided crucial details" that have now stopped reporting at a critical time with midterm elections coming up. The reporting is sourced to " American officials familiar with the intelligence" who " spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal classified information."

After reading the piece, my first reaction was that Judith Miller was back but the byline clearly read Julian E. Barnes and Matthew Rosenberg . Noms de plume , perhaps? The article is so astonishingly bad on so many levels that it could have been featured in Marvel Comics instead of the Gray Lady. First of all, if American intelligence truly has in the Kremlin high level human agents, referred to as humint, it would not be publicizing the fact for fear that Moscow would intensify its search for the traitors and discover who they were. No intelligence officer speaking either openly or anonymously would make that kind of fatal mistake by leaking such information to a journalist.

The Establishment Strikes Back

If indeed the source of the leak was a genuine intelligence officer it suggests a different, more plausible interpretation. The CIA might, in fact, have no high-level agents at all at the Kremlin level and is intent on having the Russians waste time and energy looking for the moles. There is additional evidence in the article that the agent story might be a fabrication. The authors assert that the CIA agents in Moscow provided critical information relating to the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. The nature of that information, if it existed at all, is something less than transparent and the piece cites no less an authority on Moscow's subversion than ex-Agency Director John Brennan, who connived at electing Hillary when he was at CIA and has had an axe to grind ever since. Having Brennan as a source is an indication that the two journalists were desperate and were willing to cite anyone.

And then there are the narratives that the journalists accept to make their whole story credible. As the title of the article suggests, they believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin has a "plan" for America's midterm elections. To support that conjecture they cite recent assertions from both corporate and government leaders that there has been meddling in cyber systems and on social media over the past few months, though it is interesting to note that no evidence has been provided to link such activity to Russia.

So, does Putin have a plan? The New York Times apparently believes he does. And what would that plan involve? The Times thinks it is no less than "a broad chaos campaign to undermine faith in American democracy." It also cites Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats as affirming that Putin is "intent on undermining American democratic systems." Think about that for a moment. Why would Russia want to damage an already oftentimes dysfunctional system of government? To replace it with what? A dictatorship might be more effective and even warlike, contrary to Russia's own interests. Why mess with something that is already messy all by itself?

The article also hurls out other lies and half-truths. It assumes that Russia was trying to change the outcome of the 2016 US election, for which there is no evidence at all, and it also claims that Putin is killing off spies, citing the Skripal case in Britain, for which proof of an actual Russian connection has never been presented.

And finally, then there is an odd whine from a former CIA Russia expert John Sipher blaming the intelligence failure on the likelihood that the Agency Station in Moscow is tiny and ineffective because "The Russians kicked out a whole bunch of our people" in their expulsion of sixty American diplomats/spies in March. Sipher is inter alia confirming to Moscow that many of those expelled were, in fact, CIA.

He also needs to recall that the persona non grata (PNG) move was in response to the US expelling sixty Russians and closing two diplomatic facilities over Skripal, which means the United States deliberately took self-inflicted steps that it should have known would cripple its ability to spy in Moscow. And now it is complaining because it doesn't know what is going on.

*

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author.

The original source of this article is Strategic Culture Foundation Copyright © Philip Giraldi , Strategic Culture Foundation , 2018

[Aug 30, 2018] >Once the spy agencies become the controlling element a government degenerates into a regime or imperium depending upon its level of power.

Aug 30, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

exiled off mainstreet , August 29, 2018 at 01:37

Once the spy agencies become the controlling element a government degenerates into a regime or imperium depending upon its level of power.

The rule of law is sidelined and a cynical form of dictatorship develops.

Britain, the US and all anglophone countries are exhibiting the results of this sort of evolution.

It is more dangerous now than when the historical odious tyrannies ran riot during the '30s and '40s of last century because technology has advanced to the point that their continuance is a threat to our survival as a species.

[Aug 30, 2018] Skripals, BBC and Ukranians by craig

Notable quotes:
"... "A Ukrainian political consultant has revealed to Sputnik that former MI6 agent Christopher Steele sought and paid for researchers in Ukraine to concoct fake stories about Donald Trump prior his election as US president to use in the now-infamous dossier that supposedly contained damning evidence of Russia-Trump collusion. ..."
"... Radio Sputnik's Lee Stranahan spoke previously with Ukrainian political consultant and former diplomat Andrii Telizhenko about his connections to a Democratic National Committee (DNC) operative named Alexandra Chalupa who also worked for clients in Ukrainian politics. Chalupa told Politico in January 2017 that beginning in 2015, she pulled on a network of sources she'd established in Kiev and Washington to try and turn up dirt on Trump ..."
"... The BBC is a propaganda organisation. It has even admitted it. http://viewsandstories.blogspot.com/2018/04/bbc-asserts-it-is-propaganda.html ..."
"... The door handle application is a crock. If, as is claimed the alleged Novichok was pure then who made it should be known because of its purity. ..."
"... Browder just wants us to go to war with Russia so he can keep his stolen money, that's not too much to ask! ..."
Aug 27, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

On 8 July 2018 a lady named Kirsty Eccles asked what, in its enormous ramifications, historians may one day see as the most important Freedom of Information request ever made. The rest of this post requires extremely close and careful reading, and some thought, for you to understand that claim.

Dear British Broadcasting Corporation,

1: Why did BBC Newsnight correspondent Mark Urban keep secret from the licence payers that he had been having meetings with Sergei Skripal only last summer.

2: When did the BBC know this?

3: Please provide me with copies of all correspondence between yourselves and Mark Urban on the subject of Sergei Skripal.

Yours faithfully,

Kirsty Eccles

The ramifications of this little request are enormous as they cut right to the heart of the ramping up of the new Cold War, of the BBC's propaganda collusion with the security services to that end, and of the concoction of fraudulent evidence in the Steele "dirty dossier". This also of course casts a strong light on more plausible motives for an attack on the Skripals.

Which is why the BBC point blank refused to answer Kirsty's request, stating that it was subject to the Freedom of Information exemption for "Journalism".

10th July 2018

Dear Ms Eccles

Freedom of Information request – RFI20181319

Thank you for your request to the BBC of 8th July 2018, seeking the following information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000:

1: Why did BBC Newsnight correspondent Mark Urban keep secret from the licence payers that he had been having meetings with Sergei Skripal only last summer.

2: When did the BBC know this?

3: Please provide me with copies of all correspondence between yourselves and Mark Urban on the subject of Sergei Skripal.

The information you have requested is excluded from the Act because it is held for the purposes of 'journalism, art or literature.' The BBC is therefore not obliged to provide this information to you. Part VI of Schedule 1 to FOIA provides that information held by the BBC and the other public service broadcasters is only covered by the Act if it is held for 'purposes other than those of journalism, art or literature".

The BBC is not required to supply information held for the purposes of creating the BBC's output or information that supports and is closely associated with these creative activities.

The BBC is of course being entirely tendentious here – "journalism" does not include the deliberate suppression of vital information from the public, particularly in order to facilitate the propagation of fake news on behalf of the security services. That black propaganda is precisely what the BBC is knowingly engaged in, and here trying hard to hide.

I have today attempted to contact Mark Urban at Newsnight by phone, with no success, and sent him this email:

To: [email protected]

Dear Mark,

As you may know, I am a journalist working in alternative media, a member of the NUJ, as well as a former British Ambassador. I am researching the Skripal case.

I wish to ask you the following questions.

1) When the Skripals were first poisoned, it was the largest news story in the entire World and you were uniquely positioned having held several meetings with Sergei Skripal the previous year. Yet faced with what should have been a massive career break, you withheld that unique information on a major story from the public for four months. Why?
2) You were an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment together with Skripal's MI6 handler, Pablo Miller, who also lived in Salisbury. Have you maintained friendship with Miller over the years and how often do you communicate?
3) When you met Skripal in Salisbury, was Miller present all or part of the time, or did you meet Miller separately?
4) Was the BBC aware of your meetings with Miller and/or Skripal at the time?
5) When, four months later, you told the world about your meetings with Skripal after the Rowley/Sturgess incident, you said you had met him to research a book. Yet the only forthcoming book by you advertised is on the Skripal attack. What was the subject of your discussions with Skripal?
6) Pablo Miller worked for Orbis Intelligence. Do you know if Miller contributed to the Christopher Steele dossier on Trump/Russia?
7) Did you discuss the Trump dossier with Skripal and/or Miller?
8) Do you know whether Skripal contributed to the Trump dossier?
9) In your Newsnight piece following the Rowley/Sturgess incident, you stated that security service sources had told you that Yulia Skripal's telephone may have been bugged. Since January 2017, how many security service briefings or discussions have you had on any of the matter above.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Craig Murray

I should very much welcome others also sending emails to Mark Urban to emphasise the public demand for an answer from the BBC to these vital questions. If you have time, write your own email, or if not copy and paste from mine.

To quote that great Scot John Paul Jones, "We have not yet begun to fight".


A Traub , August 29, 2018 at 08:21

Not going in to the details of the Skripals etc but what this goes to show is the limitations of the FOI Act. The FOI Act was brought in by the Blair Govt but of course was very much weakened in its final version. Even this was very much regretted by Blair in his autobiography who said what an 'idiot' he had been to bring it in. Tony, you need have no fear – powerful institutions like the BBC can block any meaningful probing because of the limitations of the law.

Reply ↓
Jo , August 29, 2018 at 10:53

Spotted this yesterday .5103
"A Ukrainian political consultant has revealed to Sputnik that former MI6 agent Christopher Steele sought and paid for researchers in Ukraine to concoct fake stories about Donald Trump prior his election as US president to use in the now-infamous dossier that supposedly contained damning evidence of Russia-Trump collusion.

Radio Sputnik's Lee Stranahan spoke previously with Ukrainian political consultant and former diplomat Andrii Telizhenko about his connections to a Democratic National Committee (DNC) operative named Alexandra Chalupa who also worked for clients in Ukrainian politics. Chalupa told Politico in January 2017 that beginning in 2015, she pulled on a network of sources she'd established in Kiev and Washington to try and turn up dirt on Trump , once his star began to rise in the Republican primary campaign." Etc etc

Steve Hayes , August 29, 2018 at 11:32

The BBC is a propaganda organisation. It has even admitted it. http://viewsandstories.blogspot.com/2018/04/bbc-asserts-it-is-propaganda.html

Mick Robson , August 29, 2018 at 17:11

I can't add any cogency to the (so-far) fruitless quest for information from the BBC, but last weeks R4 programme (still available on iPlayer) The Reunion, in which the Skripal, and more recent 'nerve agent' attacks, were discussed and, I thought, neatly tied in with the 'Murder of Georgi Markov in the 1950s, apparently by Bulgarian secret agents, perhaps deserves examination by listeners and researchers more interested in BBC propaganda.

A panel of 'experts', diplomats, security people, some of whom you may very well knowand who laid claim to being 'there or thereabouts', concluded that The Skripal's incident bore all the markings of 'state sponsored' action, though, of course, they would never know until "the Russian archives are opened".

It all sounded thoroughly convincing (radio does when you're driving on a long-haul, I find) but it did occur to me that the programme, though ostensibly about the 'murder of Markov' was intended to draw the listener to inevitable conclusions about the perpetrators of Salisbury and Amesbury 'poisonings'.

The BBC is very good at obfuscation and I felt this was a good example. Sorry I cannot be more 'relevant' to your blog of 27/08/18. Good luck, and please. as they say, keep up the good work.

PleaseBeleafMe , August 29, 2018 at 17:47

http://www.theblogmire.com/the-10-main-holes-in-the-official-narrative-on-the-salisbury-poisonings-1-the-motive/

Interesting link with alot of great info in the commemts on this story.

Garth Carthy , August 28, 2018 at 15:04

I remember the excellent 'Media Lens' team have complained about Mark Urban in the past with his blatant Western bias. For example, like the other overpaid political analysts and presenters on the BBC, he doesn't question the stated but transparently dishonest premise of the West – that they are intervening in other nations on a humanitarian basis. Like the other wastes of space in the mainstream media, he is also quick to mention civilian deaths by the Russians but not so quick to mention those killed by the West.

As I recall, Urban completely failed to reply to or to address the concerns of Media Lens in a reasonable way.

Charles Bostock , August 28, 2018 at 15:34

Garth

"I remember the excellent 'Media Lens' team have complained about Mark Urban in the past with his blatant Western bias."

Mark Urban is from a Western country and the broadcaster he works for is in a Western country. Why are you so surprised that both he and the organisation he works for have a "Western bias"? Is that so abnormal? Would you expect him to have a pro-Chinese or a pro-Russian or, for that matter, a pro-Brazilian bias and would you be happy if he had? Would you expect a journalist who works for RT to have an anti-Russian, pro-Western bias?

Sharp Ears , August 28, 2018 at 13:55

Ramifications.
'Recently Aeroflot has been affected by US sanctions and its flights to America face possible suspension by Washington, as the US government seeks to punish the Kremlin for its alleged involvement in the poisoning of former double agent and Russian national Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in March.'
https://www.rt.com/trends/aeroflot-russia-airlines-international/

Russian skies could become too expensive for US airlines if Washington targets Aeroflot
American carriers would face huge financial losses if Russia increases tariffs for the use of its airspace in response to possible US sanctions targeting the country's largest airline Aeroflot, an expert has told RT.
https://www.rt.com/business/435599-russia-aeroflot-us-sanctions/

SA , August 28, 2018 at 09:24

So are the pieces starting to fall into place?

One can join the dots and it all points to one direction. Other conspiracy theories pale into insignificance.

uncle tungsten , August 28, 2018 at 09:53

Great SA but I must add this link: Stefan Halper
https://saraacarter.com/whistleblower-exposes-key-player-in-fbi-russia-probe-it-was-all-a-set-up/

Klutzes all! and now the entire story is unravelling thanks to that idiot Alexander Downer and his mate Halper. I guess their little maltese buddy Joe Mifsud is deeply underground for a decade or two.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 11:22

I hadn't really followed the implications until' your list. So there will be a chemical attack and the OPCW will assign blame to Syria (but also possibly Syria/Russia).

The US have been making it clear that they would hold Russia accountable for any "further" chemical weapons attacks carried out by Syria. This could used then to remove Russia form the UN Security Council. Even for the UN to no longer recognise the Russian Government as legitimate and instead recognise an alternative Russian Government (under Mikhail Khardovsky). Will China fall in line?

This looks awfully close to the start of a full scale war.

giyane , August 28, 2018 at 13:24

The UN has been turning a blind eye to neo-con murder since 9/11. They are a busted flush. There is no residual value or purpose for the UN in an age that backs Saudi Arabi to train terrorists in Myanmar.

As to Senator John McCain the world will be a safer place when this terrorist is finally removed. The UN is wholly owned by the US. The US neo-cons have sucked every particle of respectability out of it.

" Those who antagonise the believing Muslim men and women and do not repent will be consigned to the Fire, to dwell forever therein. " Qur'an. I am immensely proud of Donald trump for refusing to honour him.

George K , August 28, 2018 at 13:36

Frightening, and probably part of the plan. I have been reading for the last 2 days a series of warnings by the Russians that a chemical "attack" is imminent. Not many translations of this in the MSM. One would think that they wouldn't dare after such warnings, but I am not optimistic. After all, how many people have read the warnings?

Borncynical , August 28, 2018 at 18:08

George K

I've seen posts on Twitter about this warning by the Russians and you know what the counter-argument is that they are putting forward? They contend that it's a double bluff by the Syrians/Russians. Well, if you're intending to use chemical weapons why wouldn't you make out that the other side are planning it as a false flag? Trouble is, Western governments will be more than happy to go along with that in the public eye – let's face it, they know the real truth of the situation. I note however that the Russian warning mentions the active role in the planned false flag played by British security firm Olive. I haven't seen any denial from them so that would suggest to a neutral observer that the Russian allegations do have some foundation and hopefully will be enough to 'put the wind up' those planning the event.

Borncynical , August 28, 2018 at 22:56

Further to my post at 18.08 I see a short and sweet statement on the Sputnik website that "Olive Group has no involvement" Suzanne Piner, the company's marketing director said. So there we have it, who are we to disbelieve them??

SA , August 29, 2018 at 03:29

Borncynical
I personally never believe rumours unless they are officially denied.

John Bull , August 28, 2018 at 09:39

A great blog, Craig, and lots of good comments. I have two contributions.

1. A recent Spectator blog talked of a 'Stockade of D-notices'. Surely that means more than the two we know about. So I guess that anyone working in the MSM must have to tread carefully.

2. We are swimming in a sea of fake news, disinformation, misinformation, deliberate lies and speculation. I have found only one rock worth clinging onto and it's this. The Porton Down analyst (CC) who gave evidence to the high court which heard the blood sample application said the analysis of the Skripals blood indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound (para 17 of the judge's report). It is reasonable to assume they used the term 'nerve agent' correctly, i.e. belonging to the group of organo-phosphorus compounds (from the OPCW website). On the assumption CC told the truth, there are only three possibilities:-

a. The Skripals were exposed to a nerve agent, or
b. They were exposed to a related compound that was not a nerve agent, or
c. The analysis was unable to say whether it was a nerve agent or a related compound.

If it was 'a', why did CC muddy the waters by saying 'or a related compound? Very unlikely, bearing in mind the sensitivety of the issue.

If it was 'c', is it credible that Porton Down, world leaders in chemical weaponry, were not able to tell if a substance was a nerve agent or not? I think not.

Which leaves 'b'. That the Skripals were not poisoned by a nerve agent.

I think we should all write to our MPs pointing this out and request a Parliamentary Question be put to the Secretary of State for Defence (who oversees PD) asking for full details of those blood tests and for Theresa to be briefed accordingly. She would then be required under the Ministerial Code to correct her misleading statements to the House which claimed the Skripals were poisoned by a nerve agent.

Robert , August 28, 2018 at 10:10

John Bull at 09:39

" why did CC muddy the waters by saying 'or a related compound? "

Maybe because they couldn't be sure from their measurements whether the truth was a. or b.?
The CC statement seems to rule out only c.

John Bull , August 28, 2018 at 12:06

Hi Robert – if CC knew for sure they Skripals were exposed to a nerve agent, CC would not have added 'or a related compound' as it only serves to confuse. CC might have said it because he/she couldn't tell from the findings – most unlikely – so the only reason he/she said the words 'or a related compound' was to avoid lying under oath to the high court.

In my view.

Terence Wallis , August 28, 2018 at 14:59

It all comes down to contaminated crack or whatever they used, especially the Amesbury folk. They're well known imbibers a friend living there has told me. I pass this on merely as a possible explanation from 'people who know'.

Paul Greenwood , August 28, 2018 at 11:48

Yes and whose lab tested the blood ? Maybe Porton Down offered their services ?

John Bull , August 28, 2018 at 12:11

Hi Paul – yes. At the court hearing, CC was referring to the initial blood analyses carried out by Porton Down a day or so after the poisoning. But clearly the doubt sown by the words 'or a related compound' remained at least until 20th March when CC gave that evidence.

Sandra , August 28, 2018 at 13:29

I remember reading that Court of Protection judgement wording at the time and made some notes about it, plus how this wording compared with that of Gary Aitkenhead's and the OPCW's:

When comparing the wording from three sources – interview with head of Porton Down, court hearing and OPCW documents – I think that there is room for the absence of Novichok in blood samples taken from the Skripals before 22/03.

The Court of Protection judgement before Mr Justice Williams (22/03), (regarding an application to take blood samples for the OPCW to confirm Porton Down's earlier analysis), states that earlier blood tests carried out by Porton Down "indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound. The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent." (Please note the "or".) The statement comes at point 17 i):

https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/sshd-v-skripal-and-another-20180322.pdf

Then, Gary Aitkenhead, CEO of Porton Down, told Sky News (04/04) that the substance they found was "..Novichok or from that family.." (Again, please note the "or".) The statement comes 1:27mins in on this YouTube video, which has a less edited version than on the Sky News site, plus some interesting notes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R23AQAFvZ-4

And the OPCW's executive summary, which has been made public, does not mention Novichok by name, but it says that the results of their tests confirm the findings of the UK relating to the chemical's identity, and show that the toxic chemical is of high purity. It says that the name and structure of the toxic chemical are contained in the full classified report of the Secretariat, available to the state parties of the OPCW.
Taken from points 10, 11 and 12 at:

https://www.opcw.org/fileadmin/OPCW/S_series/2018/en/s-1612-2018_e_.pdf

Cherrycoke , August 28, 2018 at 15:52

I have been thinking about this as well. Please note that "nerve agent or related compound" leaves open the possibility that the compound is not even a nerve agent.

It would be interesting to know the expert definitions of "closely related" and "family" with regard to "nerve agent" and "novichok".

The general understanding is that it was A-234. This has never been confirmed in a public statement, however.

James , August 28, 2018 at 15:02

Expressions like "nerve agent" subconsciously conjure up dark and sinister evildoing in the world of James Bond and his "licence to kill", at least in the minds of most British English speakers. The same psychology is at work when you see "Polite Notice" and subconsciously read it as "Police Notice". Such notices are invariably unofficial, and often impolite!

For the mischief makers, however, mere "nerve agent", with its ambiguity and murky undertones, was not enough; "novichok" will soon be a novichok entry for 2018 in the OED. ("Новичо́к" means "newcomer", "new guy"–as in freshman, rookie, novice.)

Modern nerve agents were first discovered in the 1930s by German industrial chemists experimenting with organophosphorus compounds (which are defined by containing a particular grouping of carbon, phosphorus and oxygen atoms). They were trying to make new insecticides which would be powerful but safe(ish), but stumbled across tabun, which was powerful but very unsafe. Given the political situation, and realising the military potential, these chemists then pursued their research with emphasis on the extremely unsafe, and with huge success. After 1945, having had no such success themselves, the victorious allies' chemists "inherited" this German research; the Soviets did particularly well here, as there was much German manufacturing infrastructure in Poland. Exactly what happened next is obviously kept very secret, but some refinements were certainly achieved such as VX, and–allegedly–the Novichoks. Per Chalmers Johnson: "we knew Saddam had WMD; we had the receipts".
All very interesting (not really), and probably well-understood by a few reading this. A problem in getting a real understanding of all this novichok/Skripal malarkey lies in some misunderstandings of the details about the foregoing, of which few will be properly aware, Craig included. He read history.

Firstly organophosphorus compounds are certainly not inherently toxic; DNA is an organophosphate, as is RNA, ATP, etc. Boat loads of other basic biochemistry involves this chemical grouping. To equate "nerve agent" (or "insecticide") with "organophosphate" is a good start, but nothing more.

Secondly, the idea that nerve agents are new is misleading. Curare (poison) tipped arrows have been used in South America for millenia, secretions by bufotenine toads similarly used elsewhere, with many many other examples throughout recorded history (and beyond). These chemicals could all semantically correctly be termed nerve agents.

Interestingly, although tabun's potency was discovered in the 30s by Schrader er al, it had been unwittingly synthesised 40-odd years earlier. There's nothing new under the sun.

Thirdly, poisoning by ACE nerve agents (which, allegedly, includes Новичо́к) is quick and easy(ish) to detect and interpret in an unambiguous way. Less so more exotic and novel toxins (so obviously not eg curare or bufotoxins, but along those lines). However, given time, a good analysis is doable using mass spectrometry, SEM, X-ray crystallography (and other) methods.

In reply to John Bull, I wouldn't say we're "swimming in a sea of fake news, et seq", more bobbing around like corks. Love the moniker, by the way! It works on so many levels.

John Bull , August 28, 2018 at 15:12

Very good summary. Thanks, James.
Glad you like it!

mark golding , August 28, 2018 at 17:24

It was NOT a nerve agent that is why somebody had to die – to enforce the lie. Life in this universe is cheap

Rhys Jaggar , August 28, 2018 at 18:30

John

I suspect the reason for the wording is that what was identified was an acetylcholineesterase (ACE) inhibitor, which covers the major nerve agents and other compounds as well.

uncle tungsten , August 28, 2018 at 09:43

Here is one of the really stupid things about the official british story line on the Skripals. Sergei and Yulia are supposed to have left their home at around 1:30 and both swiped their hands on the door lever and were then novihoaxed. They drove to town and parked their car ten minutes later. They then walked through the park and stopped to hand feed the ducks in the stream and handed bread to the young boys to also feed the ducks. They then went on to act 2 scene 1 at zizzis or the pub and then act 2 scene two collapsed on the bench.

No young boy or duck was harmed making this play. The military grade novihoax is incapable of killing a duck, let alone a child as this pair smeared military grade nerve poison on everything! They have incinerated the zizzi table and heaven knows what has been incinerated at the pub. They incinerated the Skripals front door, who knows what fate was delivered to the BMW.

But they cant kill a duck! Mind you they can starve Skripal pets.

Are we to believe this story?

Hatuey , August 28, 2018 at 10:35

How do you know that ducks didn't suffer or die?

SA , August 28, 2018 at 11:23

Brilliant diversion. How do you prove a negative? Of course very simple, no dead ducks were reported.

Hatuey , August 28, 2018 at 14:32

I wasn't trying to divert. I know quite a bit about the habits of ducks. You'll very rarely see a dead duck anywhere in the natural world. Same with swans. They like to die in private.

I can tell you that it's very unlikely that you'd have any reports of dead ducks in Salisbury parks.

Before anyone puts this down to more high level trolling, I used to be a wildlife photographer. And I mean a proper one, i.e one that crawled around in mud for days at a time filming and photographing ducks.

SA , August 28, 2018 at 14:39

Even more brilliant as now, because of your marvellous personal experience, this is almost unprovable one way or another. Well done.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 15:15

The ducks were an obvious joke (of derision). The joke has a second level (not hidden); the young boys didn't die because everyone knows the novichok poisoning story is not true?

"No ducks or young boys were harmed in the making of this movie!"

All of the above just paraphrases/repeats what uncle tungsten said

You jobs sounds like it was really great, I envy you. But your contribution (here) sucks big time!

Ken Kenn , August 28, 2018 at 10:40

Good thoughts.

There appears to be a distinct lack of cross contamination.

The Skripal car should be riven with this poison – on the steering wheel- gear stick etc etc. If so, then reports of it being burned should follow like the table – as the guinea pigs and the cat were.

It should be all over the bread and all over the assistant duck feeders and the ducks should have been legion with their webbed feet up in the air.

The door handle application is a crock. If, as is claimed the alleged Novichok was pure then who made it should be known because of its purity.

If it's Russian that should be provable. So far the proof that it is Russian made has not been shown.

SA , August 28, 2018 at 11:25

"So far the proof that it is Russian made has not been shown." Nonsense, the very name novichok is a giveaway, nobody would use a novichok except Russians.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 12:42

Thanks, SA, that wouldn't have occurred to me!

Doodlebug , August 28, 2018 at 14:44

And Dawn Sturgess' perfume bottle had 'Moscow © Browder Enterprises' moulded underneath.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 15:25

Browder just wants us to go to war with Russia so he can keep his stolen money, that's not too much to ask!

SA , August 28, 2018 at 18:02

I forgot to add Browder to one of the dots I mentioned earlier.

Terence Wallis , August 28, 2018 at 15:04

I'd say you're suffering from novichock poisoning with your addled thinking

SA , August 28, 2018 at 18:01

Also novichok seems to cause acute sense of humour failure in observers.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 18:15

Terence, It's a serious issue but derision is a powerful weapon; certainly stronger than the novichok used against the Skripals.

Rod , August 28, 2018 at 10:50

It adds a new dimension to the saying : "You couldn't make it up". They, obviously couldn't.

Borncynical , August 28, 2018 at 12:19

"They have incinerated the Zizzi table " The significance of the table in this saga intrigues me. I recall when the 'details' (!!) of events were revealed by the MSM at the outset we were informed that the table had been covered in nerve agent in the form of a fine white powder and had to be incinerated. [ In fact it was so badly contaminated even Porton Down didn't have the capability of storing it safely – that's my facetious 'take' on it before anyone asks where I read that!]

On the assumption that it was indeed incinerated as a 'risk' item it begs a couple of obvious questions which the official narrative hasn't explained. First, the time lapse between the Skripals leaving Zizzis, being identified and their movements traced back to the restaurant and 'lockdown' being applied to everything in the restaurant: we don't know but I would hazard a guess an hour minimum. Are we really supposed to believe that the plates, dishes and cutlery left by the Skripals weren't cleared away in all that time, and the table wasn't wiped down? Irrespective of whether the nerve agent residue that we are supposed to believe was being spread all over Salisbury was visible or not, surely whoever cleared the table and washed up the dishes would definitely have been contaminated if we are to believe what we have been told about the door handle theory.

Borncynical , August 28, 2018 at 12:26

Adding to my comment at 12.19, we mustn't also forget that glasses and dishes would also have been removed from the table during the course of the Skripals' meal as well, not to mention money or credit cards or card reading machines etc exchanging hands. And the drinking glasses used at the pub. The more you think about it, the more ridiculous the official line becomes.

[Aug 29, 2018] Social Media Giants Enter NATO Service

Aug 29, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

written by rick rozoff tuesday august 28, 2018
undefined

On August 22 Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that they had arbitrarily removed 652 accounts, groups and pages allegedly linked to Russia and Iran for "coordinated inauthentic behavior," by which we're safe in assuming is meant political information inconvenient for the US power structure and its "Euro-Atlantic" elite allies in Europe and elsewhere.

The purpose pursued and the criteria employed are both explicitly political, focusing especially on federal elections. Facebook boasted of recent successes in this regard in France and Mexico.

There are historically-decisive Senate and Congressional elections this November 6th in the US.

At the beginning of this month several major conservative and libertarian Facebook, YouTube and other social media accounts were closed by the above and other parties in a heavy-handed, coordinated manner. The sites and individuals banned are ones that have urged cooperation between the US and Russia and warned against worsening political and potential military conflict between the world's two major nuclear powers.

What connects the two unprecedented social media purges is an agreement reached in May of this year between Facebook and the Atlantic Council.

The Atlantic Council of the United States was established in 1961 by former Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and Christian Herter to bolster support for NATO. Atlantic Councils were set up in other member states for the same purpose, and at the present time they now number more than 40 in NATO and Partnership for Peace countries. The name is derivative of North Atlantic Council, the highest governing body of NATO .

Due to its efforts, NATO has grown from 16 to 29 members since the end of the Cold War and in addition has recruited at least forty military partners throughout the world. With Colombia joining its Partners Across the Globe program earlier this year, NATO now has members and partners on all inhabited continents.

The partnership between Facebook and the Atlantic Council was described by the Atlantic Council's president and CEO Fred Kempe as follows:

This partnership will help our security, policy and product teams get real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world. It will also increase the number of 'eyes and ears' we have working to spot potential abuse on our service - enabling us to more effectively identify gaps in our systems, preempt obstacles, and ensure that Facebook plays a positive role during elections all around the world.
The collaboration, like NATO and Facebook themselves, are not only avowedly political but unabashedly global in scale.

In the interim Facebook has announced it's hired "additional third-party reviewers" for the purpose advancing the aforesaid political censorship and furtherance of NATO's international agenda.

Failing such methods, there are also those proposed by then-president presumptive Hillary Clinton two years ago: "As president, I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyberattacks just like any other attack. We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses."

[Aug 27, 2018] Jimmy Dore rightly states they are CIA funded campaigns of Dems candidates

Notable quotes:
"... Democrats are proceeding down a dark path: identity politics brings only conflict, civil war. ..."
"... Anybody who trusts the Democrats to save us from the evil machinations of the Neocons is as hopelessly stupid as anyone who trusts the Neocons to save us from the evil machinations of the Democrats. ..."
"... These new Democrats will never vote for less spending. There previous career was based on having abundant and in some cases unlimited Federal funds at their fingertips. ..."
Aug 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

Carlton Meyer , says: Website June 8, 2018 at 4:15 am GMT

Jimmy Dore covered this topic a few weeks ago. He rightly states they are CIA funded campaigns.

Eagle Eye , says: June 8, 2018 at 5:03 am GMT

Would it have killed you to link to the WSWS.org pieces you quote from at some length?

Patrick Martin's piece is here: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/07/prim-j07.html

Ron Unz has linked to WSWS.org several times in the past as WSWS was targeted by the Deep State/Google etc. cabal to make it disappear into the "memory hole."

Mishra , says: June 8, 2018 at 5:55 am GMT
@SunBakedSuburb

The only activism I've seen from progressives in the past two years has nothing to do with economic concerns; their energy is entirely focused on race, gender, and sexuality. The cultural-Marxist troika.

Just one of many good point you make. The only thing I'd add is in relation to:

Democrats are proceeding down a dark path: identity politics brings only conflict, civil war.

As Reg mentions: conflict among the masses is very much the plan. Divide et impera.

Biff , says: June 8, 2018 at 7:21 am GMT

And my stupid [neo]liberal friends still think the democrats are going to save them, and then on to super – duper – special stupid, they think their vote for a democrat is going to have an impact. On to ludicrous stupid – it's all the republicans fault. Identity politics at its finest.

Unfixable, and circling the drain.

The Alarmist, June 8, 2018 at 11:03 am GMT • 100 Words

"Center-right" and "business oriented?"

Try Oligarch-centric.

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, from the fall of Constantinople: Sultan Mehmed II rounded up the surviving oligarchs of the Empire and asked them why they had withheld their riches and resources from supporting the Empire's final defense against his conquest, to which the oligarchs replied that they were saving their riches for his most excellent majesty. He had them brutally executed.

Jake, June 8, 2018 at 11:13 am GMT

Anybody who trusts the Democrats to save us from the evil machinations of the Neocons is as hopelessly stupid as anyone who trusts the Neocons to save us from the evil machinations of the Democrats.

DESERT FOX, June 8, 2018 at 1:06 pm GMT

At the upper levels there is no difference between the Demonrats and the Republicons as all are controlled by the Zionists and congress would by more accurately called the lower house of the Knesset..

prusmc, June 8, 2018 at 1:18 pm GMT • 100 Words

@anon

These new Democrats will never vote for less spending. There previous career was based on having abundant and in some cases unlimited Federal funds at their fingertips.

It is a mistake to think they will be any different than Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, Jerold Nadler or Luis Guitirez. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia is about a unconventional as we can expect the new congressional majority members to be.

jacques sheete, June 8, 2018 at 1:44 pm GMT

@Anon
The ultra rich use the poor to attack the middle so they can distract everyone else from uniting

That, in fact, is the practical aim of government in general. Parties, schmarties it's all one huge extortion racket.

[Aug 27, 2018] A contribution to the occasional commentary on the capture of social networks by the MIC

Notable quotes:
"... That is what happened. If you check the 'reviews' on the IMDB page I linked to you will find that nearly all entries were made on the same date 31st July 2018. That shouldn't be possible given that only registered members who have been subjected to email verification are allowed to enter a score for a movie. ..."
"... Lo and behold all these reviewers had also registered with IMDB on 31st July just to vote on this one movie. ..."
"... Well "A Snipers Tale" is the profile of a Serbian bloke who lost most of his blood relations at the age of 17 when the amerika/NATO created 'Bosnia crisis' kicked off. ..."
Aug 27, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Debsisdead , Aug 27, 2018 3:04:33 AM | 33

As a contribution to the occasional commentary on the capture of social networks by the MIC I offer the IMDB page for A Snipers War

This documentary was commissioned by and shown on Amazon Prime of all places where it had an extremely short run. When I saw that and it's score on IMDB (at that time 1/10) I nearly moved on without investigation but 1/10 how does that happen? Even the cheapest "The Room" rip off scores better than that as friends and family of the cast & crew generally inflate their scores so that the most abysmal P.O.S. cops a 4.2 or so. That would have happened here so for this to score a 1 an awful lot of people must have marked it very low.

That is what happened. If you check the 'reviews' on the IMDB page I linked to you will find that nearly all entries were made on the same date 31st July 2018. That shouldn't be possible given that only registered members who have been subjected to email verification are allowed to enter a score for a movie.

Lo and behold all these reviewers had also registered with IMDB on 31st July just to vote on this one movie.

Does that pass anyone's sniff test? I considered knocking up a script using a spam avoidance site to do the same, but what a hassle - life got in the way so I didn't - since by the time I discovered the rort it was well past the w...z release date making it unlikely that all that effort would increase the sites listing the doco anyway.

Why all the fuss?

Well "A Snipers Tale" is the profile of a Serbian bloke who lost most of his blood relations at the age of 17 when the amerika/NATO created 'Bosnia crisis' kicked off.

Remember that amerika bombed the bejeesuz outta Serbia. After that this chap joined a Serbian militia and made a bit of a name for himself as a sniper in that conflict.

He could never really settle down and ended up working as a welder in Russia at the time the fascists took over the Ukraine. Some of his comrades from the Serbian stoush prevailed upon him to volunteer and help out the people of Donbass, since he has cleared many fascisti away from their homes, in the process becoming a bit of a local hero.

A man who takes great risks and it is pretty much inevitable he will end up dead, but he just cannot seem to stop.

This is a well made doco in Russian & Serbo-Croat with english subtitles hardcoded in. Worth at least 7/10 on IMDB.

Because it can be tricky to find I've whacked it up on mega here The rez is OK, HiDef but there are a coupla sites with 1080's, no 4k tho, for those like me who prefer hi res vids.

This is a good doco in every way, if you prefer not to use this link perseverance should get you a torrent.

[Aug 27, 2018] There are huge holes in Browder story, made clear in his deposition in the Prevezon case

Magnitsky story is the textbook, perfect illustration of the level of control of CIA over media. Almost everything in official story is a lie, still it is never challenged.
Aug 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

RobinG , says: July 24, 2018 at 4:59 am GMT

@exiled off mainstreet

#BROWDERGATE

A perfectly good article, I'm sure, but why diffuse ourselves [and engender feelings of fear and hopelessness as you express] when a strategic pressure point has presented? Johnstone makes no mention of Bill Browder. Nor do the [100, so far] commenters.

BILL BROWDER is a key figure in the anti-Trump, anti-Russia hysteria. The notorious Trump Tower meeting was about the Magnitsky Act, a fabrication by Browder to hide his financial crimes. Browder "testified" in the Senate expressly to demonize Putin. Browder's contacts in the IC, the Jewish Lobby, and the fawning media have enabled his propaganda assault this week. He's appeared -- unchallenged, virtually unquestioned -- on countless talk shows. But he's been running scared at the mention of interrogation by Russians. There are huge holes in his story, made clear in his deposition in the Prevezon case. The truth will bring him down! And perhaps his Deep State supporters, along with him.

Ask your Senators if they've heard/read Browder's 2015 deposition in the Prevezon case. (See comment 161 under The Untouchable Mr. Browder? by Israel Shamir for links.)

Research links to primary sources on #Browdergate -

https://populist.tv/2018/01/20/bill-browder-links-and-resources-to-understand-controversy/

RobinG , says: July 24, 2018 at 5:02 pm GMT
@yurivku

...BTW, have you seen "THE MAGNITSKY ACT – BEHIND THE SCENES" that Phil Giraldi posted today? Debunking anti-Russian criminal sociopaths like Bill Browder will go a long way to improving relations. Not to mention easing pressure on the unfortunate Trump.

Full research primary links available here, including Browder's 2015 deposition in the U.S. vs. Prevezon Holdings case. Every Senator who voted to support Browder should see this. [Any who already have, double shame!]

https://populist.tv/2018/01/20/bill-browder-links-and-resources-to-understand-controversy/

[Aug 27, 2018] The CIA is the armed wing of Washington's permanently governing technocratic party, in the same way the KGB was the armed wing of the Soviet Communist Party. For both the contol of MSM is the part of the agenda

Aug 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

MK-DELTABURKE , says: July 22, 2018 at 8:25 pm GMT

@Cagey Beast

Aspen Institute does make attempts at outreach, but they invariably cock it up by eliciting, recruiting, or suborning every single person they bring in. The shitheads even tried to do it to me. You would think they'd have a dossier saying I hate those cobags. Their fundamental problem is, Aspen Institute is CIA. Their first and only instinct is to use people like toilet paper. They don't want popular support. They want agents in complete control.

Cagey Beast , says: July 22, 2018 at 10:58 pm GMT
@MK-DELTABURKE

Exactly.

Aspen Institute is CIA.

Yes, the Aspen Institute is the CIA and the CIA is the Aspen Institute. Or, to be more precise, the CIA is the armed wing of Washington's permanently governing technocratic party, in the same way the KGB was the armed wing of the Soviet Communist Party.

Poor Julian Assange is likely going to be in their hands not too long from now. The citizen of one Five Eyes country will be arrested by another and then sent off to the imperial metropole, to be kicked around like a political football. The rest of us Anglosphericals are expected to cheer or remain silent. Either is acceptable.

Halper , says: July 23, 2018 at 6:52 pm GMT

CIA is boosting the volume of its anti-Russian vilification because more and more CIA assets are getting flushed out. Stephan Halper is an obvious spook. Page is the corniest traitor since Lee Harvey Oswald.

https://dailystormer.name/is-carter-page-a-cia-spook/

Strzok has clearly got a dotted-line report to his real boss in CIA:

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/07/22/a-review-of-the-doj-fbi-fisa-application-release/

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/07/fisa-fraud-by-obamas-doj-and-intel-community-by-publius-tacitus.html

Publius Tacitus is incorrect, though, in making a distinction between the obama administration and the intelligence community. Obama is a third-generation CIA spook he's a CIA spokesmodel, not a head of state (see Andrew Krieg's Presidential Puppetry.)

Daniel Rich , says: July 23, 2018 at 10:35 pm GMT
@peterAUS

It's impossible to asses [correctly] who's influenced by what, but it seems that telling lies doesn't work that well any longer. You can find some numbers in the following article: Democracy Dies in Debt? US News Outlets Slashing Staff Left and Right -- Link to Sputnik.

Excerpt : "A Pew Research analysis on Monday found that more than a third of the US' largest newspapers and more than a fifth of its largest digital outlets experienced layoffs between January 2017 and April 2018."

Pancho Perico , says: July 23, 2018 at 10:27 pm GMT
@MK-DELTABURKE

The Aspen Institute is CIA, but the CIA is an organization created and controlled by the globalist conspirators at the Council on Foreign Relations, mostly the Rockefellers and other banksters.

skrik , says: August 1, 2018 at 3:18 pm GMT
@Jeff Stryker

But you cannot see that because you're focused on US cultural colonization or things you have seen in Hollywood films You compare yourself to the United States because it is a similar former British colony and white settler nation

...Since the CIA-sponsored coup of 1975, the country has been 'going to the dogs' at an increasing rate. The sheople glory under their 'Lucky Country' delusion, not even knowing its full import: Lucky not to be even partly aware. Yeah sure, the corrupt&venal MSM+PFBCs [= publicly financed broadcasters] try to revive 'the yellow peril' scare, but that's just standard 'Bernays haze' scare mongering, to keep the proles from thinking: Der, they [as peterAUS] didn't think. rgds

PS The great Aus-unwashed, as any 'Western' citizen, has zero choice; so-called 'Western democracy' allows for as good as zero 'citizen input.' The 'choice' of Trump should be put down to an aberration -- some 'clever-clogs' manipulators -- *not* Russians -- pulled off a coup. But as they used to say: "Better red than dead;" better Trump than HRC.

[Aug 25, 2018] >The BBC Is a CIA Asset

Aug 25, 2018 | www.paulcraigroberts.org

August 1, 2018 | Categories: Announcements | Tags: | Print This Article Print This Article

The BBC Is a CIA Asset

Nothing else can be said for what was once a media organization.

https://www.rt.com/uk/434862-assange-john-sweeney-bbc/

[Aug 24, 2018] The Skripnal affair in the UK and Russiagate here in the US demonstrate the absolute and utter contempt of neoliberal elite of populace they rule

Notable quotes:
"... Anyway, what's there to argue: in its founding documents, the EU declares that its foreign and security policies will follow those of NATO. In other words, Europeans have declared *themselves* to be incapable of thinking about their place in the world, letting Uncle Sam do this for them instead. Nobody will respect them unless they first learn to respect themselves. ..."
"... By the standards our Congress is applying to Russia, this would be an "Act of War", now wouldn't it? ..."
"... Well the EU swallowed the farcical story of the Scripals so I expect anything Mrs May tells them about a leak will be believed. ..."
"... International spookery is a lucrative job, if you can get in it. ..."
"... Truth is every bit as strange as fiction, only dirtier. I have to believe that international skulduggery and its various specialties like espionage, smuggling, hacking, whacking and merking is a growth industry in today's globalist world. Millennials take note, if you want to pay off those student loans in this lifetime, because I'm sure they will still collect on them in Hades. ..."
"... GCHQ is there to support the establishment and the neocons. If Corbyn were to be elected, they will be in the thick of causing as much trouble as possible for the new government. Gladio springs to mind. ..."
"... john wilson – "the farce continues." Absolutely. The Skripnal affair in the U.K. and Russiagate here in the U.S. demonstrate the absolute and utter contempt our respective elites have for the intelligence of the populace of each nation. I ..."
Aug 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Ma Laoshi , August 21, 2018 at 8:10 am

As the author also acknowledges with the references to the Belgacom saga: what else is new. It's not just spying, but outright sabotage of critical European infrastructure, which is one of the factors showing that if you'd ever want the EU to go anywhere, step one is that you'd *want* to throw the Brits out–the London branch of the US Govt will *never* be a loyal European ally. Instead of getting its own act together, the article informs us that the EU "is concerned to retain access to the UK's defense and security powers post-Brexit".

This goes to show that the problem lies a bit deeper, since ultimately the loyalty of Merkel and Macron is also to the Dark Throne, though perhaps not to the same extent as with Ms. May.

Anyway, what's there to argue: in its founding documents, the EU declares that its foreign and security policies will follow those of NATO. In other words, Europeans have declared *themselves* to be incapable of thinking about their place in the world, letting Uncle Sam do this for them instead. Nobody will respect them unless they first learn to respect themselves.

John McCarthy , August 18, 2018 at 8:24 pm

By the standards our Congress is applying to Russia, this would be an "Act of War", now wouldn't it?

padre , August 18, 2018 at 12:08 pm

First thing that comes to mind is, whether there were any Russians involved?

Peter , August 19, 2018 at 3:28 pm

Of course they were. Britishers never would spy on their "friends", would they now?. I think that Putin personally did the spying, the man has just too much time on his hands.

Brad Owen , August 18, 2018 at 9:19 am

Have British spies been hacking the EU you ask? Is it not true that spies have been at work in the isles and on the Continent for CENTURIES? I would say it's an even more important force than the military forces, what with their ability to embroil one enemy in a war with another enemy, thus eliminating two enemies, with just a bagful of money and a few proxy provocateurs. No wonder finance is King, intelligence/covert ops his governing Prime Minister, and over rules the military industrialists and uniformed services and the citizenry and their elected representatives.

john wilson , August 18, 2018 at 5:35 am

Well the EU swallowed the farcical story of the Scripals so I expect anything Mrs May tells them about a leak will be believed. Whatever the EU negotiators have to say about Brexit behind closed doors seems to be irrelevant as sooner or later they will have to put their cards on the table.

Realist , August 18, 2018 at 4:19 am

International spookery is a lucrative job, if you can get in it. Mental time slip back to the early 60's. Ian Fleming's "James Bond" novels had just hit the states as the latest craze and one of my best friends, a Ukrainian fellow, therefore congenitally attracted to the dark side, discovers them and becomes a cult follower, so much so that when he's kicked out of college for fraud a few years later he becomes involved in international gemstone smuggling under the mentorship of an ex-Nazi uncle ensconced near the Brasil-Argentine border, makes beaucoup lucre, marries a fellow American expat down in Latin America at the height of Iran-Contra shenanigans and eventually returns home a very wealthy man now living out his dotage in the closest thing to a manor house in the exurbs north of Chicago.

Truth is every bit as strange as fiction, only dirtier. I have to believe that international skulduggery and its various specialties like espionage, smuggling, hacking, whacking and merking is a growth industry in today's globalist world. Millennials take note, if you want to pay off those student loans in this lifetime, because I'm sure they will still collect on them in Hades.

John A , August 18, 2018 at 4:05 am

GCHQ is there to support the establishment and the neocons. If Corbyn were to be elected, they will be in the thick of causing as much trouble as possible for the new government. Gladio springs to mind.

john wilson , August 18, 2018 at 5:49 am

Jean, the latest in the Scripal case gets ever more bizarre. A few days ago the police went to the homes of 12 people who were in the Zizzies restaurant (don't know if is was staff or members of the public) and took away their clothes for testing.

This is a full FIVE MONTHS after the event.

I know we British are a scruffy lot, if not down right dirty, but for Christ sake give it rest, even we wash our clothes after five months. The farce continues.

Gary Weglarz , August 18, 2018 at 11:11 am

john wilson – "the farce continues." Absolutely. The Skripnal affair in the U.K. and Russiagate here in the U.S. demonstrate the absolute and utter contempt our respective elites have for the intelligence of the populace of each nation. It almost makes one long for the good old days when our intelligence agencies had to at least try to come up with plausible explanations for elite criminal activities: i.e. "the magic bullet (JFK assassination)" :) and "the pancake effect (9/11)" :)

Ok, ok, maybe they've never really given us any real respect as critical thinkers, but I quite agree with you that government propaganda has now reached absolutely farcical levels of idiocy over the last several years and is now completely and utterly detached from any actual "physical reality" on planet earth.

Jean , August 18, 2018 at 2:25 pm

Right?

How desperate are they?

How is the Steele dossier and Professor Stefan Halper playing there?Just curiosity

[Aug 24, 2018] Brennan was caught spying on the Senate Intelligence Commitee, subsequently lied about it and allegedly directed personnel under his command to lie about to the Senate and the IG

Notable quotes:
"... Brennan was caught spying on the Senate Intelligence Commitee in violation of the Constitution and subsequently lied about it and allegedly directed personnel under his command to lie about to the Senate and the IG ..."
"... Congress fears the intelligence agencies and takes orders from them, not the other way around as envisaged in the constitution or spelled out in legislation. ..."
"... Let Trump try to control the agencies by firing all of their top officers, slashing their budgets, freezing their funds or shutting down their operations, even specific projects, and watch congress come to their rescue in a New York minute. ..."
"... Congress will save any significant component of intel or the pentagon before they'd rescue Social Security or any other social program. If pressed for an answer as to which of the "usual suspects" really whacked Kennedy, I suspect most folks would put their money on the CIA, the FBI or some combination of the major intel agencies. ..."
"... The neoliberal globalists, I fear, have taken that phrase "drowning government in the bathtub" all too literally. ..."
Aug 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

GM August 16, 2018 at 10:22 pm

Brennan was caught spying on the Senate Intelligence Commitee in violation of the Constitution and subsequently lied about it and allegedly directed personnel under his command to lie about to the Senate and the IG

He could easily be brought up on rather serious charges.

Abby , August 18, 2018 at 11:23 pm

He also leaked classified information to the press as did others and they could have been prosecuted under the espionage act. They will be losing their security clearances soon too. The information that they leaked was the NSA information on Flynn to the Washington post. But of course the Obama justice department only prosecuted people who exposed Washington's dirty secrets.

Realist , August 17, 2018 at 1:21 am

Yes, what Kenneth might like to see happen may be admirable but not going to happen in 2018 or 19, which is practically a different universe from 1975 and for exactly the reasons you specify. This country and its self-appointed minders have changed massively in 45 years. Besides, 1975 was a year after Watergate was finally resolved with Nixon and Agnew's resignations and Congress may have been feeling its oats, going so far as to defund the Vietnam war! Imagine defunding ANY of the multiple wars ongoing!

Congress fears the intelligence agencies and takes orders from them, not the other way around as envisaged in the constitution or spelled out in legislation. Schumer let that feline out of the sack when he warned the president not to mess with them.

Let Trump try to control the agencies by firing all of their top officers, slashing their budgets, freezing their funds or shutting down their operations, even specific projects, and watch congress come to their rescue in a New York minute.

We saw how the CIA worked around congressionally-imposed budgetary restraints in Iran-Contra: by secretly running drugs from Columbia to LA, selling arms to Iran and using the proceeds to fund death squads in Central America. Congress didn't have the guts to take that investigation to it logical conclusion of impeachments and/or indictments. Why?

Congress will save any significant component of intel or the pentagon before they'd rescue Social Security or any other social program. If pressed for an answer as to which of the "usual suspects" really whacked Kennedy, I suspect most folks would put their money on the CIA, the FBI or some combination of the major intel agencies.

Unfettered Fire , August 17, 2018 at 12:11 pm

The neoliberal globalists, I fear, have taken that phrase "drowning government in the bathtub" all too literally.

Rosa Brooks' book How War Became Everything and Everything Became the Military exposes the vast expansion and added responsibilities of the MIC, as governmental departments continue to be dismantled and privatized.

She even said in a book circuit lecture that she thought the idea of Congress "declaring war" was antiquated and cute. Well, how long will it be when the very hollowed out structures of Capitol Hill and the White House are considered antiquated and cute?

What if the plan all along has been to fold up this whole democratic experiment and move HQ into some new multi-billion dollar Pentagon digs?

Remember the words of Strobe Talbott:

"Within the next hundred years nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all."

This nation had better wake up fast if it wants to salvage the currency authorizing power of government and restore its role in the economy, before it's no longer an option and the private bankers, today's money lenders in the temple, govern for good.

"The bank strategy continues: "If we can privatize the economy, we can turn the whole public sector into a monopoly. We can treat what used to be the government sector as a financial monopoly. Instead of providing free or subsidized schooling, we can make people pay $50,000 to get a college education, or $50,000 just to get a grade school education if families choose to go to New York private schools. We can turn the roads into toll roads. We can charge people for water, and we can charge for what used to be given for free under the old style of Roosevelt capitalism and social democracy."

This idea that governments should not create money implies that they shouldn't act like governments. Instead, the de facto government should be Wall Street. Instead of governments allocating resources to help the economy grow, Wall Street should be the allocator of resources – and should starve the government to "save taxpayers" (or at least the wealthy). Tea Party promoters want to starve the government to a point where it can be "drowned in the bathtub."

But if you don't have a government that can fund itself, then who is going to govern, and on whose terms? The obvious answer is, the class with the money: Wall Street and the corporate sector. They clamor for a balanced budget, saying, "We don't want the government to fund public infrastructure. We want it to be privatized in a way that will generate profits for the new owners, along with interest for the bondholders and the banks that fund it; and also, management fees. Most of all, the privatized enterprises should generate capital gains for the stockholders as they jack up prices for hitherto public services.

You can see how to demoralize a country if you can stop the government from spending money into the economy. That will cause austerity, lower living standards and really put the class war in business. So what Trump is suggesting is to put the class war in business, financially, with an exclamation point."

http://michael-hudson.com/2017/03/why-deficits-hurt-banking-profits/

[Aug 24, 2018] From reading The Devil s Chessboard it is quite clear that Allen Dulles still ran things after he was fired by JFK, and was most likely the coordinator of the assassination

Notable quotes:
"... Right now I think they are trying to figure out a way to get him out of office without having to actually kill him. ..."
"... I too think they'd love to assassinate Trump, but I don't think they dare. ..."
Aug 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Skip Scott August 18, 2018 at 6:31 am

Hi B.E.-

I agree that Brennan should have his clearance revoked, and frankly so should anyone after they leave government. The thing is, I just got done reading "The Devil's Chessboard", and it is quite clear that Allen Dulles still ran things after he was fired by JFK, and was most likely the coordinator of the assassination.

I doubt that Trump has any more control of the CIA than JFK had.

Until people like Brennan are capable of being prosecuted in a court of law, our so-called "Intelligence" agencies don't give a rat's ass what the president orders. In fact, they probably give "suggestions" that are in fact orders.

Right now I think they are trying to figure out a way to get him out of office without having to actually kill him.

backwardsevolution , August 18, 2018 at 8:22 am

Hi, Skip. The Devil's Chessboard sounds like a good book; I'll have to read it. Yes, I think whoever gets to the top of the CIA is probably one mean, bad monster of a human being.

I too think they'd love to assassinate Trump, but I don't think they dare. There are too many people who just don't believe the government anymore, and Trump's supporters would blow the roof off if anything happened to him. They've got to be worried about that because they're the ones with all the guns. Ha!

I think they're desperately racing against time, trying to nail Trump before he nails them. The evidence is slowly trickling out (because the FBI and DOJ are stalling) re the Steele dossier/Russiagate/spying, etc.

From the evidence gathered so far, it's pretty evident that the upper layer of the DOJ, FBI and CIA are rotten to the core and should be dismantled ASAP. If all Trump does while being in office is bring these guys down, then he will have done a great service.

Take care.

[Aug 24, 2018] The exhibit A as for the CIA capture of both congress and MSM

Notable quotes:
"... Schumer warns Trump: Intel officials 'have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you' ..."
"... This is a direct threat to a sitting president of the USA. I don't like Trump but when proved criminals they are threatening an elected president out in the open? And threatened the Democratic process ? ..."
Aug 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Jean August 16, 2018 at 7:26 am

Schumer warns Trump: Intel officials 'have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you'

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/schumer-warns-trump-intel-officials-have-six-ways-from-sunday-at-getting-back-at-you

This is a direct threat to a sitting president of the USA. I don't like Trump but when proved criminals they are threatening an elected president out in the open? And threatened the Democratic process ?

As flawed as it is

It's time to worry

Skip Scott , August 16, 2018 at 8:02 am

The amazing part of that exchange for any thinking person was that Rachel took that statement in stride and had no follow-up. Here is a Senator saying that the "Intelligence Community" controls politics through blackmail, implying that the rule of law is dead, and a supposed journalist has nothing to say about it. "Move along folks, nothing to see here "

Nancy , August 16, 2018 at 11:52 am

Not so amazing. Maddow has devolved into a loyal tool of the Deep State. We are truly spiraling further and further down the rabbit hole.

Jean , August 16, 2018 at 7:16 am

It sure was the exhibit A for the CIA capture of our media

[Aug 23, 2018] What the Brennan Affair Really Reveals by Stephen Cohen

"My strong suspicion is that 'Russiagate' is a kind of nemesis, arising from the fact that key figures in British and American intelligence have, over a protracted period of time, got involved in intrigues where they are way out of their depth. The unintended consequences of these have meant that people like Brennan and Younger, and also Hannigan, have ended up having to resort to desperate measures to cover their backsides."
Brennan exposed "intelligence community" as a forth branch of government. The branch more powerful that then the other three combined.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that a wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.
The main suspicion is that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making it possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie Ohr's sudden interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele.
Notable quotes:
"... Los Angeles Times ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... It's a misnomer to term these people representatives of a hidden "deep state." In recent years, they have been amply visible on television and newspaper op-ed pages. Instead, they see and present themselves as members of a fully empowered and essential fourth branch of government. ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... To be fair, Brennan may only be a symptom of this profound American crisis, some say the worst since the Civil War. ..."
Aug 23, 2018 | www.thenation.com

Brennan's allegation was unprecedented. No such high-level intelligence official had ever before accused a sitting president of treason, still more in collusion with the Kremlin. (Impeachment discussions of Presidents Nixon and Clinton, to take recent examples, did not include allegations involving Russia.) Brennan clarified his charge : "Treasonous, which is to betray one's trust and to aid and abet the enemy." Coming from Brennan, a man presumed to be in possession of related dark secrets, as he strongly hinted , the charge was fraught with alarming implications. Brennan made clear he hoped for Trump's impeachment, but in another time, and in many other countries, his charge would suggest that Trump should be removed from the presidency urgently by any means, even a coup. No one, it seems, has even noted this extraordinary implication with its tacit threat to American democracy. (Perhaps because the disloyalty allegation against Trump has been customary ever since mid-2016, even before he became president, when an array of influential publications and writers -- among them a former acting CIA director -- began branding him Putin's "puppet," "agent," "client," and "Manchurian candidate." The Los Angeles Times even saw fit to print an article suggesting that the military might have to remove Trump if he were to be elected, thereby having the very dubious distinction of predating Brennan.)

Why did Brennan, a calculating man, risk leveling such a charge, which might reasonably be characterized as sedition? The most plausible explanation is that he sought to deflect growing attention to his role as the "Godfather" of the entire Russiagate narrative, as Cohen argued back in February. If so, we need to know Brennan's unvarnished views on Russia.

They are set out with astonishing (perhaps unknowing) candor in a New York Times op-ed of August 17. They are those of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover in their prime. Western "politicians, political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly and unwittingly, or even bought outright, by Russian operatives not only to collect sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and disinformation. I was well aware of Russia's ability to work surreptitiously within the United States, cultivating relationships with individuals who wield actual or potential power. These Russian agents are well trained in the art of deception. They troll political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters. Too often, those puppets are found." All this, Brennan assures readers, is based on his "deep insight." All the rest of us, it seems, are constantly susceptible to "Russian puppet masters" under our beds, at work, on our computers. Clearly, there must be no "cooperation" with the Kremlin's grand "Puppet Master," as Trump said he wanted early on. (People who wonder what and when Obama knew about the unfolding Russiagate saga need to ask why he would keep such a person so close for so long.)

And yet, scores of former intelligence and military officials rallied around this unvarnished John Brennan, even though, they said, they did not entirely share his opinions. This too is revealing. They did so, it seems clear enough, out of their professional corporate identity, which Brennan represented and Trump was degrading by challenging the intelligences agencies' (implicitly including his own) Russiagate allegations against him. It's a misnomer to term these people representatives of a hidden "deep state." In recent years, they have been amply visible on television and newspaper op-ed pages. Instead, they see and present themselves as members of a fully empowered and essential fourth branch of government. This too has gone largely undiscussed while nightingales of the fourth branch -- such as David Ignatius and Joe Scarborough in the pages of the The Washington Post -- have been in full voice.

The result is, of course -- and no less ominous -- to criminalize any advocacy of "cooperating with Russia," or détente, as Trump sought to do in Helsinki with Putin. Still more, a full-fledged Russophobic hysteria is sweeping through the American political-media establishment, from Brennan and -- pending actual evidence against her -- those who engineered the arrest of Maria Butina (imagine how this endangers young Americans networking in Russia) to the senators now preparing new "crippling sanctions" against Moscow and the editors and producers at the Times , Post , CNN, and MSNBC. (However powerful, how representative are these elites when surveys indicate that a majority of the American people still prefer good relations with Moscow?)

As the dangers grow of actual war with Russia -- again, from Ukraine and the Baltic region to Syria -- the capacity of US policy-makers, above all the president, are increasingly diminished. To be fair, Brennan may only be a symptom of this profound American crisis, some say the worst since the Civil War.

Finally, there was a time when many Democrats, certainly liberal Democrats, could be counted on to resist this kind of hysteria and, yes, spreading neo-McCarthyism. (Brennan's defenders accuse Trump of McCarthyism, but Brennan's charge of treason without presenting any actual evidence was quintessential McCarthy.) After all, civil liberties, including freedom of speech, are directly involved -- and not only Brennan's and Trump's. But Democratic members of Congress and pro-Democratic media outlets are in the forefront of the new anti-Russian hysteria, with only a few exceptions. Thus a generally liberal historian tells CNN viewers that "Brennan is an American hero. His tenure at the CIA was impeccable. We owe him so much." Elsewhere the same historian assures readers , "There has always been a bipartisan spirit of support since the CIA was created in the Cold War." In the same vein, two Post reporters write of the FBI's " once venerated reputation ."

[Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter: ..."
"... For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And, yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem – Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast? Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that when they do it can seem rather weird. ..."
"... Regard these indictments in proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at determining the winner. ..."
"... However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II ..."
"... And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S. government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski, "apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would interfere in the other's elections." ..."
"... We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance." ..."
"... "Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and government-overthrows ..."
Aug 18, 2018 | www.unz.com

William Blum shares with us his correspondence with Washington Post presstitute Michael Birnbaum. As you can tell from Birnbaum's replies, he comes across as either very stupid or as a CIA asset.

When I received my briefing as staff associate, House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which required top secret clearance, I was told by senior members of the staff that the Washington Post was a CIA asset. Watching the Washington Post's takedown of President Richard Nixon with the orchestrated Watergate story, that became obvious. President Nixon had made too many overtures to the Soviets and too many arms limitations agreements, and he opened to China. Watching President Nixon's peace initiatives water down the threat level from the Soviet Union and Maoist China, the military/security complex saw a threat to its budget and power and decided that Nixon had to go. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy had resulted in far too much skepticism about the Warren Commission Report, so the CIA decided to use the Washington Post to get rid of Nixon. To keep the clueless American left hating Nixon, the CIA used its assets in the leftwing to keep Nixon blamed for the Vietnam war, a war that Nixon inherited and did not want.

The CIA knew that Nixon's problem was that he could not exit the war without losing his conservative base, which was convinced of the nonsensical "Domino Theory." I have always wondered if the CIA concocted the "Domino Theory," as it so well served them. Unable to get rid of the war "with honor," Nixon was driven to brutal methods to force the North Vietnamese to accept a situation that he could depart without defeat and soiling America's "honor" and losing his conservative support base. The North Vietnamese wouldn't bend, but the US Congress did, and so the CIA succeeded in discrediting among both the leftwing and righwing Nixon's war management. With no one to defend him, Nixon was an easy target for the CIA.

Here is Blum's exchange with Birnbaum. It is possible that Birnbaum is neither stupid nor a CIA asset, but just a person wanting to hold on to a job. The last thing he can afford to do is to disabuse readers of the "Russian Threat" when Bezos' Amazon and Washington Post properties are dependent on the CIA's annual subsidy of $600 million disquised as a "contract." https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-20/cia-washington-post-and-russia-what-youre-not-being-told

The Anti-Empire Report # 159
Willian Blum

The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter:
July 18, 2018

Dear Mr. Birnbaum,

You write Trump "made no mention of Russia's adventures in Ukraine". Well, neither he nor Putin nor you made any mention of America's adventures in the Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014, which led to the justified Russian adventure. Therefore ?

If Russia overthrew the Mexican government would you blame the US for taking some action in Mexico?
William Blum

Dear Mr. Blum,

Thanks for your note. "America's adventures in the Ukraine": what are you talking about? Last time I checked, it was Ukrainians in the streets of Kiev who caused Yanukovych to turn tail and run. Whether or not that was a good thing, we can leave aside, but it wasn't the Americans who did it.

It is, however, Russian special forces who fanned out across Crimea in February and March 2014, according to Putin, and Russians who came down from Moscow who stoked conflict in eastern Ukraine in the months after, according to their own accounts.
Best, Michael Birnbaum

To MB,

I can scarcely believe your reply. Do you read nothing but the Post? Do you not know of high State Dept official Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador in Ukraine in Maidan Square to encourage the protesters? She spoke of 5 billion (sic) dollars given to aid the protesters who were soon to overthrow the govt. She and the US Amb. spoke openly of who to choose as the next president. And he's the one who became president. This is all on tape. I guess you never watch Russia Today (RT). God forbid! I read the Post every day. You should watch RT once in a while.
William Blum

To WB,

I was the Moscow bureau chief of the newspaper; I reported extensively in Ukraine in the months and years following the protests. My observations are not based on reading. RT is not a credible news outlet, but I certainly do read far beyond our own pages, and of course I talk to the actual actors on the ground myself – that's my job.

And: yes, of course Nuland was in the Maidan – but encouraging the protests, as she clearly did, is not the same as sparking them or directing them, nor is playing favorites with potential successors, as she clearly did, the same as being directly responsible for overthrowing the government. I'm not saying the United States wasn't involved in trying to shape events. So were Russia and the European Union. But Ukrainians were in the driver's seat the whole way through. I know the guy who posted the first Facebook call to protest Yanukovych in November 2013; he's not an American agent. RT, meanwhile, reports fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time. By all means consume a healthy and varied media diet – don't stop at the US mainstream media. But ask yourself how often RT reports critically on the Russian government, and consider how that lacuna shapes the rest of their reporting. You will find plenty of reporting in the Washington Post that is critical of the US government and US foreign policy in general, and decisions in Ukraine and the Ukrainian government in specific. Our aim is to be fair, without picking sides.
Best, Michael Birnbaum

======================= end of exchange =======================

Right, the United States doesn't play indispensable roles in changes of foreign governments; never has, never will; even when they offer billions of dollars; even when they pick the new president, which, apparently, is not the same as picking sides. It should be noticed that Mr Birnbaum offers not a single example to back up his extremist claim that RT "reports fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time." "All the time", no less! That should make it easy to give some examples.

For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And, yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem – Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast? Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that when they do it can seem rather weird.

To the casual observer, THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA indictments of July 14 of Russian intelligence agents (GRU) reinforced the argument that the Soviet government interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. Regard these indictments in proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at determining the winner.

The Russians did it (cont.)
Each day I spend about three hours reading the Washington Post. Amongst other things I'm looking for evidence – real, legal, courtroom-quality evidence, or at least something logical and rational – to pin down those awful Russkis for their many recent crimes, from influencing the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election to use of a nerve agent in the UK. But I do not find such evidence.

Each day brings headlines like these:

These are all from the same day, August 9, which led me to thinking of doing this article, but similar stories can be found any day in the Post and in major newspapers anywhere in America. None of the articles begins to explain how Russia did these things, or even WHY. Motivation appears to have become a lost pursuit in the American mass media. The one thing sometimes mentioned, which I think may have some credibility, is Russia's preference of Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But this doesn't begin to explain how Russia could pull off any of the electoral magic it's accused of, which would be feasible only if the United States were a backward, Third World, Banana Republic.

There's the Facebook ads, as well as all the other ads The people who are influenced by this story – have they read many of the actual ads? Many are pro-Clinton or anti-Trump; many are both; many are neither. It's one big mess, the only rational explanation of this which I've read is that they come from money-making websites, "click-bait" sites as they're known, which earn money simply by attracting visitors.

As to the nerve agents, it makes more sense if the UK or the CIA did it to make the Russians look bad, because the anti-Russian scandal which followed was totally predictable. Why would Russia choose the time of the World Cup in Moscow – of which all of Russia was immensely proud – to bring such notoriety down upon their head? But that would have been an ideal time for their enemies to want to embarrass them.

However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II.

But we're the Good Guys, ain't we?

For a defender of US foreign policy there's very little that causes extreme heartburn more than someone implying a "moral equivalence" between American behavior and that of Russia. That was the case during Cold War I and it's the same now in Cold War II. It just drives them up the wall.

After the United States passed a law last year requiring TV station RT (Russia Today) to register as a "foreign agent", the Russians passed their own law allowing authorities to require foreign media to register as a "foreign agent". Senator John McCain denounced the new Russian law, saying there is "no equivalence" between RT and networks such as Voice of America, CNN and the BBC, whose journalists "seek the truth, debunk lies, and hold governments accountable." By contrast, he said, "RT's propagandists debunk the truth, spread lies, and seek to undermine democratic governments in order to further Vladimir Putin's agenda."

And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S. government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski, "apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would interfere in the other's elections."

"Is this moral equivalence fair?" Malinowski asked and answered: "In short, no. Russia's interference in the United States' 2016 election could not have been more different from what the United States does to promote democracy in other countries."

How do you satirize such officials and such high-school beliefs?

We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance."

"Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and government-overthrows. The authors continue: "This narrative is churned out by propaganda outlets such as RT and Sputnik [radio station]. it is deployed by isolationists who propound a U.S. retreat from global leadership."

"Isolationists" is what [neo]conservatives call critics of US foreign policy whose arguments they can't easily dismiss, so they imply that such people just don't want the US to be involved in anything abroad.

And "global leadership" is what they call being first in election-interferences and government-overthrows.

https://williamblum.org/aer/read/159

[Aug 22, 2018] Facebook Kills "Inauthentic" Foreign News Accounts - US Propaganda Stays Alive

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Internet Research Agency ..."
"... The anti-Russian mania in U.S. politics gives social media companies a welcome excuse to clamp down on promotional schemes for sites like Liberty Front Press by claiming that these are disinformation campaigns run by the U.S. enemy of the day . ..."
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... Well this surely shows that Facebook/Twitter is run through the help of US/Western intelligence ..."
"... Sorry, but, if you let any opinion on Facebook or Twitter sway your politics, you're an idiot. ..."
"... fireEye, google, yahoo, facebook and so many other tech companies are all in a few miles radius of one another in San Jose area of California ..."
"... In the battles over ideas, printing presses were often targeted for destruction so ideas could be restricted -- what's happening with Twitter and Facebook is merely an updated version of such repression. ..."
"... Blogs today represent yesterday's broadsheets, and by using social media, they can increase their exposure to a wider audience. Thus, social media represents a point-of-control for those trying to shape/frame discourse/content. They may be private companies, but they interact with public discourse and ought to be subjected to Free Speech controls like the USA's 1st Amendment. ..."
"... Very many hi-tech companies in the US are working with the CIA. Such as Oracle that has an office on the east coast of the US that keeps a very low profile inside the company. ..."
"... Robert Bridge provides us with a timely written article dealing with the issue at hand: "And if US intel is in bed with Hollywood you can be damn sure they're spending time in the MSM whorehouse as well." ..."
"... IMHO, it would be foolish to presume that the CIA would simply discontinue and to walk away from (as it claims!) a program like Operation Mockingbird. Government agencies have famously infiltrated the Quakers (ferchrissakes!). Facebook was funded and developed by a CIA front shop. Zuckerburg is a dopey kid and a frontispiece. ..."
"... The danger of course is when people start to conclude that any media site permitted by FB or SM is Sanctioned by the Propaganda department of the Ministry of Truth and ignored. ..."
"... Trump would be hailed a savior if he were to morph into President Taft and Bust the Trusts like BigLie Media, its allied telecoms and social media corps. ..."
"... As to a lack authenticity, what about the tweets from outside Egypt pushing and reporting on the "Arab Spring" protests there. We have other examples of "inauthentic" social messaging on other agendas pushed like Syria. What about "A Gay Girl in Damascus?" ..."
"... who still uses facebook? The only people i know who still are active users are senior citizens. ..."
Aug 22, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

The creation of digital content led to the re-establishment of claqueurs :

By 1830 the claque had become an institution. The manager of a theatre or opera house was able to send an order for any number of claqueurs. These were usually under a chef de claque (leader of applause), who judged where the efforts of the claqueurs were needed and to initiate the demonstration of approval. This could take several forms. There would be commissaires ("officers/commissioner") who learned the piece by heart and called the attention of their neighbors to its good points between the acts. Rieurs (laughers) laughed loudly at the jokes. Pleureurs (criers), generally women, feigned tears, by holding their handkerchiefs to their eyes. Chatouilleurs (ticklers) kept the audience in a good humor, while bisseurs (encore-ers) simply clapped and cried "Bis! Bis!" to request encores.

Today anyone can create content and rent or buy virtual claqueurs in from of "likes" on Facebook or "followers" on Twitter to increase its distribution.

An alternative is to create artificial social media personas who then promote ones content. That is what the Internet Research Agency , the Russian "troll factory" from St. Petersburg, did. The fake personas it established on Facebook promoted IRA created clickbait content like puppy picture pages that was then marketed to sell advertisements .

The profit orientated social media giants do not like such third party promotions. They prefer that people pay THEM to promote their content. Selling advertisements is Facebook's business. Promotional accounts on its own platform are competition.

The anti-Russian mania in U.S. politics gives social media companies a welcome excuse to clamp down on promotional schemes for sites like Liberty Front Press by claiming that these are disinformation campaigns run by the U.S. enemy of the day .

Yesterday Facebook announced that it deleted a number of user accounts for "inauthentic behavior":

We've removed 652 Pages, groups and accounts for coordinated inauthentic behavior that originated in Iran and targeted people across multiple internet services in the Middle East, Latin America, UK and US. FireEye, a cybersecurity firm, gave us a tip in July about "Liberty Front Press," a network of Facebook Pages as well as accounts on other online services.
...
We are able to link this network to Iranian state media through publicly available website registration information, as well as the use of related IP addresses and Facebook Pages sharing the same admins. For example, one part of the network, "Quest 4 Truth," claims to be an independent Iranian media organization, but is in fact linked to Press TV, an English-language news network affiliated with Iranian state media.
The FireEye report Facebook acted on notes:
FireEye has identified a suspected influence operation that appears to originate from Iran aimed at audiences in the U.S., U.K., Latin America, and the Middle East. This operation is leveraging a network of inauthentic news sites and clusters of associated accounts across multiple social media platforms to promote political narratives in line with Iranian interests. These narratives include anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes, as well as support for specific U.S. policies favorable to Iran, such as the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) .
...
Based on an investigation by FireEye Intelligence's Information Operations analysis team, we assess with moderate confidence that this activity originates from Iranian actors.

The evidence FireEye presents is quite thin. The purpose of its inquest and report is obviously self-promotion.

Moon of Alabama is also promoting anti-Saudi , anti-Israeli , and pro-Palestinian themes. It supports the JCPOA deal. This is, according to FireEye, "in line with Iranian interests". It may well be. But does that make Moon of Alabama a "suspected influence operation"? Is it an "inauthentic news site"?

Is the @MoonofA Twitter account showing "coordinated inauthentic behavior" when it promotes the pieces presented on this site? We, by the way, assess with high confidence that that this activity originates from a German actor. Is that a reason to shut it down?

Who will shut down the tons of "inauthentic" accounts U.S. spies , the British military and Israeli propaganda organisations run?

Here is another high confidence tip for FireEye. There is proof, and even an admission of guilt, that a hostile government financed broadcasting organization is creating inauthentic Facebook accounts to disseminate disinformation. These narratives include anti-Russian, anti-Syrian, and pro-Saudi views, as well as support for specific U.S. policies favorable to Israel, such as its financing of the anti-Iranian headscarf campaign .

This year the U.S. government run Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) will spend more than $23 million for its Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB). OCB administers Radio and Television (TV) Martí programs directed at the Cuban public. In its 2019 budget request to Congress (pdf) the BBG admits that it creates inauthentic Facebook accounts to increase the distribution of its dreck:

In FY 2018, OCB is establishing on island digital teams to create non-branded local Facebook accounts to disseminate information . Native pages increase the chances of appearing on Cuban Facebook users newsfeeds. The same strategy will be replicated on other preferred social media networks.

How is this different from what the PressTV may have done? When will Facebook shut those inauthentic BBG accounts down?


---
h/t to Left I on the News

Comments


jo6pac , Aug 22, 2018 1:31:58 PM | 1

The truth hurts the 1%

Thanks b

librul , Aug 22, 2018 1:48:13 PM | 2

Before most of us had ever heard of "Putin's Chef", the Pentagon was bragging publicly that it was using Facebook click-bait for propaganda.

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2017/09/analysts-are-quitting-state-departments-anti-propaganda-team/140936/

At the Defense One Summit last November [2016], former GEC director Michael Lumpkin [GEC, Pentagon propaganda department] described how the Center was using the data it received as a Facebook advertiser to maximize the effectiveness of its own targeted appeals.

"Using Facebook ads, I can go within Facebook, I can go grab an audience, I can pick Country X, I need age group 13 to 34, I need people who have liked -- whether it's Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi or any other set -- I can shoot and hit them directly with messaging," Lumpkin said. He emphasized that with the right data, effective message targeting could be done for "pennies a click."

Chipnik , Aug 22, 2018 1:50:52 PM | 4
Ironically, when I created a FB page hangout for my foreign students to disseminate topical educational materials that were freely available as PDF links, or free 'loss-leader' lessons from for-profits, or Khan Academy free lesson links ... in other words, organizing a docent-guided free education feed for terribly poor 3W students ...

FB informed me that this was an 'illegal' business activity, lol. They shut it down with *zero* warning. One moment it was a beautiful colorful uplifting education resource, the next it was burnt to ashes. 404.

ATM, on an Anony FB page I launched to reconnect with my students, after a couple ill-advised comments to their thread posts, discussing what's *really* going on in the world, FB has blocked any posts that I might want to make. They just never show up when I hit enter. Like training a bad puppy, lol. All FB lets me do is 'like' or emoji or 'wave' to my students, so it's a semaphore that I still exist, even in FB lockup.

But I think I'll stop. It's bread-crumbing them to FBs candy-cane house and the boiling cauldron that awaits. Frog in a Pot!

Ianovskii , Aug 22, 2018 2:16:03 PM | 5
Regarding 4:

Chipnik, Open a VK account and invite your students! No more censorship!

Bart Hansen , Aug 22, 2018 2:30:32 PM | 7
"...we assess with moderate confidence that this activity originates from Iranian actors." Jeez, can't they at least produce a "highly likely" for us? On the intelligence community's confidence scale, "moderate" has to be just above "wishful" and "doubtful"
fastfreddy , Aug 22, 2018 2:32:46 PM | 8
One of the tricks of corporate propaganda: Often, when exposed to capitalist propaganda, a socialist gets the impression that he can have the best of both worlds! - the perceived benefits of capitalism as he keeps his beloved social benefits.

It isn't until some time after the bmobing has stopped, that he realizes that he has lost ALL his former social benefits and what he has thereafter is hard capitalism and no money.

Zanon , Aug 22, 2018 2:45:53 PM | 9
Well this surely shows that Facebook/Twitter is run through the help of US/Western intelligence. Only way is to fight back or you will eventually have fines and end up in jail for thoughtcrimes.

This site and us here commenting is of course already targeted by these scums, besides, sites like this will certainly be shut down sooner or later.

Remember Facebook also attacked Venezuela recently, "Why Did Facebook Purge TeleSUR English?"

TeleSUR English is a rare voice of dissent to US foreign policy. Is that why Facebook deleted its page?
https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Why-Did-Facebook-Purge-TeleSUR-English-20180816-0016.html
ben , Aug 22, 2018 2:47:13 PM | 10
Sorry, but, if you let any opinion on Facebook or Twitter sway your politics, you're an idiot. At the very least, naive to a fault.

Claqueurs is a new word for me b, thanks for the education.

Zanon , Aug 22, 2018 2:49:46 PM | 11
ben

Its not facebook itself this is about but views, freedom of speech itself - that is what being attacked.

james , Aug 22, 2018 3:20:48 PM | 12
b.. thanks... your first paragraph giving context to how the public was swayed going back close to 200 years ago was very interesting..

The usa gov't has something to sell and something to buy.. fireEye, google, yahoo, facebook and so many other tech companies are all in a few miles radius of one another in San Jose area of California.. If Russia was to bomb somewhere in the usa - that would be one good place to start!

They are all selling to the usa gov't at this point... the usa devotes so much to propaganda and these corps all try to peddle the needed tools to keep the fearmongering going, when they're not snooping of course! hey - they can do both - snoop and sell!!

karlof1 , Aug 22, 2018 3:31:39 PM | 14
Long ago before the Hydrocarbon Epoch, the Broadsheet was your typical newscast assembled by the local printer who was often reporter and editor, and even in small towns there was competition, with readers of news gathering in coffee shops to discuss their contents. The vociferousness of many publications was extreme, but as Jefferson observed in the 1790s, easily disproved hyperbole was far more desirable than censorship -- people were deemed capable of determining a publication's veracity for themselves and thus their success or failure would be determined by the marketplace of ideas.

In the battles over ideas, printing presses were often targeted for destruction so ideas could be restricted -- what's happening with Twitter and Facebook is merely an updated version of such repression. With the advent of the personal computer and internet, ease of publishing exploded, which presented elites determined to control the overall discourse with a huge problem they are still grappling with. One of the aims of the Independent Media Center on its founding in 1999 was to turn every activist into a reporter and every computer into a printing press with contents published collectively at regional Media Centers. Unfortunately, after a promising first several years, the nascent movement failed and remains in dormancy, being mostly replaced by personal blogs.

Blogs today represent yesterday's broadsheets, and by using social media, they can increase their exposure to a wider audience. Thus, social media represents a point-of-control for those trying to shape/frame discourse/content. They may be private companies, but they interact with public discourse and ought to be subjected to Free Speech controls like the USA's 1st Amendment.

AriusArmenian , Aug 22, 2018 4:30:10 PM | 15
Very many hi-tech companies in the US are working with the CIA. Such as Oracle that has an office on the east coast of the US that keeps a very low profile inside the company. In fact the first contract that launched the company was a contract with the CIA to implement the IBM SQL standard. I shouldn't have to explain to anyone here why the CIA would use a relational database (have to keep all those subversive secret ops in order). Similar connection to CIA for Google, Facebook, Symantec, etc.

If you are using US software (very likely) then assume CIA and NSA back-doors. Some solutions are to use Linux and VPNs, and Yandex for cloud storage. Get away from US software.

karlof1 , Aug 22, 2018 5:13:35 PM | 17
Robert Bridge provides us with a timely written article dealing with the issue at hand: "And if US intel is in bed with Hollywood you can be damn sure they're spending time in the MSM whorehouse as well."
karlof1 , Aug 22, 2018 5:28:53 PM | 18
Sorry, should have included this in 17. As many know, Caitlin Johnstone, a Truth Seeker par excellence, has also been censored, but prior to that wrote this essay on the subject at hand, which is all about manufacturing consent as she sees it:

"This is a setup. Hit the soft target so your oligarch-friendly censorship doesn't look like what it is, then once you've manufactured consent, go on to shut down the rest of dissenting media bit by bit."

This is a US government ordered setup supported by the evidence she presents in her intro, but not by Trump!

fast freddy , Aug 22, 2018 5:53:49 PM | 20
IMHO, it would be foolish to presume that the CIA would simply discontinue and to walk away from (as it claims!) a program like Operation Mockingbird. Government agencies have famously infiltrated the Quakers (ferchrissakes!). Facebook was funded and developed by a CIA front shop. Zuckerburg is a dopey kid and a frontispiece.
Pft , Aug 22, 2018 7:06:53 PM | 22
The danger of course is when people start to conclude that any media site permitted by FB or SM is Sanctioned by the Propaganda department of the Ministry of Truth and ignored. Then these few truthful media sites that are unbanned will need to beg these social media giants to ban them so as to restablish credibility. FB and SM will then need to ban a few controlled MSM sites so people will believe they are credible and read the propaganda

I guess we are not there yet, or are we? I do not use FB or other SM for news or anything else, although I do occasionally click on links to them from a web page, but I guess a lot of people do. Maybe that will change.

karlof1 , Aug 22, 2018 7:13:05 PM | 23
The battle over Net Neutrality is related to this. Recently, Verizon blackmailed a California fire department engaged in fighting the state's largest ever wildfire by throttling its data feed thus threatening public safety for a Few Dollars More.

Trump would be hailed a savior if he were to morph into President Taft and Bust the Trusts like BigLie Media, its allied telecoms and social media corps.

Curtis , Aug 22, 2018 7:21:01 PM | 24
Claqueurs. One of the earliest versions of the annoying "laugh track" used in television. Like Ben 10, I learned something new today.

As to a lack authenticity, what about the tweets from outside Egypt pushing and reporting on the "Arab Spring" protests there. We have other examples of "inauthentic" social messaging on other agendas pushed like Syria. What about "A Gay Girl in Damascus?"

As usual, thanks for pointing out the hypocrisy of US govt/media.

pB , Aug 22, 2018 8:41:56 PM | 25
who still uses facebook? The only people i know who still are active users are senior citizens.

[Aug 17, 2018] What is definitely conclusive is the Gucci 2 entity forged the inclusion of Russian fingerprints in the leaked version of the documents by pasting it into a Russian language Word template.

Notable quotes:
"... What is definitely conclusive is the Gucci 2 entity forged the inclusion of Russian fingerprints in the leaked version of the documents by pasting it into a Russian language Word template. With 70 years of experience in espionage, there is no way Russian spy agencies are that sloppy and moreover, and if they were it would be absolutely unprecedented. ..."
"... the central conclusion of William Binnery's forensic analysis: that Gucifer 2.0 was a fabrication, and that the DNC emails were downloaded, not hacked by Russia. ..."
"... Were Assange be allowed to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee later this month, the lid could be blown off the entire sordid operation. ..."
"... From before the CIA's formation the US intelligence activities have been the province of the Republican Party (there are plenty of exceptions, but please follow). Allen Dulles and his ilk were friends with and shared goals with German industrialists long before World War II. These relationships continued through WWII and afterwards. The CIA has functioned as an international coal and iron police, overthrowing governments around the world that have stood in the way of corporate profits. ..."
"... This edition of Covert Action Information Bulletin, in 1990, happened just before a shift in Washington. Almost all of the operations run by our government to destabilize Eastern Europe and the USSR in 1990 were organized by the political right and run by people such as Paul Weyrich. But the nineties showed a rise in Democratic activity in these settings. I would guess that a mental image of this would be our then-First Lady lying about dodging bullets on an airstrip during the destruction of Yugoslavia. It marked the successful CIA takeover of the Democratic Party. ..."
"... The 2016 Russiagate hysteria has been an intelligence operation which has been by all measures successful. I presumed initially that the scam was done to put Hillary into the White House, but now wonder if having Trump as President was part of the long-term strategy. ..."
"... Please note that the DNC backed over fifty new candidates for Congress who have intelligence backgrounds. How do you think they will vote for the coming war resolution against Russia? ..."
"... Not sure about the theory of installing Trump in the WH is part of a long term strategy of the deep state, but the latter seems to be adapting to the disruption quite well. ..."
"... Additional info: Stephen Kinzer's "The Brothers" which documents the Dulles brother's creation of the Cold War mentality and activities. Shouldn't we add Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski. ..."
"... Citing a book from almost 30 years ago that implicated ONLY the Republicans in the CIAs machinations ignores LBJ and the CIA's involvement in Vietnam and possibly in the JFK assassination. ..."
"... One suspects that the President has revealed far less than he knows, perhaps wary of being accused of "obstruction" by Mueller in concert with the controlled media. He actually requested that William Binney present his analysis to then CIA Director Pompeo, who has since sat on it. ..."
"... But actually, to your point, the reverse is true. If the DNC and Podesta were hacked by Russians, the NSA would have been able to demonstrate that fact through evidentiary proof, a point made repeatedly by Binney. ..."
"... No such proof was or has ever been offered. Instead the main document presented to the American public was the January 6, 2017 "assessment" by analysts hand-picked by John Brennan, who has played a key role in the illegal operation against President Trump. ..."
"... I was struck by one comment particularly, why not ask Assange about the leak. ..."
"... Keeping him incommunicado certainly serves the leaders of the lynch mob and thanks goes to the new Ecuadorian President. He was asked to shut the guy up and he did. ..."
"... Herman, Assange has been asked about the identity of the leaker and replied that he couldn't comment because Wikileaks has a strict policy of maintaining sources' confidentiality. No potential source would ever trust Assange if he violated that policy. Instead, Assange offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Seth Richards' murderer. So this was his way of answering the question indirectly. ..."
Aug 17, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Paul N August 14, 2018 at 2:36 pm

I don't believe the Russians did this. I think there are perhaps millions of people in the US capable of carrying out this action and many more with motive. Furthermore, if they did, I am happy that the information was made available so I can't see why I would care.

That said, I am unconvinced by this evidence. I am quite familiar with file systems on different operating systems and I would at least need to know what device we are talking about here. Did it come from Assange? Why doesn't somebody say so? What sort of device is it? The simple fact that it was copied from a computer doesn't prove that the computer was the DNC server. It might have been copied from Putin's iMac. I believe in one reading the writer acknowledged that the dates on the drive could be manipulated and I am certain that this is true. While this may still leave it above the level of evidence that the FBI or "intelligence" agencies have presented (or even claimed to have) it is not conclusive. Reply

GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:10 pm

What is definitely conclusive is the Gucci 2 entity forged the inclusion of Russian fingerprints in the leaked version of the documents by pasting it into a Russian language Word template. With 70 years of experience in espionage, there is no way Russian spy agencies are that sloppy and moreover, and if they were it would be absolutely unprecedented.

Furthermore, I have no reason to disbelieve Craig Murray that the docs were handed to him directly and transferred by him to Wikileaks. Quite the contrary, in fact, since his reputation would undoubtedly be irreconcilably demolished for all time if the Russiagaters ever came up with hard proof to support their conspiracy theory.

GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:12 pm

Please forgive all the typos, posted on my little bitty phone :)

j. D. D. , August 14, 2018 at 2:21 pm

The crucial premise of the ongoing British-instigated coup against President Trump and the chief legal ground for Robert Mueller's operation against the President, is the claim that the Russians hacked the emails of the DNC and, John Podesta, and provided the results to WikiLeaks which published them. The authenticity of such emails showing Hillary Clinton to be a craven puppet of Wall Street who had cheated Bernie Sanders of the nomination were never disputed, by Clinton, or anyone else.

Nor has the central conclusion of William Binnery's forensic analysis: that Gucifer 2.0 was a fabrication, and that the DNC emails were downloaded, not hacked by Russia.

Furthermore, the only people who really know where and by whom the download occurred are Julian Assange, whose life is now in peril, and former British Ambassador Craig Murray.

Were Assange be allowed to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee later this month, the lid could be blown off the entire sordid operation.

paul g. , August 14, 2018 at 3:03 pm

Craig stated he was merely a go between, who was given the data in the woods by American University by probably another go between. Lots of cut outs here but the data was transferred physically by thumb drive(s).

David G , August 15, 2018 at 8:27 am

"The crucial premise is the claim that the Russians hacked the emails of the DNC and, John Podesta, and provided the results to WikiLeaks which published them."

Don't forget about the Facebook puppy videos. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/10/04/the-mystery-of-the-russia-gate-puppies/

Bob In Portland , August 14, 2018 at 1:25 pm

I would like to call attention to a little slice of history of US the destabilization of Eastern Europe and the USSR that would help to explain what is happening today.

From before the CIA's formation the US intelligence activities have been the province of the Republican Party (there are plenty of exceptions, but please follow). Allen Dulles and his ilk were friends with and shared goals with German industrialists long before World War II. These relationships continued through WWII and afterwards. The CIA has functioned as an international coal and iron police, overthrowing governments around the world that have stood in the way of corporate profits.

Russ Bellant's book, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, points to the political relationship between the Republican Party and fascists around the world. You can read a short article by Bellant here: https://archive.org/details/CovertActionInformationBulletinNo35TheCIAInEasternEurope

This edition of Covert Action Information Bulletin, in 1990, happened just before a shift in Washington. Almost all of the operations run by our government to destabilize Eastern Europe and the USSR in 1990 were organized by the political right and run by people such as Paul Weyrich. But the nineties showed a rise in Democratic activity in these settings. I would guess that a mental image of this would be our then-First Lady lying about dodging bullets on an airstrip during the destruction of Yugoslavia. It marked the successful CIA takeover of the Democratic Party.

The 2016 Russiagate hysteria has been an intelligence operation which has been by all measures successful. I presumed initially that the scam was done to put Hillary into the White House, but now wonder if having Trump as President was part of the long-term strategy.

Please note that the DNC backed over fifty new candidates for Congress who have intelligence backgrounds. How do you think they will vote for the coming war resolution against Russia?

GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:16 pm

Not sure about the theory of installing Trump in the WH is part of a long term strategy of the deep state, but the latter seems to be adapting to the disruption quite well.

Diana Lee , August 14, 2018 at 8:52 pm

Additional info: Stephen Kinzer's "The Brothers" which documents the Dulles brother's creation of the Cold War mentality and activities.
Shouldn't we add Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

michael , August 15, 2018 at 6:33 am

Citing a book from almost 30 years ago that implicated ONLY the Republicans in the CIAs machinations ignores LBJ and the CIA's involvement in Vietnam and possibly in the JFK assassination. Later, Carter was the only Democrat President who may or may not have been heavily involved with the CIA. The Clintons were likely involved with the CIA early on in their Mena, Arkansas drug-smuggling schemes, and the CIA was definitely closely involved in their presidential anti-Slavic foreign policy. The Clintons' neoliberal agenda fit well with the older neocons and consolidated the Duopoly support for the crazed think tank ideas in DC.

jeff montanye , August 17, 2018 at 7:45 am

all perhaps true, but the cia, etc. have terribly neglected their republican base (ftr: registered democrat, sanders and trump voter) and it is baying at their heels, drool swinging from gnashing fangs. that is a political change as profound and radical as anything i observed around the tear gas and batons of the sixties.

Dan Kuhn , August 14, 2018 at 1:19 pm

"They have passed the point of no return; there is no walking it back now. If it fails heads will roll, but most importantly these trusted institutions will have flushed their last vestiges of credibility down the drain. Then what?"

Then nothing. It puts one mind of the comment made by one of the Robber Barons when they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar. His comment " All that was lost was honour" In the present mess even if eventually it all comes to light no one is going to be held answerable. No one is going to jail. Truth does not matter. The propaganda is what matters. if it is proven wrong it is merely swept under the rug. With the short attention spans of Americans it would be forgotten in a New York Minute.

GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:19 pm

Perhaps this explains the need for the likely false flag poison attack in Britain and the fake Douma nerve gas attack. Russiagate hasn't really been panning out so well and too much info has been emerging to challenge the narrative.

David G , August 15, 2018 at 8:29 am

I fully agree.

Peter de Klerk , August 14, 2018 at 1:06 pm

If Russian hacking is a hoax, why has it not been exposed by all the Trump appointed intelligence and FBI heads? Trump's people could shut it down with a public single statement. Y'all are deep into a conspiracy theory that makes no sense.

AnthraxSleuth , August 14, 2018 at 1:27 pm

Pffft!

It was shown to be a hoax by Clinton's own campaign staff in their book released after the election titled "shattered".

"Within 24 hours of her concession speech, [campaign chair John Podesta and manager Robby Mook] assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."

The plan, according to the book, was to push journalists to cover how "Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign," and it succeeded to a fare-thee-well. After the election, coverage of the Russian "collusion" story was relentless, and it helped pressure investigations and hearings on Capitol Hill and even the naming of a special counsel, which in turn has triggered virtually nonstop coverage.

https://nypost.com/2017/10/26/how-team-hillary-played-the-press-for-fools-on-russia/

Guess the only conspiracy theororist here is you. Goebbels would be so proud. You drank the kool-aid bruh!

Peter de Klerk , August 14, 2018 at 2:19 pm

My comment applies equally well to your response. Why doesn't Nunes, Pompeo, or Coates, etc ever say anything about these theories?

AnthraxSleuth , August 14, 2018 at 4:28 pm

It's no longer a theory when the conspirators confess to it in their own writing. Which I demonstrated to you in the previous post.

Peter de Klerk , August 14, 2018 at 6:18 pm

This very slanted article amplifies a few post-election statements. I'm sure Podesta and Mook wanted to play this up. Some of that was sour grapes but most people are inclined to think it was also true. These guys controlling most media outlets and most of the intelligence community seems absurd to me. But I guess we all believe what we want to believe now.

jdd , August 14, 2018 at 2:30 pm

One suspects that the President has revealed far less than he knows, perhaps wary of being accused of "obstruction" by Mueller in concert with the controlled media. He actually requested that William Binney present his analysis to then CIA Director Pompeo, who has since sat on it.

But actually, to your point, the reverse is true. If the DNC and Podesta were hacked by Russians, the NSA would have been able to demonstrate that fact through evidentiary proof, a point made repeatedly by Binney.

No such proof was or has ever been offered. Instead the main document presented to the American public was the January 6, 2017 "assessment" by analysts hand-picked by John Brennan, who has played a key role in the illegal operation against President Trump.

jeff montanye , August 17, 2018 at 7:54 am

And Donald Trump has more training in show business than most politicians or even internet commenters. I suspect there is a fall premiere of quite an extravaganza leading up to the midterm elections.

Herman , August 14, 2018 at 1:03 pm

Read half the most intelligent commentary and had to quick. I was struck by one comment particularly, why not ask Assange about the leak. Too simple but too much to ask, I guess. Keeping him incommunicado certainly serves the leaders of the lynch mob and thanks goes to the new Ecuadorian President. He was asked to shut the guy up and he did.

Modawg , August 14, 2018 at 3:28 pm

I think he has been asked and has politely refused to reveal. But his innuendo is that it was from inside the US and definitely not the Russkies.

alley cat , August 14, 2018 at 4:44 pm

Herman, Assange has been asked about the identity of the leaker and replied that he couldn't comment because Wikileaks has a strict policy of maintaining sources' confidentiality. No potential source would ever trust Assange if he violated that policy. Instead, Assange offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Seth Richards' murderer. So this was his way of answering the question indirectly.

A Solomonic solution that is technically not a violation of confidentiality

Andy Wilcoxson , August 14, 2018 at 12:36 pm

Can I play devil's advocate and ask a question. Can we rule out the possibility that a hacker in Russia, China, or wherever had remote control of a computer in the United States that they used to hack the DNC?

49.1 megabytes per second is almost 400 mbps, which is a very fast transfer speed, but there were one gigabit (1000 mbps) connections available in several US markets when these e-mails were stolen. You might not have been able to transfer the files directly from Washington D.C. to Russia at those speeds, but you certainly could have transferred them between computers within the United States at those speeds using gigabit internet connections.

Is there something I'm missing? How does the file transfer speed prove this was a USB download and not a hack when gigabit internet connections existed that could have accommodated those transfer speeds -- maybe not directly to Russia or Europe, but certainly to another US-based computer that foreign hackers may have have remotely controlled.

Desert Dave , August 14, 2018 at 6:09 pm

Actually a byte is 10 bits total because there is overhead (start and stop bits). So 49.1 MBps is about 491 Mbps. The question of whether the DNC server was attached to a network that fast would be easy to answer, if the FBI or anybody else wanted to check.

AnthraxSleuth , August 15, 2018 at 1:11 am

A byte is 8 bits.

[Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

Highly recommended!
This is an interesting analysis shedding some light on how the US intelligence services have gone rogue...
Notable quotes:
"... Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no evidence. ..."
"... the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough. ..."
"... That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment. ..."
"... He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So, where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail? ..."
"... The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance -- which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US "intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit up." ..."
"... The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on. ..."
"... "What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available, is an impossible task." ..."
"... "The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as conspiracy theory, not as fact." ..."
"... But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and ultimately futile conflicts. ..."
"... Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American efforts in Iraq and Syria. ..."
"... Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
Jul 28, 2018 | russia-insider.com
In today's United States, the term "espionage" doesn't get too much use outside of some specific contexts. There is still sporadic talk of industrial espionage, but with regard to Americans' own efforts to understand the world beyond their borders, they prefer the term "intelligence." This may be an intelligent choice, or not, depending on how you look at things.

First of all, US "intelligence" is only vaguely related to the game of espionage as it has been traditionally played, and as it is still being played by countries such as Russia and China. Espionage involves collecting and validating strategically vital information and conveying it to just the pertinent decision-makers on your side while keeping the fact that you are collecting and validating it hidden from everyone else.

In eras past, a spy, if discovered, would try to bite down on a cyanide capsule; these days torture is considered ungentlemanly, and spies that get caught patiently wait to be exchanged in a spy swap. An unwritten, commonsense rule about spy swaps is that they are done quietly and that those released are never interfered with again because doing so would complicate negotiating future spy swaps.

In recent years, the US intelligence agencies have decided that torturing prisoners is a good idea, but they have mostly been torturing innocent bystanders, not professional spies, sometimes forcing them to invent things, such as "Al Qaeda." There was no such thing before US intelligence popularized it as a brand among Islamic terrorists.

Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no evidence.

There are unlikely to be any more British spy swaps with Russia, and British spies working in Russia should probably be issued good old-fashioned cyanide capsules (since that supposedly super-powerful Novichok stuff the British keep at their "secret" lab in Porton Down doesn't work right and is only fatal 20% of the time).

There is another unwritten, commonsense rule about spying in general: whatever happens, it needs to be kept out of the courts, because the discovery process of any trial would force the prosecution to divulge sources and methods, making them part of the public record. An alternative is to hold secret tribunals, but since these cannot be independently verified to be following due process and rules of evidence, they don't add much value.

A different standard applies to traitors; here, sending them through the courts is acceptable and serves a high moral purpose, since here the source is the person on trial and the method -- treason -- can be divulged without harm. But this logic does not apply to proper, professional spies who are simply doing their jobs, even if they turn out to be double agents. In fact, when counterintelligence discovers a spy, the professional thing to do is to try to recruit him as a double agent or, failing that, to try to use the spy as a channel for injecting disinformation.

Americans have been doing their best to break this rule. Recently, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted a dozen Russian operatives working in Russia for hacking into the DNC mail server and sending the emails to Wikileaks. Meanwhile, said server is nowhere to be found (it's been misplaced) while the time stamps on the files that were published on Wikileaks show that they were obtained by copying to a thumb drive rather than sending them over the internet. Thus, this was a leak, not a hack, and couldn't have been done by anyone working remotely from Russia.

Furthermore, it is an exercise in futility for a US official to indict Russian citizens in Russia. They will never stand trial in a US court because of the following clause in the Russian Constitution: "61.1 A citizen of the Russian Federation may not be deported out of Russia or extradited to another state."

Mueller may summon a panel of constitutional scholars to interpret this sentence, or he can just read it and weep. Yes, the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough.

That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment.

He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So, where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail?

Since there exists an agreement between the US and Russia to cooperate on criminal investigations, Putin offered to question the spies indicted by Mueller. He even offered to have Mueller sit in on the proceedings. But in return he wanted to question US officials who may have aided and abetted a convicted felon by the name of William Browder, who is due to begin serving a nine-year sentence in Russia any time now and who, by the way, donated copious amounts of his ill-gotten money to the Hillary Clinton election campaign.

In response, the US Senate passed a resolution to forbid Russians from questioning US officials. And instead of issuing a valid request to have the twelve Russian spies interviewed, at least one US official made the startlingly inane request to have them come to the US instead. Again, which part of 61.1 don't they understand?

The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance -- which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US "intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit up."

The "intelligence" the US intelligence agencies provide can be anything but; in fact, the stupider it is the better, because its purpose is allow unintelligent people to make unintelligent decisions. In fact, they consider facts harmful -- be they about Syrian chemical weapons, or conspiring to steal the primary from Bernie Sanders, or Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden -- because facts require accuracy and rigor while they prefer to dwell in the realm of pure fantasy and whimsy. In this, their actual objective is easily discernible.

The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on.

One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag operations, à la 9/11, to fake false flag operations, à la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story is perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips. It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.

Trump was recently questioned as to whether he trusted US intelligence. He waffled. A light-hearted answer would have been:

"What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available, is an impossible task."

A more serious, matter-of-fact answer would have been:

"The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as conspiracy theory, not as fact."

And a hardcore, deadpan answer would have been:

"The US intelligence services swore an oath to uphold the US Constitution, according to which I am their Commander in Chief. They report to me, not I to them. They must be loyal to me, not I to them. If they are disloyal to me, then that is sufficient reason for their dismissal."

But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and ultimately futile conflicts.

Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American efforts in Iraq and Syria.

The total cost of wars so far this century for the US is reported to be $4,575,610,429,593. Divided by the 138,313,155 Americans who file tax returns (whether they actually pay any tax is too subtle a question), it works out to just over $33,000 per taxpayer. If you pay taxes in the US, that's your bill so far for the various US intelligence "oopsies."

The 16 US intelligence agencies have a combined budget of $66.8 billion, and that seems like a lot until you realize how supremely efficient they are: their "mistakes" have cost the country close to 70 times their budget. At a staffing level of over 200,000 employees, each of them has cost the US taxpayer close to $23 million, on average. That number is totally out of the ballpark! The energy sector has the highest earnings per employee, at around $1.8 million per. Valero Energy stands out at $7.6 million per. At $23 million per, the US intelligence community has been doing three times better than Valero. Hats off! This makes the US intelligence community by far the best, most efficient collapse driver imaginable.

There are two possible hypotheses for why this is so.

First, we might venture to guess that these 200,000 people are grossly incompetent and that the fiascos they precipitate are accidental. But it is hard to imagine a situation where grossly incompetent people nevertheless manage to funnel $23 million apiece, on average, toward an assortment of futile undertakings of their choosing. It is even harder to imagine that such incompetents would be allowed to blunder along decade after decade without being called out for their mistakes.

Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars."

[Aug 14, 2018] Bloody Sunday 1972 The British Beginning of Gladio

Notable quotes:
"... However, these gunmen were not local Catholics, they were not part of the IRA or any other Ulster organisation, whoever they were, they were there on the orders of external forces. ..."
"... From the point of view of those who sent those gunmen, the event was a great success, it achieved precisely the results they wanted as it resulted in 13 dead, innocent Catholic civilians and ignited the province of Ulster into decades of awful violence. ..."
"... Who would want to do such a thing, who would want to create an internal conflict inside the British Isles that would greatly influence Britain and it's governments for a quarter of a century? I believe that Bloody Sunday was part of the CIA-lead campaign of false flag terror known as Gladio. Gladio terrorist operations had begun in 1972, three years after Muammar Gadaffi had been placed in power in Libya by a CIA coup and Libya was to be the base of operations for Gladio. ..."
Aug 14, 2018 | www.veteranstoday.com

https://us-u.openx.net/w/1.0/pd?plm=6&ph=2857f3e0-a998-4d70-b5c1-b19a3d6766a1&gdpr=0

Note the point made by a Para that all of the members of the British Army killed in the three years of The Troubles to that point had been the victims of 'highly accurate sniper fire'. Then note how the situation was setup to place the Paras in the worst possible position – sent in to a very hot spot where the high ground – the blocks of flats, was occupied by the enemy, an enemy that was known to have possessed at least one sniper rifle. The Paras were going to be shot at and the gunfire was almost certain to come from the flats.

Listen to the testimony of the Paras, they are adamant that is indeed what happened – that multiple weapons opened fire on them from the flats, they were experienced troops and knew exactly what incoming rifle fire sounded like, they saw the bullets striking the ground around them. I have no doubt that this is indeed what happened, that the Paras were fired on from the flats. What happened next was all too predictable -the Paras reacted in the only way they were trained to react when fired upon – to seek out the source of the gunfire and attack it immediately.

This was the start of the massacre as the Paras reacted to the gunfire from the flats by moving forward and shooting at any targets that presented themselves and tragically, the only targets that day were innocent, unarmed British civilians, young Catholics who were guilty of little more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The bishop and other Catholics present on that day are equally adamant that no-one on the civilian side was armed, that none of the protesters fired on the Paras; I believe they are telling te truth just as much as the Paras are.

How can both the Paras and the civilians be telling the truth when they hold opposing testimonies?

I think it is pretty simple and with the benefit of decades of hindsight and the knowledge of many subsequent false flag events, pretty obvious what really happened. I believe that gunmen were indeed placed in the flats and perhaps other buildings around 'Aggro Corner' and those gunmen did indeed fire at the Paras, not with the intention of hitting any of them as that would provide proof that gunmen were present and active that day, but with the intention of causing the Paras to react with the hyper aggression which they had been trained to display.

However, these gunmen were not local Catholics, they were not part of the IRA or any other Ulster organisation, whoever they were, they were there on the orders of external forces. Forces that intended to escalate the civil unrest that had wracked the province since 1969 into a far more belligerent and violent affair where large and highly organised paramilitary forces like the IRA were formed to battle the British Army and the Ulster Constabulary in what was a virtual civil war. For this to happen, an event like Bloody Sunday had to take place, innocent Catholics had to be sacrificed and the British had to look like brutal and murderous imperialist oppressors.

From the point of view of those who sent those gunmen, the event was a great success, it achieved precisely the results they wanted as it resulted in 13 dead, innocent Catholic civilians and ignited the province of Ulster into decades of awful violence.

Who would want to do such a thing, who would want to create an internal conflict inside the British Isles that would greatly influence Britain and it's governments for a quarter of a century? I believe that Bloody Sunday was part of the CIA-lead campaign of false flag terror known as Gladio. Gladio terrorist operations had begun in 1972, three years after Muammar Gadaffi had been placed in power in Libya by a CIA coup and Libya was to be the base of operations for Gladio.

Gladio had multiple objectives, in the political climate of the Cold War it aimed to discredit left wing political groups, more importantly, the aim was to inculcate a climate of fear among the general populace. This was known as the 'strategy of tension' which was intended to generate a pervasive sense of fear which would encourage the population to appeal to the state for protection. I firmly believe that Bloody Sunday and the subsequent 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland was part of Gladio and that the intelligence services of Britain, the USA and their NATO allies were directly responsible.

https://us-u.openx.net/w/1.0/pd?plm=6&ph=2857f3e0-a998-4d70-b5c1-b19a3d6766a1&gdpr=0

  1. US-First August 14, 2018 at 9:08 pm CRY HAVOC AND LET SLIP THE DOGS OF WAR

    One point Ian that is not clear from the videos Ian is that high above the Bogside along the City of Derry walls British soldiers fired down from on high into the crowds making away from the city center for Free Derry Corner. With soldiers separated there is always danger of crossed signals, soldiers caught in crossfire and officers at cross purposes. All in all, as you say, it was a disaster. When the Paras are around expect a no-nonsense high intensity encounter. Whoever, the cad or Hooray Henry was who decided to use the Paras for crowd arrests deserved to be thumped. Nobody deserved to die that day. Nobody! Soldiers as you say just follow orders and if confronted with real or probable danger will react accordingly. And those trained to kill, do just that, kill. Everything in the planning of that day smacked of deliberate provocation/saber-rattling against a peaceful Civil Rights protest march. And the planners of the Bogside havoc from their offices at Whitehall proved a world away from ensuing events on the ground and a far remove from logic or basic common sense. And God rest the dead!

    My favorite poem of the North of Ireland troubles from 300 years ago: "The Man From God Knows Where"
    http://www.politics.ie/forum/northern-ireland/205823-man-god-knows-where.html

[Aug 13, 2018] Google Is Constantly Tracking, Even If You Turn Off Device Location History

You do not need to keep you phone on when you driving, do you ?
Aug 13, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Mon, 08/13/2018 - 17:25 74 SHARES

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Google is actually tracking you even when you switch your device settings to Location History "off" .

As journalist Mark Ames comments in response to a new Associated Press story exposing Google's ability to track people at all times even when they explicitly tell Google not to via iPhone and Android settings, "The Pentagon invented the internet to be the perfect global surveillance/counterinsurgency machine. Surveillance is baked into the internet's DNA."

In but the latest in a continuing saga of big tech tracking and surveillance stories which should serve to convince us all we are living in the beginning phases of a Minority Report style tracking and pansophical "pre-crime" system, it's now confirmed that the world's most powerful tech company and search tool will always find a way to keep your location data .

The Associated Press sought the help of Princeton researchers to prove that while Google is clear and upfront about giving App users the ability to turn off or "pause" Location History on their devices, there are other hidden means through which it retains the data .

According to the AP report :

Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you've been. Google's support page on the subject states: "You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored."

That isn't true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking.

For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are .

And some searches that have nothing to do with location, like "chocolate chip cookies," or "kids science kits," pinpoint your precise latitude and longitude -- accurate to the square foot -- and save it to your Google account .

The issue directly affects around two billion people using Google's Android operating software and iPhone users relying on Google maps or a simple search.

Among the computer science researchers at Princeton conducting the tests is Jonathan Mayer, who told the AP , "If you're going to allow users to turn off something called 'Location History,' then all the places where you maintain location history should be turned off," and added, "That seems like a pretty straightforward position to have."

Google, for its part, is defending the software and privacy tracking settings , saying the company has been perfectly clear and has not violated privacy ethics.

"There are a number of different ways that Google may use location to improve people's experience, including: Location History, Web and App Activity, and through device-level Location Services," a Google statement to the AP reads. "We provide clear descriptions of these tools, and robust controls so people can turn them on or off, and delete their histories at any time."

According to the AP, there is a way to prevent Google from storing the various location marker and metadata collection possibilities, but it's somewhat hidden and painstaking.

Google's own description on how to do this as a result of the AP inquiry is as follows :

To stop Google from saving these location markers, the company says, users can turn off another setting, one that does not specifically reference location information. Called "Web and App Activity" and enabled by default, that setting stores a variety of information from Google apps and websites to your Google account.

When paused, it will prevent activity on any device from being saved to your account. But leaving "Web & App Activity" on and turning "Location History" off only prevents Google from adding your movements to the "timeline," its visualization of your daily travels. It does not stop Google's collection of other location markers.

You can delete these location markers by hand, but it's a painstaking process since you have to select them individually , unless you want to delete all of your stored activity.

Of course, the more constant location data obviously means more advertising profits and further revenue possibilities for Google and its clients, so we fully expect future hidden tracking loopholes to possibly come to light.

Beginning in 2014, Google has utilized user location histories to allow advertisers to track the effectiveness of online ads at driving foot traffic . With the continued possibility of real-time tracking to generate billions of dollars, it should come as no surprise that Google would seek to make it as difficult (or perhaps impossible?) as it can for users to ensure they aren't tracked.

As for the government, we can only imagine the creative surveillance "fun" Washington's 16+ intelligence agencies are having with such a powerful tool right now.

[Aug 08, 2018] The Elys e and Gladio B by Thierry Meyssan

Notable quotes:
"... Of course, in the 21st century, we no longer torture and assassinate people as we used to, we simply discredit trouble-makers by way of the Press. Above all, there is no more Soviet Union, and consequently no more stay-behind network. But the personnel we used and who were replaced have had to be recycled. ..."
"... A number of elements attest to the fact that these agents first of all led the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and then, today, against Russia [ 8 ], to the point where they are labelled by the FBI as Gladio B [ 9 ]. The efficiency of this network in the " Greater Middle East " over the last 17 years needs no further proof. ..."
Aug 08, 2018 | www.voltairenet.org

Nonetheless, we may remember that during the Cold War, the United States and the United Kingdom had created, in all of the allied states, a service designed to combat Soviet influence – without the knowledge of the national institutions. This system is known to historians as the stay-behind, and to the public by the name of its Italian branch, Gladio. All over the world, it was under the joint command of the CIA and MI6, via the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) [ 3 ], except for Europe, where it was connected to NATO [ 4 ]

The main operational officials of this stay-behind network (in other words, capable of becoming clandestine in the case of a Soviet invasion) were the ex-officials of the Nazi repression. While the French people know that SS captain and head of the Gestapo in Lyon, Klaus Barbie, became the official representative of the stay-behind network in Bolivia working against Che Guevara, they do not know, for example, that the Police Prefect for Paris, the collaborator Maurice Papon, who massacred a hundred Algerians on 17 October 1961, was one of the leaders of the network in France, working against the FLN [ 5 ]. Here in Damascus where I live, people remember another SS officer and director of the camp at Drancy, Alois Brunner, who was placed as an advisor to the Syrian secret services by the CIA and MI6 in order to prevent the country from swinging over into the Soviet camp. He was arrested by President Bachar el-Assad as soon as he came to power.

In France, when the stay-behind turned against France, accused it of leaving Algeria to the Soviets, organised the coup d'état in 1961 and financed the OAS (Organisation de l'Armée Secrète), President De Gaulle recuperated certain of its agents in order to form a militia to work against the militia - the SAC (Service d'Action Civique) [ 6 ].

Despite appearances, these stories are not as old as all that - the world of politics still hosts personalities who were part of the stay-behind network. For example, the current President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Junker, was the head of Gladio in Luxembourg [ 7 ].

The first General Secretary of " En Marche ! ", Ludovic Chaker, is allegedly an agent of the DGSE. He is said to have hired – by accident – a friend of Jawad Bendaoud, " Daesh's landlord, " as a bodyguard for the candidate Macron. Today he works at the Elysée where he " doubles " the anti-terrorist task force of Prefect Bousquet de Florian.

Of course, in the 21st century, we no longer torture and assassinate people as we used to, we simply discredit trouble-makers by way of the Press. Above all, there is no more Soviet Union, and consequently no more stay-behind network. But the personnel we used and who were replaced have had to be recycled.

A number of elements attest to the fact that these agents first of all led the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and then, today, against Russia [ 8 ], to the point where they are labelled by the FBI as Gladio B [ 9 ]. The efficiency of this network in the " Greater Middle East " over the last 17 years needs no further proof.

Precisely, the question of the fight against terrorism – or its manipulation - was handled by the United States secret service, which the Elysée was preparing to replicate. Oddly enough, the Elysées anti-terrorist task force, directed by Prefect Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, is already doubled by a " cell " entrusted to an executive of the President's chief of staff, Admiral Bernard Rogel. According to L'Opinion , this executive, Ludovic Chaker – who hired Benalla – is a " veteran " agent of the Direction Générale de la Sécurite Exterieure (DGSE) [ 10 ]

We are not attempting to compare Alexandre Benalla with Maurice Papon, but to enquire whether an element of an illegal force of repression is in the process of being (re)created in Europe. Article licensed under Creative Commons

The articles on Voltaire Network may be freely reproduced provided the source is cited, their integrity is respected and they are not used for commercial purposes (license CC BY-NC-ND ).

Source : "The Elysée and " Gladio B " ", by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network , 29 July 2018, www.voltairenet.org/article202201.html

[Aug 08, 2018] The CIA, FBI, and US army killed Dr. King with the help of their organized crime assets. JFK might be killed the same way

Aug 08, 2018 | www.unz.com

From: Civil War II Coming by Kevin Barrett

William Pepper -- the King family's attorney who proved in a court of law that the CIA, FBI, and US army killed Dr. King with the help of their organized crime assets -- once spoke with a US Army Colonel who admitted to helping plan the assassination. The Colonel said that the military had done extensive focus group style interviews with participants in the 1967 race riots and determined that Dr. King's charisma was the biggest factor driving the riots.

Counterintuitively, the apostle of nonviolence was inspiring the psychological liberation of black people in such a way that a certain percentage felt empowered to act out their repressed anger. So when King determined to bring half a million followers to Washington, DC and stay there until the feds pulled out of Vietnam and declared a real war on poverty, the Colonel and his friends immediately envisioned the nation's capital erupting into mass violence that could spread nationwide on a scale many orders of magnitude beyond what had happened during 1967's Long Hot Summer, perhaps precipitating a real civil war culminating in the revolutionary overthrow of the American State. This, the Colonel explained to Pepper, was the primary reason King had to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

Predictably, the Deep State's murder of Dr. King did not solve the racial violence problem. The assassination itself set off a wave of new riots in cities including Chicago, Baltimore, and -- sorry, Colonel -- Washington, DC. White-dominated forces of the State retaliated with escalating repression. Black communities felt increasingly under siege, and have continued to feel that way until the present day.

[Aug 05, 2018] Bernie Sanders did everything he was told he should do. He supported the Democratic establishment candidate, and now he believes the Russiagate story.

Notable quotes:
"... While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than " a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
"... So you plan to continue this McCarthy Russian BS? You didn't speak out when you got cheated in the primaries, and you didn't seem to care that Hillary was using her own paid troll army. Integrity matters Bernie and you are losing yours. ..."
"... You stopped speaking for me and millions of others when you caved to crooked HRC. No it was NOT clear that Russia was "deeply involved in the election. What is CLEAR is your betrayal of your followers and cover up of the election fraud perpetrated by DNC! Everybody knows... ..."
"... Bernie, that's MIC propaganda. Stop helping it. There are millions of reasons Trump should not be president. We don't need a hyped up corporate fairytale to make that point https://t.co/7FAwb47LtB ..."
"... Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate by the democrats. ..."
Aug 05, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

It has been clear to everyone (except Donald Trump) that Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 election and intends to be involved in 2018. It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the Russian oligarchs.

-- Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 16, 2018

However, Sanders had already committed the unforgivable sin of criticizing the Democratic establishment candidate from the left. There is simply no way of coming back from that treason.

Despite his stance, Sanders has also been constantly presented as another Russian agent, with the Washington Post (11/12/17) asking its readers, "When Russia interferes with the 2020 election on behalf of Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders, how will liberals respond?" The message is clear: The progressive wave rising across America is and will be a consequence of Russia, not of the failures of the system, nor of the Democrats.

It isn't just progressive politicians that are all traitors. Movements like Black Lives Matter are also traitors for Russia.

Slate: Russian Trolls Were Obsessed With Black Lives Matter
CNN: Her son was killed -- then came the Russian trolls
NY Times: The Propaganda Tools Used by Russians to Influence the 2016 Election

snoopydawg on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 6:32pm
Bernie's tweet is hysterical
It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the Russian oligarchs.

Hey, Bernie. The American people were the ones who should have decided who won the primary, not Hillary, the DNC and the delegates. That you are blaming Her loss on Russia instead of admitting that the American people rejected her makes you nothing more than a democratic puppet. How embarrassing for you.

Every Black voter should abandon the DP until they apologize for their disrespect for the BLM and saying that they only started protesting cops killing Blacks because Russia manipulated them into doing so.

Eichenwald thinks that our intelligence agencies are patriots who have spent their lives working on keeping us safe does he? I agree with Dmitry Orlov's take on them.

US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the

The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on.

....

the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself.

While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than " a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. "

And let's not forget how many coups and false flag events they had a hand in creating that have cost so much misery and death.

One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag operations, ŕ la 9/11, to fake false flag operations, ŕ la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story is perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips.

It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.

The real puppets are the ones who believe in this silly story that Russia is pulling Trump's strings and that the GOP are also Russian puppets. Good grief!

snoopydawg on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 6:55pm
The first tweet shows how people twist events

The others show that there are others out there that have seen through this propaganda crap. I'd like to see the breakdown of Hillary supporters that believe Russia Gate and the Bernie supporters that don't. Most of the Trump supporters think it's phony so what made Hillary's believe in something that everyone should be laughing at?

You deserve a lot of credit. Russia interfered in your favor, yet you are man enough to admit that they interfered. Thank you Bernie!

-- Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) February 16, 2018

So you plan to continue this McCarthy Russian BS? You didn't speak out when you got cheated in the primaries, and you didn't seem to care that Hillary was using her own paid troll army. Integrity matters Bernie and you are losing yours.

-- Underdawg47 (@Underdawg47) February 17, 2018

You stopped speaking for me and millions of others when you caved to crooked HRC. No it was NOT clear that Russia was "deeply involved in the election. What is CLEAR is your betrayal of your followers and cover up of the election fraud perpetrated by DNC! Everybody knows...

-- Logan (@KOMBUCHABABY) February 17, 2018

Bernie, that's MIC propaganda. Stop helping it. There are millions of reasons Trump should not be president. We don't need a hyped up corporate fairytale to make that point https://t.co/7FAwb47LtB

-- SanBernieDingDong (@noreallyhowcome) February 17, 2018

MrWebster on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 7:19pm
2020 dem candidates will try to out do each other on Russia

Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate by the democrats.

The democrats (and media cohorts) have become an apocolyptic death cult. The language that comes from them is infused with the language of conspiracies, violence, treason, aggression and demonization.

And here is the thing, Bernie to survive electorally will have to become a cult member. Effectively he will have to be pro-war with Russia. He will be giving from the the Left supposed support for aggressive action andmilitarism toward Russia.

I fear that if a democrat becomes president in 2020 (it won't be Bernie), is elected president that in the year of the midterms in 2022, the US will start a real war with Russia which has a highly likehood of going nuclear.

[Aug 05, 2018] Are you a Russiagate traitor by gjohnsit

Notable quotes:
"... There was NO hack. ..."
"... emphasis in original. ..."
"... "inside job" ..."
"... "Who's the insider?" ..."
"... -- William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), from memory ..."
"... @thanatokephaloides ..."
"... Finally there's the meeting that Assange's lawyer set up with congress for him to testify to congress and tell them where he got the DNC emails that showed how they rigged the primary. Comey and Schaffer shot that down because it would have killed Russia Gate. Dead and buried and the country could move on. ..."
"... In this case, it is NOT a matter of opinion. It is a matter of FACT. The physical proof that we have right now tells us that the Wikileaks documents did not come from a "hack." We also have physical evidence that someone (no doubt Crowdstrike) manipulated copies of the leaked documents and embedded awkward amateurish evidence to make them look like they were taken by a "Russian" hacker. Here's how we know that: ..."
"... Assange's diplomatic trip to the US in mid-2017 to testify before Congress and prove where the documents came from was emergency-blocked by Comey and Rosenstein. As a consequence, Assange immediately released the extensive Vault 7 documents to the American people so we could forensically recognize the signature techniques that the US intelligence agencies would use to alter downloaded DNC documents and embed fake Russian "fingerprints." We have seen the physical evidence that that occurred. ..."
"... The US has no real physical evidence of a Russian hack or they would never have released the fake evidence. Yet they continue their attack to harm Russia's economy and the continue their attempts to provoke a hot war with Russia. The US motive for this has nothing to do with their fake hacking narrative; it is about crippling Russia (and China) to forestall the rapid rise of Eurasia, which is stripping the Neocons and war-profiteering corporations of their dream for the US to achieve total domination over all other nations. The Entitled Elite want their New American Century back! Their Empire was supposed to rule the world.... ..."
"... @Pluto's Republic ..."
"... While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than " a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
"... third run ..."
"... ~~Author Unknown ..."
"... ~~Martin Luther King Jr. ..."
"... @Unabashed Liberal ..."
"... @Unabashed Liberal ..."
"... ~~Martin Luther King Jr. ..."
"... Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate by the democrats. ..."
Aug 04, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

Russiagate may technically be about Trump, but in fact most of the "traitors" and Putin Puppets are progressives on the left. Russiagate officially started in 2015 long before the DNC hack and the Democratic primaries.

From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Date: 2015-12-21 12:09

Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin

Russiagate never was actually about Russia. It's the Democrats' version of Obama's birth certificate. As Caitlin Johnstone puts it, Russiagate is 9/11 minus 9/11.

TWIT:

Kurt Eichenwald

@kurteichenwald

Bottom line: You either support the patriots in our intelligence community and law enforcement who work endlessly for our national security, and all of the intelligence agencies of our allies, or you support Putin.

You're either a patriot, a traitor or an idiot. Choose.

10:51 AM-16 Jul 2018

In reality, Russiagate started with Ralph Nader and the 2000 election .

They said a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush. You have a moral duty to vote for the Democrat and to be pragmatic. Your Naderite purity came at the expense of the poor. Only affluent selfish white guys could afford this type of virtue signaling. In fact, maybe some of these people were really Republicans in disguise. There were no Russian bots to blame just yet, but clearly some liberals are unable to imagine good faith criticism of Democrats coming from the left.

The terms " virtue signaling", " purity pony", and of course "White Berniebro" weren't coined yet, but the the stereotype they describe was formed in 2000. Gore lost and Nader and all his voters, in swing states or not, were vilified. They were worse than Republicans. They were traitors. Of all the factors that caused Gore's loss, the only one that Democratic partisans really cared about was Nader.

People that voted for Nader became responsible for the Iraq War, while Democrats who voted for Bush and the Iraq War got a free pass. Liberals, besides their obvious double-standards when allocating responsibility, made the dubious claim that morality requires being pragmatic in your voting. And then, as if to prove the basis of their claims to be false, they approach their target audience in a non-pragmatic way.

The anger on open display is the opposite of pragmatic politics. They don't try to persuade people to vote for the Democrat. They demand it. It is a moral litmus test, or rather, a judgement of one's very soul. Good people know they have to vote for the Democrat. Bad people vote for Republicans and the very worst people of all claim to be left, but vote for Stein or maybe even voted for Clinton, but criticized her. Democratic partisans have no interest in what you say about an issue if they perceive it as in any way an attack or a criticism of a Democrat. If you are a third party advocate you can forget about being taken seriously on any issue because you have already self identified as a Satanist and you need to be exorcised from the body politic. Even if you say you support the Democrat as the lesser evil, you speak as one of the damned and deserve no mercy. Sanders played the game in 2016 exactly the way people said Nader should have played it and he and his supporters were still dismissed.

Like Nader before her, Stein is the absolute worst traitor of all . Worse than Trump himself.

Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent. https://t.co/qkDUe6yADd

-- Zac Petkanas (@Zac_Petkanas) 18 December 2017

Maddow cast suspicion on Stein's silence over alleged Russian attempts to interfere with the election to benefit Donald Trump, who she claimed during her own campaign would govern no differently than Hillary Clinton.

"So everybody's like, 'Wow, how come this like super, super aggressive opposition that we saw from these third-party candidates -- how come they haven't said anything since this scandal has broken?'" Maddow said.

"I don't know, Jill -- I can't pronounce it in Russian," Maddow said, with apparent sarcasm.

. @maddow spots something fishy going on between Jill Stein and Vladimir Putin. pic.twitter.com/Cah10YWx8p

-- DESUS & MERO (@desusandmero) 15 February 2017

Bernie Sanders, OTOH, did everything he was told he should do. He supported the Democratic establishment candidate, and believed the Russiagate story.

It has been clear to everyone (except Donald Trump) that Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 election and intends to be involved in 2018. It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the Russian oligarchs.

-- Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 16, 2018

However, Sanders had already committed the unforgivable sin of criticizing the Democratic establishment candidate from the left. There is simply no way of coming back from that treason.

Despite his stance, Sanders has also been constantly presented as another Russian agent, with the Washington Post (11/12/17) asking its readers, "When Russia interferes with the 2020 election on behalf of Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders, how will liberals respond?" The message is clear: The progressive wave rising across America is and will be a consequence of Russia, not of the failures of the system, nor of the Democrats.

It isn't just progressive politicians that are all traitors. Movements like Black Lives Matter are also traitors for Russia.

Slate: Russian Trolls Were Obsessed With Black Lives Matter
CNN: Her son was killed -- then came the Russian trolls
NY Times: The Propaganda Tools Used by Russians to Influence the 2016 Election

That's because you, Russia, funded riots in Ferguson. See 0 hour I have your connections to Trump archived via Schiller and Scavino https://t.co/aTUDlCGkYi

-- Louise Mensch (@LouiseMensch) April 9, 2017

If you are still confused about what is treason and what isn't, ask yourself the question: Does the issue advance the narrative that the Democratic Party is a force for absolute good?

Oh my god: this is how deranged official Washington is. The President of the largest Dem Party think tank (funded in part by dictators) genuinely believes Chelsea Manning's candidacy is a Kremlin plot. Conspiracy theorists thrive more in mainstream DC than on internet fringes pic.twitter.com/e8g314iQHT

-- Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 15, 2018

We still have the 2018 election, and then the long lead-up to the 2020 election. There is nothing to indicate that the rhetoric won't get a lot more insane. The general indifference of the public doesn't seem to discourage the media and pundits. So how will it likely look in Fall 2020? Probably like it looked in 1952 .

The purpose of advancing the Communist issue was not to fix the Communist problem -- it was to exploit that problem for political and ideological advantage. That is how the Republican Party could produce its unhinged 1952 platform, which charged that the Democrats "have shielded traitors to the Nation in high places," "work unceasingly to achieve their goal of national socialism," and "by a long succession of vicious acts, so undermined the foundations of our Republic as to threaten its existence." (Does that kind of talk strike you as overheated? Then you, too, are failing to take the Russia issue seriously.)

There is little to no danger for conservatives and Republicans. All of the danger is for progressives and socialists, and the angry mob is the Democratic establishment trying to silence left-wing ideas. In comparison, the danger of the GOP to the left-wing is trivial.

Deja on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 5:04pm

Ffs, there was NO "hack"

Russiagate officially started in 2015 long before the DNC hack and the Democratic primaries.

I'm finding it harder and harder to believe that people keep posting it as common knowledge and factual -- especially on this site. Old dkos habits are hard to break, I guess. The speed at which the files were STOLEN prove it was done from within the network. Not from Russia, or from a van parked down the street. I can only guess that the DNC can't reveal whose network account was used to do so, because it would blow the bullshit lie of a hack out of the water.

There was NO hack.

thanatokephaloides on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 5:21pm
inside job

@Deja

The speed at which the files were STOLEN prove it was done from within the network. Not from Russia, or from a van parked down the street. I can only guess that the DNC can't reveal whose network account was used to do so, because it would blow the bullshit lie of a hack out of the water.

There was NO hack.

emphasis in original.

The term usually used by the perpetrator classes for this sort of thing is: "inside job" . And, as with all other inside jobs, the question really is: "Who's the insider?"

"The easiest way to raise a revolutionary army is to use someone else's; especially if it belongs to your enemy."
-- William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), from memory

Deja on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 5:27pm
Dead men tell no tales

@thanatokephaloides
R.I.P. Seth Rich

Side note: I find it odd that his parents sued Fox News for saying he was murdered by the DNC. The judge sided with Fox.

gjohnsit on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 5:51pm
It makes no difference

@Deja

I've seen an article debunking the "hack was a leak" story, but it makes no difference anyway. In my book, the leak/hack just created a more informed electorate, and that's good for American democracy.

gjohnsit on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 6:25pm
"care about the truth"

@Deja
The truth is contained in the emails, not in their journey. Remember who else is telling you that the contents of the emails is less important than how they got there - the Democrats.

divineorder on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 8:22pm
Yes, 'shill' equals bad imo. I too, have read that the 'leak'

@Deja hypothesis has problems. Don't get me wrong, I think it holds more promise than the 'hack' hypothesis. But right now, really, we got shit for proof either way? Would honestly look forward to your proof either way, sans the critique of the essayist. Might I suggest that you criticize the point, not the person, please? Questions remain.

- DNC leak vs hack remains unproven (servers not provided)
- one party consent is complicated. On the tape, there was 3rd party on speaker phone. Were they in one party consent jurisdiction as well?
- How was CNN able to confirm that this tape was recorded in NY?

-- John LeFevre (@JohnLeFevre) July 25, 2018

snoopydawg on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 10:09pm
Leak or hack - there's no evidence that Russia was involved

@divineorder

in it. This is the point that matters to me. Assange has stated that the emails didn't come from Russia. Craig Murray said that he was involved with the person who got the information from the DNC computers and that there was no connection to Russia.

The CIAs Vault 7 shows how evidence on computers can be manipulated to make it seem like someone's dawg did the deed. I think it'd be very sloppy for trained hackers to leave their own footprints on the scene don't you think?

Finally there's the meeting that Assange's lawyer set up with congress for him to testify to congress and tell them where he got the DNC emails that showed how they rigged the primary. Comey and Schaffer shot that down because it would have killed Russia Gate. Dead and buried and the country could move on.

Pluto's Republic on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 10:34pm
Absolutely right.

@Deja

It matters profoundly. Knowing the facts surrounding critical political events or social earthquakes can be epigenetic events. Hard truths can trigger conscious evolution while we are alive and your advanced gene expressions can be physically inherited, changing the species.

By exercising our own critical thinking and working very hard to see through narratives to the core realities in the universe and in all things -- we are physically evolving the species into better and more enlightened generations of humans.

In this case, it is NOT a matter of opinion. It is a matter of FACT. The physical proof that we have right now tells us that the Wikileaks documents did not come from a "hack." We also have physical evidence that someone (no doubt Crowdstrike) manipulated copies of the leaked documents and embedded awkward amateurish evidence to make them look like they were taken by a "Russian" hacker. Here's how we know that:

Assange's diplomatic trip to the US in mid-2017 to testify before Congress and prove where the documents came from was emergency-blocked by Comey and Rosenstein. As a consequence, Assange immediately released the extensive Vault 7 documents to the American people so we could forensically recognize the signature techniques that the US intelligence agencies would use to alter downloaded DNC documents and embed fake Russian "fingerprints." We have seen the physical evidence that that occurred.

The US has no real physical evidence of a Russian hack or they would never have released the fake evidence. Yet they continue their attack to harm Russia's economy and the continue their attempts to provoke a hot war with Russia. The US motive for this has nothing to do with their fake hacking narrative; it is about crippling Russia (and China) to forestall the rapid rise of Eurasia, which is stripping the Neocons and war-profiteering corporations of their dream for the US to achieve total domination over all other nations. The Entitled Elite want their New American Century back! Their Empire was supposed to rule the world....

If that is what your instincts tell you, you should trust them. It's a biological imperative.

on the cusp on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 10:22pm
Perfect.

@Pluto's Republic At the very least, we should call it "alleged" hacks. I want some proof before we drop nukes.

Mickt on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 5:57pm
I saw this today

Just to lighten things up?

https://www.theonion.com/the-onion-reviews-christopher-robin-1828056997

The Aspie Corner on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 6:17pm
This whole thing is starting to look like

the plot to Beavis and Butt-head Do America.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3eTqb_fgTAA

snoopydawg on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 6:32pm
Bernie's tweet is hysterical
It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the Russian oligarchs.

Hey, Bernie. The American people were the ones who should have decided who won the primary, not Hillary, the DNC and the delegates. That you are blaming Her loss on Russia instead of admitting that the American people rejected her makes you nothing more than a democratic puppet. How embarrassing for you.

Every Black voter should abandon the DP until they apologize for their disrespect for the BLM and saying that they only started protesting cops killing Blacks because Russia manipulated them into doing so.

Eichenwald thinks that our intelligence agencies are patriots who have spent their lives working on keeping us safe does he? I agree with Dmitry Orlov's take on them.

US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the

The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on.
....
the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your
own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than " a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. "

And let's not forget how many coups and false flag events they had a hand in creating that have cost so much misery and death.

One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag operations, ŕ la 9/11, to fake false flag operations, ŕ la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story is perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips. It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.

The real puppets are the ones who believe in this silly story that Russia is pulling Trump's strings and that the GOP are also Russian puppets. Good grief!

Unabashed Liberal on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 6:53pm
Say it, Sister! ;-) The entire exercise--

@snoopydawg

meaning the 'Russia Ruse'--IMO, has been an exercise in setting up a scenario under which the PtB can put in place a system geared toward major social media 'censorship,' and, a face-saving exercise for FSC--just in case she decides to make a third run in 2020. Heaven forbid!

Mollie/Blue Onyx (Reverting to my original handle)

"Every time I lose a dog, he takes a piece of my heart. Every new dog gifts me with a piece of his. Someday, my heart will be total dog, and maybe then I will be just as generous, loving, and forgiving." ~~Author Unknown

"Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way." ~~Martin Luther King Jr.

"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong." ~~W. R. Purche

MrWebster on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 7:51pm
Coates said the Russias are engaged in "messaging campaign"

@Unabashed Liberal @Unabashed Liberal

"... has been an exercise in setting up a scenario under which the PtB can put in place a system geared toward major social media 'censorship,'

Yup. Dan Coates directory of national intelligence came out and accused Russsia of engaging in a "messaging campaign". So how does one stop this messaging campaign. Well, back in the day, the answer was to answer bad speech with more and better speech.

Well, with Russiagate both the media and dem/gop establishment have to come to demand censorship from the major social media platforms. And they have responded. At first they actually didn't and thought the Russia charges were trivial. Until that is, they were theatened by House and Senate reps. And then they hopped to it.

And just a number of days ago, Facebook proudly announced they took down some nefarious pages who seemed to be engaging in a message campaign. And turns out they shut down a real group organizing an anti-fascist rally. There are other examples like this.

The censorship will continue becoming more and more brazen. (BTW, youtube started ths process earlier demonitizing and hurting a lot of popular, but alternative voices.)

BTW--the Young Turks showed the Coats clip and claimed "see the Russians are still hacking our elections".

Unabashed Liberal on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 8:17pm
Hi, Mr W!--good to see you. I couldn't

@MrWebster

agree more with all of your comments/sentiments.

I'm truly getting concerned regarding the direction our government appears to be taking when it comes to 'freedom of expression/speech.' Strangely, many on the 'left' don't seem very concerned. Indeed, because the MSM is so intent on going after DT, many so-called progressives--including the supposedly more liberal (cough, cough) lawmakers--have become major cheerleaders of the corporatist media. Go figure.

Mollie/Blue Onyx (Reverting to my original handle)

"If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die, I want to go where they went." ~~Will Rogers

"Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way." ~~Martin Luther King Jr.

"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong." ~~W. R. Purche

snoopydawg on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 8:35pm
Dan Coates should be fired

@MrWebster

as well as every other person in Trump's administration that is working against him. This is insubordination and if Trump continues to let them run their mouths then I believe that he is in on this scam and is playing along with it. Why? Look at what has been happening since he became president. From the increasing Russian sanctions to the internet censorship to the increased military budget with money that goes to fighting cyber warfare and many other things that are being done because of this new and improved false flag.

As you stated YouTube has been removing lots of videos, Facebook and Twitter have been censoring alternative media sites that are not playing along with Russia Gate and Google changed its algorithms so that traffic to those sites are down up to 90% according to WSWS.

I once thought that this would eventually be exposed for the scam it is, but not any more. It's here to stay. And just like in 1984 where there was that place where history was changed to fit the narrative of the day, we are seeing that here. Things that happened last decade are being blamed on Russia hacking. I wouldn't be surprised if the KKK and Jim Crow were blamed on Russia. This is how out of control it's gotten. And I was so looking forward to seeing Rachel trying to explain to her viewers how she got things so wrong.

The Aspie Corner on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 8:46pm
Trumpy Boy is as complicit in this as the rest of the pigs.

@snoopydawg His erratic actions are the perfect distraction for the capitalist pigs the same as the "Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Marxist Communist Fascist Socialist Radical Leftist Feminazi SJW" crap that went on during the last capitalist puppet presidency. Either way, the world still burns and the pigs make out like bandits in the process. Keeping the plebs at each other's throats is just a bonus for them.

Alligator Ed on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 9:41pm
Rachel will never admit she's wrong.

@snoopydawg Remember whom you are discussing. Alas, you must be a Russian wolfhound to think R. Madcow could ever be wrong. Apologize, then stand in the corner until after the midterms when the GRU hauls off recalcitrant Dims and Repugnants failing to swear fealty to Vladimir Vladimirovich.

divineorder on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 7:18pm
sd yes Orlov calls it like it is.

@snoopydawg

Caitlin J. Interesting Twitter thread:

https://mobile.twitter.com/caitoz/status/1025482696628137986

"Russiagate is like a mirage. It looks so real from a distance you'll swear it's there and mock anyone who says otherwise, but once you get up close and examine its component parts you find it's made of nothing but innuendo, spin, unsubstantiated claims and dishonest omissions.
2:45 PM · Aug 3, 2018"

And....

https://mobile.twitter.com/caitoz/status/1025489710594945024Caitlin Johnstone

"
@caitoz
·
Aug 3
Nothing wrong with wanting a full investigation. There's something very, very wrong with pressuring a US president to continually escalate dangerous cold war tensions with a nuclear superpower without ever backing down based on an "idea" with no evidence. "

MrWebster on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 8:11pm
In 2020 Bernie will be a "strong" pro-war candidate

@snoopydawg Bernie will not be able to say "Oh evil Russia but let's not go to war with them." Diplomacy itself finally became full criminalized and made tresonous when Trump meet Putin in Finland. Any level of moderation will be attacked as soft on Putin and treasonous.

And I write "pro-war" and not "anti-Russian". One cannot be anti-Russian in any moderate way. Being anti-Russian means supporting a harsh and aggressive military stance toward their nation. The Russians are after all destroying Western civilization and this cannot be meant with diplomacy.

And from what I can, every national democratic candidate for House and Senate will follow suite.

divineorder on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 10:25pm
Hard to know what will happen by then but your guess

@MrWebster is as good as mine.

I wonder if this list is correct?

For reference, these are the only 10 senators who voted AGAINST giving Trump a $717 billion war budget:

Bernie Sanders
Elizabeth Warren
Ed Markey
Kirsten Gillibrand
Dick Durban
Kamala Harris
Jeff Merkley
Ron Wyden
Mike Lee (R)
Marco Rubio (R)
So much for #Resistance huh?

-- Clayton Farris (@ClaytonRFarris) August 3, 2018

Wars and rumours of wars...

This is OT, and some will say Bernie is sheepdogging these kids.

Thank you to the young people standing up to fossil fuel corporations and leading the movement to combat climate change. #ThisIsZeroHour pic.twitter.com/77f9KvY4og

-- Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 24, 2018

... ... ...

snoopydawg on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 6:55pm
The first tweet shows how people twist events

The others show that there are others out there that have seen through this propaganda crap. I'd like to see the breakdown of Hillary supporters that believe Russia Gate and the Bernie supporters that don't. Most of the Trump supporters think it's phony so what made Hillary's believe in something that everyone should be laughing at?

You deserve a lot of credit. Russia interfered in your favor, yet you are man enough to admit that they interfered. Thank you Bernie!

-- Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) February 16, 2018

So you plan to continue this McCarthy Russian BS? You didn't speak out when you got cheated in the primaries, and you didn't seem to care that Hillary was using her own paid troll army. Integrity matters Bernie and you are losing yours.

-- Underdawg47 (@Underdawg47) February 17, 2018

You stopped speaking for me and millions of others when you caved to crooked HRC. No it was NOT clear that Russia was "deeply involved in the election. What is CLEAR is your betrayal of your followers and cover up of the election fraud perpetrated by DNC! Everybody knows...

-- Logan (@KOMBUCHABABY) February 17, 2018

Bernie, that's MIC propaganda. Stop helping it. There are millions of reasons Trump should not be president. We don't need a hyped up corporate fairytale to make that point https://t.co/7FAwb47LtB

-- SanBernieDingDong (@noreallyhowcome) February 17, 2018

MrWebster on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 7:19pm
2020 dem candidates will try to out do each other on Russia

Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate by the democrats.

The democrats (and media cohorts) have become an apocolyptic death cult. The language that comes from them is infused with the language of conspiracies, violence, treason, aggression and demonization.

And here is the thing, Bernie to survive electorally will have to become a cult member. Effectively he will have to be pro-war with Russia. He will be giving from the the Left supposed support for aggressive action andmilitarism toward Russia.

I fear that if a democrat becomes president in 2020 (it won't be Bernie), is elected president that in the year of the midterms in 2022, the US will start a real war with Russia which has a highly likehood of going nuclear.

[Aug 04, 2018] Edward Snowden 5 years in Russia and still relevant as ever

Aug 04, 2018 | theduran.com

TASS reported that August 1 was the five year anniversary of Edward Snowden's being granted temporary asylum in the Russian Federation. This happened after his release of an enormous trove of information showing clandestine and illegal practices being carried out by the US intelligence agencies to gather information on just about anyone in the world, for any – or no – reason at all.

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Edward Snowden, 35, is a computer security expert. In 2005-2008, he worked at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language sponsored by the National Security Agency (NSA) and at the global communications division at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In 2007, Snowden was stationed with diplomatic cover at the US mission to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2009, he resigned from the CIA to join the Dell company that sent him to Hawaii to work for the NSA's information-sharing office. He was particularly employed with the Booz Allen Hamilton consulting firm.

In June 2013, Snowden leaked classified information to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, which revealed global surveillance programs run by US and British intelligence agencies. He explained the move by saying that he wanted to tell the world the truth because he believed such large-scale surveillance on innocent citizens was unacceptable and the public needed to know about it.

The Guardian and The Washington Post published the first documents concerning the US intelligence agencies' spying on Internet users on June 6, 2013. According to the documents, major phone companies, including Verizon, AT&T and Sprint Nextel, handed records of their customers' phone conversations over to the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who also had direct access to the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Skype, YouTube, Paltalk, AOL and Apple. In addition, Snowden's revelations showed that a secret program named PRISM was aimed at collecting audio and video recordings, photos, emails and information about users' connections to various websites.

The next portion of revelations , which was published by the leading newspapers such as The Guardian, Brazil's O Globo, Italy's L'Espresso, Germany's Der Spiegel and Suddeutsche Zeitung, concerned the US spying on politicians. In particular, it became known that the NSA and Great Britain's Government Communications Headquarters intercepted the phone calls that foreign politicians and officials made during the G20 summit in London in 2009. British intelligence agencies particularly tried to intercept then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's phone calls. US intelligence monitored the phone calls of 35 world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

According to the disclosed information, the NSA regularly gathered intelligence at the New York and Washington offices of the European Union's mission. The agency also achieved access to the United Nations' internal video conferences and considers the Vienna headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as one of its major targets for spying.

The leaks also uncovered details about the Blarney and Rampart-T secret surveillance programs. Blarney, which started in 1978, is used to collect information related to counter-terrorism, foreign diplomats and governments, as well as economic and military targets. Rampart-T has been used since 1991 to spy on foreign leaders. The program is focused on 20 countries, including Russia and China.

Snowden also let the world know that Germany's Federal Intelligence Service and Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution used the NSA's XKeyScore secret computer system to spy on Internet users, monitoring their web activities. In addition, the NSA and Great Britain's Government Communications Headquarters developed methods that allowed them to hack almost all the encryption systems currently used on the Internet. Besides, the leaked documents said that the NSA had secretly installed special software on about 100,000 computers around the globe that provided access to them and made cyber attacks easier. In particular, the NSA used a secret technology that made it possible to hack computers not connected to the Internet.

Portions of the information Snowden handed over to Greenwald and Poitras continue to be published on The Intercept website . According to edwardsnowden.com – a website commissioned by the Courage foundation (dedicated to building support for Snowden), a total of 2,176 documents from the archive have been published so far.

The NSA and the Pentagon claim that Snowden stole about 1.7 mln classified documents concerning the activities of US intelligence services and US military operations. He is charged with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person. He is facing up to ten years in prison on each charge.

As can be seen, Mr. Snowden's work is of extreme importance now in the connected Internet age. But how is his life in Russia now?

According to Sputnik News, his life goes on . Reports say that he is continuing to learn the Russian language and to travel about the country:

Anatoly Kucherena, Edward Snowden's lawyer, has revealed some details of the renowned whistleblower's life to Sputnik. According to him, Snowden has found a job, is actively traveling around Russia and is continuing to learn the language.

Kucherena added that Snowden receives visits from his girlfriend, Lindsey Mills, and his parents. When asked about the whistleblower's favorite place in Russia, his lawyer said that he likes St Petersburg "a lot."

"He is doing alright: his girlfriend visits him, he has a good job and he's continuing to study Russian. His parents visit him occasionally. [They] have no problems with visas. At least they have never complained about having any trouble," the lawyer said.

After Snowden released classified NSA documents, he fled first to Hong Kong, then, on June 23, 2013, arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong. The whistleblower remained in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport until he was granted temporary asylum in Russia, which was later prolonged to 2020.

[Aug 03, 2018] A Threat to Global Democracy How Facebook Surveillance Capitalism Empower Authoritarianism

Notable quotes:
"... Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy ..."
"... The War and Peace Report ..."
"... Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy ..."
"... Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy ..."
"... If you want to organize a protest out of the eyes of the government, the worst thing you can do is use Facebook or Twitter in that effort, right? ..."
"... Look, any police department, any state security service anywhere in the world that doesn't infiltrate protest groups or, you know, activist groups that way is foolish, right? It's so easy. Facebook makes surveillance so easy. ..."
"... It's great for motivating people to get into the street, but don't be surprised if there are a couple guys with crew cuts in the crowd with you. ..."
Aug 01, 2018 | www.democracynow.org

...We speak with Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of "Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy." He is a professor of media studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia.

AMY GOODMAN : Facebook has been at the center of a number of controversies in the United States and abroad. Earlier this year, Facebook removed more than 270 accounts it determined to be created by the Russia-controlled Internet Research Agency. Facebook made that move in early April, just days before founder and CEO Mark Zuckeberg was question on Capitol Hill about how the voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica harvested data from more than 87 million Facebook users without their permission in efforts to sway voters to support President Donald Trump. Zuckerberg repeatedly apologized for his company's actions then.

MARK ZUCKERBERG : We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake, and I'm sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here.

AMY GOODMAN : Today we spend the hour with a leading critic of Facebook, Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy . He's professor of media studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. We're speaking to him in Charlottesville.

Professor, welcome to Democracy Now!

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Oh, thanks. It's good to be here.

AMY GOODMAN : Well, let's begin with this latest news. There are hearings today that the Senate Intelligence Committee is holding, and yesterday Facebook removed these -- well, a bunch of pages, saying they don't know if it's Russian trolls, but they think they are inauthentic. Talk about these pages, what they mean, what research is being done and your concerns.

... ... ...

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Yeah. Look, Cambridge Analytica was a great story, right? It finally brought to public attention the fact that for more than five years Facebook had encouraged application developers to get maximal access to Facebook data, to personal data and activity, not just from the people who volunteered to be watched by these app developers, but all of their friends -- right? -- which nobody really understood except Facebook itself and the application developers. So, thousands of application developers got almost full access to millions of Facebook users for five years. This was basic Facebook policy. This line was lost in the storm over Cambridge Analytica.

...You know, Steve Bannon helped run the company for a while. It's paid for by Robert Mercer, you know, one of the more evil hedge fund managers in the United States. You know, it had worked for Cruz, for Ted Cruz's campaign, and then for the Brexit campaign and also for Donald Trump's campaign in 2016. So it's really easy to look at Cambridge Analytica and think of it as this dramatic story, this one-off. But the fact is, Cambridge Analytica is kind of a joke. It didn't actually accomplish anything. It pushed this weird psychometric model for voter behavior prediction, which no one believes works.

And the fact is, the Trump campaign, the Ted Cruz campaign, and, before that, the Duterte campaign in the Philippines, the Modi campaign in India, they all used Facebook itself to target voters, either to persuade them to vote or dissuade them from voting. Right? This was the basic campaign, because the Facebook advertising platform allows you to target people quite precisely, in groups as small as 20. You can base it on ethnicity and on gender, on interest, on education level, on ZIP code or other location markers. You can base it on people who are interested in certain hobbies, who read certain kinds of books, who have certain professional backgrounds. You can slice and dice an audience so precisely. It's the reason that Facebook makes as much money as it does, because if you're selling shoes, you would be a fool not to buy an ad on Facebook, right? And that's drawing all of this money away from commercially based media and journalism. At the same time, it's enriching Facebook. But political actors have figured out how to use this quite deftly.

AMY GOODMAN : "Every Breath You Take" by The Police. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . We're spending the hour with professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, who is author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy . He's speaking to us from Charlottesville, from the University of Virginia, professor of media studies and head of the Center for Media and Citizenship at UVA . Your book, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy .

I want to go back to the beginning of this interview, where we talked about Facebook taking down more than 30 pages, saying that they are not authentic. We immediately got responses from all over saying the protest against the Unite the Right rally in Washington, D.C., in August, around the anniversary of the attacks at your university, University of Virginia, are real. These protests against Unite the Right are real. So, this goes to a very important issue, Professor, that you now have Facebook, this corporation, deciding what we see and what we don't see. It's almost as if they run the telephone company and they're listening to what we say and deciding what to edit, even if some of the stuff is absolutely heinous that people are talking to each other about -- the idea of this multinational corporation becoming the publisher and seen as that and determining what gets out. So, yes, there's a protest against Unite the Right. That is very real. They've taken down one page, that might not have been real, organizing the protest against Unite the Right. And the Unite the Right rally is supposed to be happening. What, for example, would happen if there was a protest against Facebook, Siva?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Yeah, you can't use Facebook to protest against Facebook, by the way. You can't even use Facebook to advertise a book about Facebook, for actually one --

AMY GOODMAN : What do you mean?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Well, they will not allow a group or a page or an advertisement to contain the word "Facebook." And it's not just to insulate themselves from criticism. That is a nice bonus for them. But it's really because they don't want any sort of implication that the company itself is endorsing any group or page or product. So, the use of the word -- look, the only way Facebook operates is algorithmically, right? It has machines make very blunt decisions. So the very presence of the word "Facebook" will knock a group down or knock a page down. And so you can't use Facebook to criticize Facebook, not very effectively.

AMY GOODMAN : So what about your book, which has the word "Facebook" in it?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Right. I can't -- I can't buy ads on Facebook about it. But that's OK. I think I'll do OK.

... ... ...

But in addition, Facebook has the ability to get hijacked, because what it promotes mostly are items that generate strong emotions. What generates strong emotions? Well, content that is cute or lovely, like puppies and baby goats, but also content that is extreme, content that is angry, content that is hateful, content that feeds conspiracy theories. And this hateful, angry conspiracy theory collection doesn't just spread because people like it. In fact, it, more often than not, spreads because people have problems with it. If I were to post some wacky conspiracy theory on my Facebook page today, nine out of 10 of the comments that would follow it would be friends of mine arguing against me, telling me how stupid I was for posting this. The very act of commenting on that post amplifies its reach, puts it on more people's news feeds, makes it last longer, sit higher. Right? So the very act of arguing against the crazy amplifies the crazy. It's one of the reasons that Facebook is a terrible place to deliberate about the world. It's a really effective place if you want to motivate people toward all sorts of ends, like getting out to a rally. But it's terrible if you actually want to think and discuss and deliberate about the problems in the world. And what the world needs now more than anything are more opportunities to deliberate calmly and effectively and with real information. And Facebook is working completely against that goal.

by around 2002, Google figured out how to target ads quite effectively based on the search terms that you had used. By about 2007, Facebook was starting to build ads into its platform, as well. And because it had so much more rich information on our interests and our connections and our habits, and even, once we put Facebook on our mobile phones, our location -- it could trace us to whatever store we went into, whatever church or synagogue or mosque we went into; it could know everything about us -- at that point, targeting ads became incredibly efficient and effective. That's what drove the massive revenues for both Facebook and Google. That's why Facebook and Google have all the advertising money these days, right? It's why the traditional public sphere is so impoverished, why it's so hard to pay reporters a living wage these days, because Facebook and Google is taking all that money -- are taking all that money, because they developed something better than the display ad of a newspaper or magazine, frankly. But there was just no holding back on that. As a result, once Facebook goes big, once Twitter emerges around 2009, you start seeing --

... ... ...

Right now, there are 220 million Americans who regularly use Facebook. That's pretty flat. But there are 250 million people in India who regularly use Facebook, so more than in the United States. And that's only a quarter of the population of India. So, not only is the future of Facebook in India, the present of Facebook is in India. So let's keep that in mind. This is a global phenomenon. The United States matters less and less every day.

Yet the United States Congress has inordinate power over Facebook. The fact that its headquarters is here, for one thing. The fact that the major stock markets of the world pay strong attention to what goes on in our country, right? So we have the ability, if we cared to, to break up Facebook. We would have to revive an older vision of antitrust, one that takes the overall health of the body politic seriously, not just the price to consumers seriously. But we could and should break up Facebook. We never should have -- excuse me -- allowed Facebook to purchase WhatsApp. We should never have allowed Facebook to purchase Instagram. Those are two of the potential competitors to Facebook. If those two companies existed separately from Facebook and the data were not shared among the user files with Facebook, there might be a chance that market forces could curb the excesses of Facebook. That didn't happen. We really should sever those parts. We should also sever the virtual reality project of Facebook, which is called Oculus Rift. Virtual reality has the potential to work its way into all sorts of areas of life, from pilot training to surgeon training to pornography. In all of these ways -- to shopping -- right? -- to tourism. In all of these ways, we should be very concerned that Facebook itself is likely to control all of the data about one of the more successful and leading virtual reality companies in the world. That's a problem. Again, we should spin that off. But we should also limit what Facebook can do with its data. We should have strong data protection laws in this country, in Canada, in Australia, in Brazil, in India, to allow users to know when their data is being used and misused and sold.

Those are necessary but, I'm afraid, insufficient legislative and regulatory interventions. Ultimately, we are going to have to put Facebook in its place and in a box. We are going to have to recognize, first of all, that Facebook brings real value to people around the world. Right? There are not 2.2 billion fools using Facebook. There are 2.2 billion people using Facebook because it brings something of value to their lives, often those puppy pictures or news of a cousin's kid graduating from high school, right? Those are important things. They are not to be dismissed. There are also places in the world where Facebook is the entire media system, or at least the entire internet, places like sub-Saharan Africa, places like Myanmar, places like Sri Lanka, and increasingly in India, Facebook is everything. And we can't dismiss that, as well. And so, we are -- AMY GOODMAN : Well, I mean, the government works with Facebook. For example, you talk about --

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN : -- Myanmar, Burma. It's more expensive to get internet on your phone if you're trying to access a site outside of Facebook.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : That's right.

AMY GOODMAN : It's free to use Facebook services on your phone.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Right, Facebook -- use of Facebook does not count against your data cap in Myanmar and in about 40 other countries around the world, the poorest countries in the world. So, the poorest places in the world are becoming Facebook-dependent at a rapid rate. This was -- Facebook put this plan forward as a philanthropic arm. And one could look at it cynically and say, "Well, you were just trying to build Facebook customers." But the people who run Facebook are true believers that the more people use Facebook for more hours a day, the better humanity will be. I think we've shown otherwise. I know my book shows otherwise. And I think we've built -- we've allowed Facebook to build this terrible monster that is taking great advantage of the people who are most vulnerable. And it's one reason I think we should pay less attention to what's going on.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, but, Professor Vaidhyanathan, I think also, though, the importance of your book is that while you concentrate on Facebook, you make the point over and over again that it's not just Facebook. I think in the conclusion to your book -- I want to read a section where you talk about technopoly. And you say, "Between Google and Facebook we have witnessed a global concentration of wealth and power not seen since the British and Dutch East India Companies ruled vast territories, millions of people, and the most valuable trade routes." And then you go on to say, "Like the East India Companies, they excuse their zeal and umbrage around the world by appealing to the missionary spirit: they are, after all, making the world better, right? They did all this by inviting us in, tricking us into allowing them to make us their means to wealth and power, distilling our activities and identities into data, and launching a major ideological movement" -- what Neil Postman, the famous NYU critic, called technopoly. And then you go on to say, "'Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists of the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.'" You could say this about Uber, about Airbnb, about all these folks that are saying that data and technology will save the world.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : That's right. It's a false religion. And what we really need is to rehumanize ourselves. That is the long, hard work. So, I can propose a few regulatory interventions, and they would make a difference, but not enough of a difference. Fundamentally, we have to break ourselves out of this habit of techno-fundamentalism -- trying to come up with a technological solution to make up for the damage done by the previous technology. It's a very bad habit. It doesn't get us anywhere. If we really want to limit the damage that Facebook has done, we have to invest our time and our money in institutions that help us think, that help us think clearly, that can certify truth, that can host debate -- right? -- institutions like journalism, institutions like universities, public libraries, schools, other forms of public forums, town halls. We need to put our time and our energy into face-to-face politics, so we can look our opponents in the eye and recognize them as humans, and perhaps achieve some sort of rapprochement or mutual understanding and respect. Without that, we have no hope. If we're engaging with people only through the smallest of screens, we have no ability to recognize the humanity in each other and no ability to think clearly. We cannot think collectively. We cannot think truthfully. We can't think. We need to build -- rebuild, if we ever had it, our ability to think. That's ultimately the takeaway of my book. I hope we can figure out better, richer ways to think. We're not getting rid of Facebook. We're going to be with it -- we're going to have it for a long time. We might even learn to use it better, and we might rein it in a little better. But, ultimately, the big job is to train ourselves to think better.

AMY GOODMAN : So, Siva, let me ask you about WeChat in China. I mean, WeChat is everything there. It's Yelp, PayPal, Google, Instagram, Facebook, all rolled into one. You write, "With almost a billion users, WeChat has infused itself into their lives in ways Facebook wishes it could."

... ... ...

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : The other part of their long-term strategy is, Mark Zuckerberg wants to get into the Chinese market. That is the one place in the world where he can't do business effectively. He would love to take on WeChat directly. But here's the big difference. WeChat, like every other application or software platform in the People's Republic of China answers to the People's Republic of China. There is constant, full surveillance by the government. WeChat cannot operate without that. Facebook seems to be willing to negotiate on that point. If Facebook became more like WeChat, it's very likely that around the world it would have to cut very strong agreements with governments around the world that would allow for maybe not Chinese level of surveillance, but certainly a dangerous level of surveillance and licensing. And so, again, we might not sweat that in the United States or in Western Europe, where we still have some basic civil liberties -- at least most of us do -- but people in Turkey, people in Egypt, people in India should be very worried about that trend.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What about the issue, that's been much publicized, of the role of Facebook and Twitter and other social media in protest movements, in dissident movements around the world, whether it's in Egypt during the Tahrir Square protests or other parts of the world?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : I think one of the great tragedies of this story is that we were misled into thinking that social media played a direct and motivating role in the uprisings in 2011. In fact, almost nobody in Egypt used Twitter at the time. The handful of people who did were cosmopolitans who lived in Cairo. And what they did, they used Twitter to inform the rest of the world, especially journalists, what was going on in Egypt. That was an important function, but it wasn't used to organize protests. Neither was Facebook, really, for the simple reason that the government watches Facebook, right? The government watches Twitter. If you want to organize a protest out of the eyes of the government, the worst thing you can do is use Facebook or Twitter in that effort, right? In addition, when we think about the Arab Spring, the alleged Arab Spring, we often focus on --

... ... ...

AMY GOODMAN : The Guardian reports today, quote, "A trove of documents released by the city of Memphis late last week appear to show that its police department has been systematically using fake social media profiles to surveil local Black Lives Matter activists, and that it kept dossiers and detailed power point presentations on dozens of Memphis-area activists along with lists of their known associates." The report reveals a fake Memphis Police Department Facebook profile named "Bob Smith" was used to join private groups and pose as an activist. We have just 30 seconds, Siva.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Yeah. Look, any police department, any state security service anywhere in the world that doesn't infiltrate protest groups or, you know, activist groups that way is foolish, right? It's so easy. Facebook makes surveillance so easy.

My friends who do activism, especially human rights activism, in parts of the world that are authoritarian, the first thing they tell people is get off of Facebook. Use other services to coordinate your activities. Right? Use analog services and technologies. Right? Facebook is the worst possible way to stay out of the gaze of the state. It's great for motivating people to get into the street, but don't be surprised if there are a couple guys with crew cuts in the crowd with you.

[Jul 26, 2018] "Soft neoliberals" blatant hypocrisy by James Kirkpatrick

Notable quotes:
"... Guardians of the Galaxy ..."
"... Chris Pratt and more break silence after James Gunn fired from 'Guardians of the Galaxy 3 ,' ..."
"... Note: Hollywood Finds Child Rape Hilarious , ..."
"... Hollywood demonizes Roseanne, But Defends James Gunn Pedophile Tweets , Newswars, ..."
"... National Review ..."
"... Roseanne and the High Cost of Embracing Craziness . ..."
"... Lesson from the Roseanne debacle: Stop hiring hateful nutjobs , ..."
"... New York Daily News, ..."
"... Should James Gunn have lost his job at Disney ? Daily Wire, ..."
"... Roseanne's behavior is not defensible , The Maven, ..."
"... BBQ Becky, Permit Patty and why the Internet is shaming white people who police people 'simply for being black' , ..."
"... How Pizzagate Pusher Mike Cernovich Keeps Getting People Fired , ..."
"... Huffington Post, ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
Jul 23, 2018 | www.unz.com
Inc.'s Fawning Response to James Gunn Scandal Reveals Where Its True Loyalties Lie

It's the classic man-bites-dog story; a Leftist artist suffered a career setback because of his statements on social media. The person in question is Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn, who lost his gig directing Disney's next installment in the film series after independent reporters such as Mike Cernovich highlighted his "jokes" about the sexual exploitation of children. Senator Ted Cruz, among others, was outraged and suggested Gunn's comments even bordered on illegality.

Hollywood celebrities are defending Gunn and even demanding that he be rehired [ Chris Pratt and more break silence after James Gunn fired from 'Guardians of the Galaxy 3 ,' by Lisa Respers France, CNN, July 23 2018). However, one can't help but notice the same celebrities defending or telling graphic "jokes" about sexually exploiting children are also the people who want careers ended for Politically Incorrect comments directed at privileged classes such as women, homosexuals, or nonwhites [ Note: Hollywood Finds Child Rape Hilarious , by John Nolte, Breitbart, July 22, 2018].

It's not clear why Disney, a company dependent on its appeal to children, would ever employ someone who thinks horrific crimes are comedic fodder. After all, as Gunn himself once tweeted:

What's more, this comes only weeks after comedienne Roseanne Barr had her top-rated show canceled for comparing former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett to a monkey . (Revealingly, Barr defended herself by claiming that she thought Jarett was white –Jarrett (right) is notably pale for an African-American.) Many of the celebrities now defending Gunn openly celebrated when Roseanne was fired [ Hollywood demonizes Roseanne, But Defends James Gunn Pedophile Tweets , Newswars, July 21, 2018].

Yet it isn't just Leftist celebrities who are suddenly eager to defend the sacred right of free speech when it comes to pedophilia. Shockingly, some Conservativism Inc. luminaries, particularly those who love to showily brag about their Christianity and social conservatism , have chosen this hill to die on as well.

David French, one of the most prominent Never Trump activists of the 2016 election, rushed to Gunn's defense, saying:

In contrast, however, when Roseanne was purged for a single tweet, French penned an entire piece for National Review on May 29, 2018 entitled Roseanne and the High Cost of Embracing Craziness .

Similarly, S.E. Cupp, who has a long career as one of CNN's token conservatives , decided this of all things was something that she couldn't remain silent about. She endorsed French's tweet in support of Gunn and added:

Yet only two months ago. when mob rule on Twitter decided Roseanne's fate, Cupp gleefully piled on. Like NR 's French, she faulted ABC for hiring Roseanne in the first place.

Remember, this is a woman who was an early supporter of birtherism, has compared Muslims to Nazis, took to Twitter regularly to attack citizens both private and public, floated wild conspiracy theories and bullied Trump opponents with racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic insults.

[ Lesson from the Roseanne debacle: Stop hiring hateful nutjobs , by S.E. Cupp, New York Daily News, May 29, 2018]

Minicon Ben Shapiro , another opponent of Trump during the primaries, is also among Gunn defenders. Shapiro acknowledged Gunn's tweets were "loathsome" but said "that doesn't mean he should have lost his job at Disney". [ Should James Gunn have lost his job at Disney ? Daily Wire, July 20, 2018]

Roseanne, however, was different: "Roseanne played herself in the series, so when she made a new racist reference about Valerie Jarrett, her persona was inseparable from her character," Shapiro wrote. " Roseanne was Roseanne."

This Talmudic reasoning about how the cases are different is suspicious given how eager Shapiro is to police the American right for unauthorized speech

Erick Erickson is another Never Trumper whose views about respectability have mysteriously changed within two months. When Roseanne was driven off the air, Erickson self-righteously proclaimed: "Her joke was not in poor taste. It was racist" [ Roseanne's behavior is not defensible , The Maven, May 30, 2018]. Yet regarding Gunn, he said:

The last comment is revealing. It's hard to imagine in what ways conservatives are "winning" -- Trump supporters are regularly attacked on the street and expelled from businesses. Random white people are humiliated by the Main Stream Media and fired from their jobs for calling the police. [ BBQ Becky, Permit Patty and why the Internet is shaming white people who police people 'simply for being black' , Jessica Guynn, USA TODAY, July 18, 2018] Meanwhile, even as the Democrats become ever more radical, they continue to enjoy all but unanimous support from the MSM and are leading the polls. Insofar as the American Right has won any major victories in the recent past, it was President Trump's election -- something Erickson and his Never Trump co-conspirators fought every step of the way.

Yet the strange connection between Never Trump and defending James Gunn is easily explained. All of the figures above rely on Leftist media, and the powerful mafias that dominate it , to grant them fame and legitimacy as "leading" American conservatives. For that reason, Never Trump conservatives share a common interest with System media outlets in making sure only certain people have access to a mass audience -- certainly not independents like Mike Cernovich [ How Pizzagate Pusher Mike Cernovich Keeps Getting People Fired , by Luke O'Brien, Huffington Post, July 21, 2018].

For ideological and ethnic reasons, Never Trumpers are desperate to purge the American Right of any authentic populist and nationalist tendencies that can't be controlled from the top down. Their power relies on their audience remaining corralled within a certain ideological space and not hearing dissident ideas such as the biological reality of race or the political insanity of expecting nonwhites to vote for "limited government." These Beltway Right hacks have a positive interest in making sure that websites and platform outside Conservatism Inc., although equally or more critical of supposed common enemies on the Left, are marginalized and stripped of resources.

Thus, Cupp, French, Shapiro, Erickson et. al will always be far more eager to purge the Conservative movement than to combat Leftist control of key cultural institutions. To a Never Trump conservative dreaming of future bylines in The New York Times and television appearances on CNN, a far-Left Hollywood degenerate poisoning the minds of America's youth isn't even a problem, let alone an enemy. The problem for Conservatism Inc. remains Donald Trump and what he represents -- a fighting American Right, united behind nationalism, and willing to do what it takes to win power.

After all, the point of that fighting Right is not to get a sinecure in the enemy's System. The point is to destroy it entirely.

[Jul 25, 2018] Making Shit Up - The US Intelligence Community As 'Collapse Driver'

Notable quotes:
"... There is another unwritten, commonsense rule about spying in general: whatever happens, it needs to be kept out of the courts, because the discovery process of any trial would force the prosecution to divulge sources and methods, making them part of the public record. An alternative is to hold secret tribunals, but since these cannot be independently verified to be following due process and rules of evidence, they don't add much value. ..."
"... Americans have been doing their best to break this rule. Recently, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted a dozen Russian operatives working in Russia for hacking into the DNC mail server and sending the emails to Wikileaks. Meanwhile, said server is nowhere to be found (it's been misplaced) while the time stamps on the files that were published on Wikileaks show that they were obtained by copying to a thumb drive rather than sending them over the internet. Thus, this was a leak, not a hack, and couldn't have been done by anyone working remotely from Russia. ..."
Jul 25, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Dmitry Orlov via Club Orlov blog,

In today's United States, the term "espionage" doesn't get too much use outside of some specific contexts. There is still sporadic talk of industrial espionage, but with regard to Americans' own efforts to understand the world beyond their borders, they prefer the term "intelligence." This may be an intelligent choice, or not, depending on how you look at things.

First of all, US "intelligence" is only vaguely related to the game of espionage as it has been traditionally played, and as it is still being played by countries such as Russia and China. Espionage involves collecting and validating strategically vital information and conveying it to just the pertinent decision-makers on your side while keeping the fact that you are collecting and validating it hidden from everyone else.

In eras past, a spy, if discovered, would try to bite down on a cyanide capsule; these days torture is considered ungentlemanly, and spies that get caught patiently wait to be exchanged in a spy swap. An unwritten, commonsense rule about spy swaps is that they are done quietly and that those released are never interfered with again because doing so would complicate negotiating future spy swaps. In recent years, the US intelligence agencies have decided that torturing prisoners is a good idea, but they have mostly been torturing innocent bystanders, not professional spies, sometimes forcing them to invent things, such as "Al Qaeda." There was no such thing before US intelligence popularized it as a brand among Islamic terrorists.

Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no evidence. There are unlikely to be any more British spy swaps with Russia, and British spies working in Russia should probably be issued good old-fashioned cyanide capsules (since that supposedly super-powerful Novichok stuff the British keep at their "secret" lab in Porton Down doesn't work right and is only fatal 20% of the time).

There is another unwritten, commonsense rule about spying in general: whatever happens, it needs to be kept out of the courts, because the discovery process of any trial would force the prosecution to divulge sources and methods, making them part of the public record. An alternative is to hold secret tribunals, but since these cannot be independently verified to be following due process and rules of evidence, they don't add much value.

A different standard applies to traitors; here, sending them through the courts is acceptable and serves a high moral purpose, since here the source is the person on trial and the method -- treason -- can be divulged without harm. But this logic does not apply to proper, professional spies who are simply doing their jobs, even if they turn out to be double agents. In fact, when counterintelligence discovers a spy, the professional thing to do is to try to recruit him as a double agent or, failing that, to try to use the spy as a channel for injecting disinformation.

Americans have been doing their best to break this rule. Recently, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted a dozen Russian operatives working in Russia for hacking into the DNC mail server and sending the emails to Wikileaks. Meanwhile, said server is nowhere to be found (it's been misplaced) while the time stamps on the files that were published on Wikileaks show that they were obtained by copying to a thumb drive rather than sending them over the internet. Thus, this was a leak, not a hack, and couldn't have been done by anyone working remotely from Russia.

Furthermore, it is an exercise in futility for a US official to indict Russian citizens in Russia. They will never stand trial in a US court because of the following clause in the Russian Constitution: "61.1 A citizen of the Russian Federation may not be deported out of Russia or extradited to another state." Mueller may summon a panel of constitutional scholars to interpret this sentence, or he can just read it and weep. Yes, the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough.

That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment. He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So, where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail?

Since there exists an agreement between the US and Russia to cooperate on criminal investigations, Putin offered to question the spies indicted by Mueller. He even offered to have Mueller sit in on the proceedings. But in return he wanted to question US officials who may have aided and abetted a convicted felon by the name of William Browder, who is due to begin serving a nine-year sentence in Russia any time now and who, by the way, donated copious amounts of his ill-gotten money to the Hillary Clinton election campaign. In response, the US Senate passed a resolution to forbid Russians from questioning US officials. And instead of issuing a valid request to have the twelve Russian spies interviewed, at least one US official made the startlingly inane request to have them come to the US instead. Again, which part of 61.1 don't they understand?

The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance -- which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US "intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit up."

The "intelligence" the US intelligence agencies provide can be anything but; in fact, the stupider it is the better, because its purpose is allow unintelligent people to make unintelligent decisions. In fact, they consider facts harmful -- be they about Syrian chemical weapons, or conspiring to steal the primary from Bernie Sanders, or Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden -- because facts require accuracy and rigor while they prefer to dwell in the realm of pure fantasy and whimsy. In this, their actual objective is easily discernible.

Their objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on. One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag operations, à la 9/11, to fake false flag operations, à la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story is perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips. It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.

Trump was recently questioned as to whether he trusted US intelligence. He waffled.

A light-hearted answer would have been:

"What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available, is an impossible task."

A more serious, matter-of-fact answer would have been:

"The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2017 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as conspiracy theory, not as fact."

And a hardcore, deadpan answer would have been:

"The US intelligence services swore an oath to uphold the US Constitution, according to which I am their Commander in Chief. They report to me, not I to them. They must be loyal to me, not I to them. If they are disloyal to me, then that is sufficient reason for their dismissal."

But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and ultimately futile conflicts. Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American efforts in Iraq and Syria.

The total cost of wars so far this century for the US is reported to be $4,575,610,429,593. Divided by the 138,313,155 Americans who file tax returns (whether they actually pay any tax is too subtle a question), it works out to just over $33,000 per taxpayer. If you pay taxes in the US, that's your bill so far for the various US intelligence "oopsies."

The 16 US intelligence agencies have a combined budget of $66.8 billion, and that seems like a lot until you realize how supremely efficient they are: their "mistakes" have cost the country close to 70 times their budget. At a staffing level of over 200,000 employees, each of them has cost the US taxpayer close to $23 million, on average. That number is totally out of the ballpark! The energy sector has the highest earnings per employee, at around $1.8 million per. Valero Energy stands out at $7.6 million per. At $23 million per, the US intelligence community has been doing three times better than Valero. Hats off! This makes the US intelligence community by far the best, most efficient collapse driver imaginable.

There are two possible hypotheses for why this is so.

First , we might venture to guess that these 200,000 people are grossly incompetent and that the fiascos they precipitate are accidental. But it is hard to imagine a situation where grossly incompetent people nevertheless manage to funnel $23 million apiece, on average, toward an assortment of futile undertakings of their choosing. It is even harder to imagine that such incompetents would be allowed to blunder along decade after decade without being called out for their mistakes.

Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known.

How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars."

[Jul 23, 2018] The Prophecy of Orwell's 1984. Totalitarian Control and the Entertainment Culture that Takes Over by Edward Curtin

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There is a vast literature analyzing the political prophecy of George Orwell 's Nineteen Eighty-Four . Big Brother, double-speak, telescreens, crimestop, etc. – all applied to our current political situation. The language has become part of our popular lexicon, and as such, has become clichéd through overuse. Blithe, habitual use of language robs it of its power to crack open the safe that hides the realities of life. ..."
"... There is no doubt that Orwell wrote a brilliant political warning about the methods of totalitarian control. But hidden at the heart of the book is another lesson lost on most readers and commentators. Rats, torture, and Newspeak resonate with people fixated on political repression, which is a major concern, of course. But so too is privacy and sexual passion in a country of group-think and group-do, where "Big Brother" poisons you in the crib and the entertainment culture then takes over to desexualize intimacy by selling it as another public commodity. ..."
"... The United States is a pornographic society. By pornographic I do not just mean the omnipresent selling of exploitative sex through all media to titillate a voyeuristic public living in the unreality of screen "life" and screen sex through television, movies, and online obsessions. I mean a commodified consciousness, where everyone and everything is part of a prostitution ring in the deepest sense of pornography's meaning – for sale, bought. ..."
"... As this happens, words and language become corrupted by the same forces that Orwell called Big Brother, whose job is total propaganda and social control. Just as physical reality now mimics screen reality and thus becomes chimerical, language, through which human beings uncover and articulate the truth of being, becomes more and more abstract. People don't die; they "pass on" or "pass away." Dying, like real sex, is too physical. Wars of aggression don't exist; they are "overseas contingency operations." Killing people with drones isn't killing; it's "neutralizing them." There are a "ton" of examples, but I am sure "you guys" don't need me to list any more. ..."
"... This destruction of language has been going on for a long time, but it's worth noting that from Hemingway's WW I through Orwell's WW II up until today's endless U.S. wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, etc., there has been the parallel development of screen and media culture, beginning with silent movies through television and onto the total electronic media environment we now inhabit – the surround sound and image bubble of literal abstractions that inhabit us, mentally and physically. In such a society, to feel what you really feel and not what, in Hemingway's words, "you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel" has become extremely difficult. ..."
"... But understanding the history of public relations, advertising, propaganda, the CIA, the national security apparatus, technology, etc., makes it clear that such hope is baseless. For the propaganda in this country has penetrated far deeper than anyone can imagine, and it has primarily done this through advanced technology and the religion of technique – machines as pure abstractions – that has poisoned not just our minds, but the deepest wellsprings of the body's truths and the erotic imagination that links us in love to all life on earth. ..."
"... Orwell makes it very clear that language is the key to mind control, as he delineates how Newspeak works. I think he is right. And mind control also means the control of our bodies, Eros, our sex, our physical connections to all living beings and nature. Today the U.S. is reaching the point where "Oldspeak" – Standard English – has been replaced by Newspeak, and just "fragments of the literature of the past" survive here and there. ..."
Jul 20, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

The Sexual Passion of Orwell's Winston Smith

"Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice." – Frederick Nietzsche , Beyond Good and Evil

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen." – D. H. Lawrence , Lady Chatterley's Lover

"The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one's own destruction, has become a 'biological' need." – Herbert Marcuse , One Dimensional Man

There is a vast literature analyzing the political prophecy of George Orwell 's Nineteen Eighty-Four . Big Brother, double-speak, telescreens, crimestop, etc. – all applied to our current political situation. The language has become part of our popular lexicon, and as such, has become clichéd through overuse. Blithe, habitual use of language robs it of its power to crack open the safe that hides the realities of life.

There is no doubt that Orwell wrote a brilliant political warning about the methods of totalitarian control. But hidden at the heart of the book is another lesson lost on most readers and commentators. Rats, torture, and Newspeak resonate with people fixated on political repression, which is a major concern, of course. But so too is privacy and sexual passion in a country of group-think and group-do, where "Big Brother" poisons you in the crib and the entertainment culture then takes over to desexualize intimacy by selling it as another public commodity.

The United States is a pornographic society. By pornographic I do not just mean the omnipresent selling of exploitative sex through all media to titillate a voyeuristic public living in the unreality of screen "life" and screen sex through television, movies, and online obsessions. I mean a commodified consciousness, where everyone and everything is part of a prostitution ring in the deepest sense of pornography's meaning – for sale, bought.

And consumed by getting, spending, and selling. Flicked into the net of Big Brother, whose job is make sure everything fundamentally human and physical is debased and mediated, people become consumers of the unreal and direct experience is discouraged. The natural world becomes an object to be conquered and used. Animals are produced in chemical factories to be slaughtered by the billions only to appear bloodless under plastic wrap in supermarket coolers. The human body disappears into hypnotic spectral images. One's sex becomes one's gender as the words are transmogrified and as one looks in the mirror of the looking-glass self and wonders how to identify the one looking back.

Streaming life from Netflix or Facebook becomes life the movie. The brilliant perverseness of the mediated reality of a screen society – what Guy Debord calls The Society of the Spectacle – is that as it distances people from fundamental reality, it promotes that reality through its screen fantasies. "Get away from it all and restore yourself at our spa in the rugged mountains where you can hike in pristine woods after yoga and a breakfast of locally sourced eggs and artisanally crafted bread." Such garbage would be funny if it weren't so effective. Debord writes,

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images .Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.

Thus sex with robots and marrying yourself are not aberrations but logical extensions of a society where solipsism meets machine in the America dream.

As this happens, words and language become corrupted by the same forces that Orwell called Big Brother, whose job is total propaganda and social control. Just as physical reality now mimics screen reality and thus becomes chimerical, language, through which human beings uncover and articulate the truth of being, becomes more and more abstract. People don't die; they "pass on" or "pass away." Dying, like real sex, is too physical. Wars of aggression don't exist; they are "overseas contingency operations." Killing people with drones isn't killing; it's "neutralizing them." There are a "ton" of examples, but I am sure "you guys" don't need me to list any more.

Orwell called Big Brother's language Newspeak, and Hemingway preceded him when he so famously wrote in disgust In a Farewell to Arms ,

"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression in vain. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene "

This destruction of language has been going on for a long time, but it's worth noting that from Hemingway's WW I through Orwell's WW II up until today's endless U.S. wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, etc., there has been the parallel development of screen and media culture, beginning with silent movies through television and onto the total electronic media environment we now inhabit – the surround sound and image bubble of literal abstractions that inhabit us, mentally and physically. In such a society, to feel what you really feel and not what, in Hemingway's words, "you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel" has become extremely difficult.

... ... ...

But as we learn in 1984 and should learn in the U.S.A. today , "seemed" is the key word. Their triumph was temporary. For sexual passion reveals truths that need to be confirmed in the mind. In itself, sexual liberation can be easily manipulated, as it has been so effectively in the United States. "Repressive de-sublimation" Herbert Marcuse called it fifty years ago. You allow people to act out their sexual fantasies in commodified ways that can be controlled by the rulers, all the while ruling their minds and potential political rebelliousness. Sex becomes part of the service economy where people service each other while serving their masters. Use pseudo-sex to sell them a way of life that traps them in an increasingly totalitarian social order that only seems free. This has been accomplished primarily through screen culture and the concomitant confusion of sexual identity. Perhaps you have noticed that over the past twenty-five years of growing social and political confusion, we have witnessed an exponential growth in "the electronic life," the use of psychotropic drugs, and sexual disorientation. This is no accident. Wars have become as constant as Eros – the god of love, life, joy, and motion – has been divorced from sex as a stimulus and response release of tension in a "stressed" society. Rollo May, the great American psychologist, grasped this:

Indeed, we have set sex over against eros, used sex precisely to avoid the anxiety-creating involvements of eros We are in flight from eros and use sex as the vehicle for the flight Eros [which includes, but is not limited to, passionate sex] is the center of vitality of a culture – its heart and soul. And when release of tension takes the place of creative eros, the downfall of the civilization is assured.

Because Julia and Winston cannot permanently escape Oceania, but can only tryst, they succumb to Big Brother's mind control and betray each other. Their sexual affair can't save them. It is a moment of beauty and freedom in an impossible situation. Of course the hermetically sealed world of 1984 is not the United States. Orwell created a society in which escape was impossible. It is, after all, an admonitory novel – not the real world. Things are more subtle here; we still have some wiggle room – some – although the underlying truth is the same: the U.S. oligarchy, like "The Party," "seeks power entirely for its own sake" and "are not interested in the good of others," all rhetoric to the contrary. Our problem is that too many believe the rhetoric, and those who say they don't really do at the deepest level. Fly the flag and play the national anthem and their hearts are aflutter with hope. Recycle old bromides about the next election when your political enemies will be swept out of office and excitement builds as though you had met the love of your life and all was well with the world.

But understanding the history of public relations, advertising, propaganda, the CIA, the national security apparatus, technology, etc., makes it clear that such hope is baseless. For the propaganda in this country has penetrated far deeper than anyone can imagine, and it has primarily done this through advanced technology and the religion of technique – machines as pure abstractions – that has poisoned not just our minds, but the deepest wellsprings of the body's truths and the erotic imagination that links us in love to all life on earth.

In "Defence of Poetry," Percy Bysshe Shelley writes:

The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

We are now faced with the question: Can we escape the forces of propaganda and mind control that run so very deep into American life? If so, how? Let's imagine a way out.

Orwell makes it very clear that language is the key to mind control, as he delineates how Newspeak works. I think he is right. And mind control also means the control of our bodies, Eros, our sex, our physical connections to all living beings and nature. Today the U.S. is reaching the point where "Oldspeak" – Standard English – has been replaced by Newspeak, and just "fragments of the literature of the past" survive here and there.

This is true for the schooled and unschooled. In fact, those more trapped by the instrumental logic, disembodied data, and word games of the power elite are those who have gone through the most schooling, the indoctrination offered by the so-called "elite" universities. I suspect that more working-class and poor people still retain some sense of the old language and the fundamental meaning of words, since it is with their sweat and blood that they "earn their living." Many of the highly schooled are children of the power elite or those groomed to serve them, who are invited to join in living the life of power and privilege if they swallow their consciences and deaden their imaginations to the suffering their "life-styles" and ideological choices inflict on the rest of the world. In this world of The New York Times , Harvard, The New Yorker , Martha's Vineyard, The Washington Post , Wall St., Goldman Sachs, the boardrooms of the ruling corporations, all the corporate media, etc., language has become debased beyond recognition. Here, as Orwell said of Newspeak, "a heretical thought should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express." The intelligently orthodox, he adds, must master the art of "doublethink" wherein they hold two contradictory ideas in their minds simultaneously, while accepting both of them. This is the key trick of logic and language that allows the power elites and their lackeys in the U.S. today to master the art of self-deception and feel good about themselves as they plunder the world. In this "Party" world, the demonization, degradation, and killing of others is an abstraction; their lives are spectral. Orwell describes doublethink this way:

To tell deliberate lives while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink . For by using the word one admits one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

... ... ...

*

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely; he is a frequent contributor to Global Research. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/ .

[Jul 23, 2018] Chickens with Their Heads Cut Off, Coming Home to Roost. The "Treason Narrative" by Helen Buyniski

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Congress wasted no time jumping on the Treason bandwagon, led by Chuck Schumer conjuring the spectre of the KGB, Marco Rubio as neocon point-man (one imagines Barbara Bush rolling in her grave at his usurpation of Jeb's rightful role) proposing locked-and-loaded sanctions in case of future "meddling," and John McCain , still desperate to take the rest of the world with him before he finally kicks a long-overdue bucket, condemning the "disgraceful" display of two heads of state trying to come to an agreement about matters of mutual interest. The Pentagon has invested a lot of time and money in positioning Russia as Public Enemy #1, and for Trump to put his foot in it by making nice with Putin might diminish the size of their weapons contracts – or the willingness of the American people to tolerate more than half of every tax dollar disappearing down an unaccountable hole . Peace? Eh, who needs it. Cash , motherfucker. ..."
"... The Intelligence Community believes it is God, and it hath smote Trump good. Smelling blood in the water, the media redoubled their shrieking for several days, and crickets. ..."
Jul 23, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

... ... ...

The Helsinki hysteria shone a spotlight on the utter impotence of the establishment media and their Deep State controllers to make their delusions reality. Never before has there been such a gaping chasm visible between the media's "truth" and the facts on the ground. Pundits compared the summit to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 , with some even reaching for the brass ring of the Holocaust by likening it to Kristallnacht , while polls revealed the American people really didn't care .

Worse, it laid bare the collusion between the media and their Deep State handlers – the central dissemination point for the headlines, down to the same phrases, that led to every outlet claiming Trump had "thrown the Intelligence Community under the bus" by refusing to embrace the Russia-hacked-our-democracy narrative during his press conference with Putin. Leaving aside the sudden ubiquity of "Intelligence Community" in our national discourse – as if this network of spies and murderous thugs is Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood – no one seriously believes every pundit came up with "throws under the bus" as the proper way of describing that press conference.

The same central control was apparent in the unanimous condemnations of Putin – that he murders journalists , breaks international agreements , uses banned chemical weapons , kills women and children in Syria , and, of course, meddles in elections . For every single establishment pundit to exhibit such a breathtaking lack of insight into their own government's misdeeds is highly unlikely. Many of these same talking heads remarked in horror on Sinclair Broadcasting's Orwellian "prepared statement" issuing forth from the mouths of hundreds of stations' anchors at once. Et tu, Anderson Cooper?

Helsinki – Trump and Putin – a Showdown for Summer Doldrums or a Genuine Attempt Towards Peace?

The media frenzy was geared toward sparking a popular revolt, with tensions already running high from the previous media frenzy about family separation at the border (though only one MSNBC segment seemed to recall that they should still care about that, and belatedly included some footage of kids behind a fence wrapped in Mylar blankets). Rachel Maddow , armed with the crocodile tears that served her so well during the family-separation fracas, exhorted her faithful cultists to do something . Meanwhile, national-security neanderthal John Brennan all but called for a coup, condemning the president for the unspeakable "high crimes and misdemeanors" of seeking to improve relations with the world's second-largest nuclear power. He called on Pompeo and Bolton, the two biggest warmongers in a Trump administration bristling with warmongers, to resign in protest. This would have been a grand slam for world peace, but alas, it was not to be. Even those two realize what a has-been Brennan is.

Congress wasted no time jumping on the Treason bandwagon, led by Chuck Schumer conjuring the spectre of the KGB, Marco Rubio as neocon point-man (one imagines Barbara Bush rolling in her grave at his usurpation of Jeb's rightful role) proposing locked-and-loaded sanctions in case of future "meddling," and John McCain , still desperate to take the rest of the world with him before he finally kicks a long-overdue bucket, condemning the "disgraceful" display of two heads of state trying to come to an agreement about matters of mutual interest. The Pentagon has invested a lot of time and money in positioning Russia as Public Enemy #1, and for Trump to put his foot in it by making nice with Putin might diminish the size of their weapons contracts – or the willingness of the American people to tolerate more than half of every tax dollar disappearing down an unaccountable hole . Peace? Eh, who needs it. Cash , motherfucker.

Trump's grip on his long-elusive spine was only temporary, and he held another press conference upon returning home to reiterate his trust in the intelligence agencies that have made no secret of their utter loathing for him since day one. When the lights went out at the climactic moment, it became clear for anyone who still hadn't gotten the message who was running the show here (and Trump, to his credit, actually joked about it). The Intelligence Community believes it is God, and it hath smote Trump good. Smelling blood in the water, the media redoubled their shrieking for several days, and crickets. On to the Playmates .

Sacha Baron Cohen 's latest series, "Who is America," targeted Ted Koppel for one segment. Koppel cut the interview short after smelling a rat and expressed his high-minded concern that Cohen's antics would hurt Americans' trust in reporters. But after a week of the entire media establishment screaming that the sky is falling while the heavens remain firmly in place, Cohen is clearly the least of their problems. At least he's funny.

*

Helen Buyniski is a journalist and photographer based in New York City. She covers politics, sociology, and other anthropological/cultural phenomena. Helen has a BA in Journalism from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University. Find more of her work at http://www.helenofdestroy.com and http://medium.com/@helen.buyniski .

[Jul 23, 2018] the CIA is the armed wing of Washington s permanently governing technocratic party, in the same way the KGB was the armed wing of the Soviet Communist Party.

"Yes, the Aspen Institute is the CIA and the CIA is the Aspen Institute"
Notable quotes:
"... CIA manages transnational organized crime to top up their budget for unauthorized clandestine operations, like killing JFK. CIA protects its criminal protégés with their chartered impunity. ..."
"... RFK knew how it works. RFK junior explained the reason for RFK's focus on organized-crime until CIA whacked him. That's why his book was made to sink without a ripple. ..."
"... Evenfurthermore, CIA is the government and the government is CIA. Decades ago Fletcher Prouty showed that CIA's deepest-cover illegal moles are embedded in our own government. Every agency with repressive capacity is infiltrated with focal points, who report to CIA handlers without the other agency's knowledge. ..."
"... Of course Israel is trying to infiltrate it -- they understand the levers of power. ..."
"... Assange has got some mighty stinkers in his insurance file. All we can do is hope they're enough to destabilize the CIA Reich that has ruled America since 1949. ..."
Jul 23, 2018 | www.unz.com

Yes, the Aspen Institute is the CIA and the CIA is the Aspen Institute. Or, to be more precise, the CIA is the armed wing of Washington's permanently governing technocratic party, in the same way the KGB was the armed wing of the Soviet Communist Party.

Poor Julian Assange is likely going to be in their hands not too long from now. The citizen of one Five Eyes country will be arrested by another and then sent off to the imperial metropole, to be kicked around like a political football. The rest of us Anglosphericals are expected to cheer or remain silent. Either is acceptable.

MK-DELTABURKE , July 23, 2018 at 12:40 pm GMT

Yup. Furthermore, CIA is organized crime and organized crime is CIA. CIA recruits and runs agents in favored criminal syndicates in every illicit trade: drugs, child sexual trafficking, arms, fraud, bustouts, extortion, money laundering. Their purpose is not to interdict the trade but to control it.

CIA manages transnational organized crime to top up their budget for unauthorized clandestine operations, like killing JFK. CIA protects its criminal protégés with their chartered impunity.

They call off law enforcement with the magic words national security or 'sources and methods.' If the plan gets exposed, CIA's criminal cutouts insulate the agency from exposure.

RFK knew how it works. RFK junior explained the reason for RFK's focus on organized-crime until CIA whacked him. That's why his book was made to sink without a ripple.

https://popularresistance.org/the-mass-media-will-not-review-rfk-jr-s-book-why/

Evenfurthermore, CIA is the government and the government is CIA. Decades ago Fletcher Prouty showed that CIA's deepest-cover illegal moles are embedded in our own government. Every agency with repressive capacity is infiltrated with focal points, who report to CIA handlers without the other agency's knowledge.

https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/ST.html

Of course Israel is trying to infiltrate it -- they understand the levers of power.

Assange has got some mighty stinkers in his insurance file. All we can do is hope they're enough to destabilize the CIA Reich that has ruled America since 1949.

[Jul 23, 2018] Usage Examples of Our Intelligence Community, with Implications

Notable quotes:
"... "Our intelligence community" is one of those phrases that make my back teeth itch, because I hate to see "our" doing that much work (especially when I know how much work our's parent, "we," has to do.) ..."
"... On Friday, Michael McFaul, a former United States ambassador to Russia, wrote on Twitter: "I'm very impressed that Mueller was able to name the 12 GRU officers in the new indictment. Demonstrates the incredible capabilities of our intelligence community ." ..."
"... Almost one year ago, on January 28th, 2003, the President devoted one-third of his State of the Union address to what he described as "a serious and mounting threat to our country" posed by Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. He spoke, in those famous 16 words, about efforts by Iraq to secure enriched uranium from Africa. He talked about aluminum tubes "suitable for nuclear weapons production." He described stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and said, "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs." ..."
"... That "we know, we know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was dispersing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agent to various locations " That "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more." Pictures of what he called "active chemical munitions bunkers" with "sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions." ..."
"... The WMDs episode led to the (bipartisan) Iraq War, the greatest strategic debacle in American history. The WMDs episode was marked by fake evidence (yellowcake; aluminum tubes), planted stories, gaslighting, and a consensus of elite opinion along the Acela Corridor, exactly as today. The intelligence community was wrong. The national security establishment was wrong. The press was wrong. The Congressional leadership was wrong. The President was wrong. Everybody was wrong (except for a few outliers who couldn't get jobs afterwards anyhow, exactly because they were right). And now, today, we are faced with the same demand that we believe what the intelligence community says, without question, and without evidence that the public can see and examine. The only difference is that this time, the stakes are greater: Rather than blowing a few trillion and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of faraway brown people, we're rushing toward a change in the Constitutional Order that in essence makes the intelligence community a fourth branch of the government. ..."
Jul 20, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Usage Examples of "Our Intelligence Community", with Implications Posted on July 22, 2018 by Lambert Strether By Lambert Strether of Corrente .

"Our intelligence community" is one of those phrases that make my back teeth itch, because I hate to see "our" doing that much work (especially when I know how much work our's parent, "we," has to do.) So I thought I'd throw together some usage examples of the term to see if I could find more significant readings than my own reaction, and then draw out some implications from that reading. But first, let's look at how often that term is used, and where. We turn to Google Trends :

Some caveats: Google doesn't have enough data to track "our intelligence community," or so it says, so the search is for "intelligence community" only.

Further, the search is for 2008 to the present, again because Google, or so it says, doesn't have enough data for shorter time frames.[1] However, I think the chart shows that interest in the intelligence community is not general in time or space: It spikes when there's gaslighting with reader interest in particular stories, and spikes along the Acela Corridor, in Washington and New York. (We might also speculate, based on HuffPost/YouGov voter data , that interest in the today's stories about the intelligence is limited not only in space, and time, but in scope: Primarily among liberal Democrats.[2]) With that, let's turn to our usage examples.

I used Google to find them, and of course Google search is crapified and all but useless -- for example, it insists on returning examples of "intelligence community" along with "our intelligence community" in normal search, even with when the search string is quoted -- but it is what it is; readers are invited to supply their own examples.

Example 1, July 13, 2018, New York Times :

On Friday, Michael McFaul, a former United States ambassador to Russia, wrote on Twitter: "I'm very impressed that Mueller was able to name the 12 GRU officers in the new indictment. Demonstrates the incredible capabilities of our intelligence community ."

No. Mueller provided no evidence and the case is unlikely to go to trial; the capability consists in the naming, not in the proof. Verdict: Credulity .

Example 2, July 3, 2018, Washington Post :

The intelligence community determined that the Kremlin intended to "denigrate" and "harm" Clinton, and "undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process" while helping Trump.

And the same claim, July 10, 2018, Washington Post:

The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to boost Trump's candidacy

No. If you click through, you'll find that this is the "17 agencies"/"high confidence" report, whose agencies and analysts were hand-picked by Clapper; that's just not the "intelligence community" as a whole[3]; the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was not involved in the analysis, for example. (I don't see how it's normal that such an important topic not to be the subject of a Presidental Finding, but perhaps people were in a rush.) Verdict; Misinformation .

Example 3, July 19, 2018, ( retiring ) Senator Jeff Flake (R), New York Times :

FLAKE: We know the intelligence is right. We stand behind our intelligence community . We need to say that in the Senate. Yes, it's symbolic, and symbolism is important.

And a similar formulation, July 22, 2018, Senator Marco Rubio (R), CBS News :

We need to move forward from that with good public policy and part of that is, I think, standing with our intelligence community .

Posturing aside, to my sensibilities, it's pretty disturbing when "support the troops" bleeds over into "support the spies," and when supporting the conclusions of an institution bleeds over into supporting the institution itself, as such. (The whole of the Federalist Papers argues against the latter view: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.") Verdict: Authoritarian followership .

Example 4, undated, Office of the Director of National Intelligence :

WE UNIFY OUR INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY TOWARD A STRONGER, SAFER NATION

No. The DNI mistakes the hope for the fact; were the intelligence community in fact unified , Clapper would not have hand-picked agencies for his report, and a Presidential Finding would have been made. (And given the source, "our" is doing even more work there than it usual does; it reminds of liberal Democrats talking about "our Democracy." Whose, exactly?) Verdict: Wishful thinking .

Example 5, July 16, 2018, John Sipher (interview), PBS :

I do think the intelligence community is quite resilient. They put their head down and they do their work, but they take this very seriously. And they see the president as their primary customer and they will do almost anything to get the president the information that he needs to do his job.

No. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes -- "Who will guard the guards themselves?" -- was formulated by the Roman poet Juvenal (d. 138AD) in the late first or early second century, [checks calculator], about 1880 years ago. It's absurd to assume that "the intelligence" community has always served its "primary customer" -- see the Bay of Pigs invastion at " groupthink " -- or that they will in the future, especially considering the enormous stakes involved today. Verdict: Historical ignorance .

Example 6, July 12, 2018, Representative Barbara Comstock :

Today I voted for H.R. 6237, the Matthew Young Pollard Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 2018 and 2019. This important legislation funds our Intelligence community and provides them the resources they need to effectively defend our nation "This legislation makes sure that the dedicated men and women who serve our nation in the Intelligence Community [caps in the original] are fully equipped to fulfill their mission."

No. While Sipher urges ( as does Clapper ) that the intelligence community is in the business of serving customers, Comstock, through her language ("dedicated men and women who serve our nation") identifies it with the military. That's pretty disturbing when you realize that the intelligence community has a domestic component (and when you think back to Obama's 17-city crackdown on Occupy, or Obama's militarized response to #BlackLivesMatter). Verdict: Militarization

Example 7, July 16, 2018, ABC :

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, head of the U.S. intelligence community , reaffirmed his conclusion that Russia had indeed tried to sway the election in a statement published after Trump's remarks.

No. The U.S. has 17 intelligence agencies; the DNI is in no sense their head. From the DNI site :

The core mission of the ODNI is to lead the IC in intelligence integration, forging a community that delivers the most insightful intelligence possible. That means effectively operating as one team: synchronizing collection, analysis and counterintelligence so that they are fused. This integration is the key to ensuring national policymakers receive timely and accurate analysis from the IC to make educated decisions.

If you boil that bureucratic porridge down -- the Russian word for porridge is kasha , in case kompromat has worn thin for you -- you'll see that the 17 intelligence agencies do not have a reporting relationship to the DNI. Hence, the DNI is not their head. QED. Verdict: Authoritarian followership

Example 8, July 18, 2018, John Brennan, Salon :

[BRENNAN:] What Mr. Trump did (Monday) was to betray the women and men of the FBI, the CIA and NSA and others and betray the American public. That's why I use the term, this was nothing short of treason, because it is a betrayal of the nation. He's giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

(Leaving aside Brennan's broad definition of enemy -- apparently a sovereign state with interests different from our own, as opposed to a nation against whom Congress has declared war -- note that Brennan treats the agencies as individual entities, not as "unified," presumably betraying DNI Coats). More:

BRENNAN:] I still shake my head trying to understand what was discussed during the two-hour one-on-one, what was discussed between the two sides in their bilateral meeting. We only saw what Mr. Trump said during the press conference. I can't even imagine what he said behind closed doors. I can't imagine what he said to Mr. Putin directly. I am very concerned about what type of impact it might have on our intelligence community and on this country."

No. Note well: What ( torture advocate ) Brennan says contradicts the other two models expressed in this aggregation. If the President is the customer, it's not Brennan's concern what that customer does (any more than it's Best Buy's concern what I buy in Starbucks after I pick up my flat-screen TV). And if the intelligence community is a branch of the military, it's not their concern what their Commander-in-Chief does; he'll tell them what they need to know.) Seriously, why does the Praetorian Guard need to know what the emperor is doing. Now, one could argue that Brennan's ambition is counteracting Trump's ambition; well and good, but then one needs to think through the consequences. And if Brennan, et al., really believe that Trump committed treason, then they -- as the good patriots they presumably are -- need to indicate a path to removing him. If that path does not include full disclosure of the evidence for whatever charges are to be made, then the country will have to deal with the consequences -- which I'd speculate won't be pretty -- of a change in the Constitutional order where the "intelligence community" can remove a President from office based on its own internal consensus . Praetorian

(Here's a collection of examples ; I wish I had time to do more examples, but these will have to do.)

But speaking of the internal consensus of the intelligence community, let's take a little walk down memory lane . From the "Salon Staff," quoting Senator Jane Harmon:

Almost one year ago, on January 28th, 2003, the President devoted one-third of his State of the Union address to what he described as "a serious and mounting threat to our country" posed by Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. He spoke, in those famous 16 words, about efforts by Iraq to secure enriched uranium from Africa. He talked about aluminum tubes "suitable for nuclear weapons production." He described stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and said, "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs."

One week later, on February 5th, Secretary of State Colin Powell, with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet sitting behind his right shoulder, used charts and photographs to elaborate on the Administration's WMD case. "These are not assertions," Powell said, "these are facts corroborated by many sources." Among Powell's claims were:

That "we know, we know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was dispersing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agent to various locations " That "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more." Pictures of what he called "active chemical munitions bunkers" with "sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions."

Powell has subsequently said that he spent days personally assessing the intelligence. He included only information he felt was fully supported by the analysis. Hence, no mention of enriched uranium from Africa, no claim that al Qaeda was involved in 9-11.

The effect was powerful. Veteran columnist for the Washington Post, Mary McGrory, known for liberal views and Kennedy connections, wrote an op-ed the following day entitled "I Am Persuaded". Members of Congress, like me, believed the intelligence case. We voted for the resolution on Iraq to urge U.N. action and to authorize military force only if diplomacy failed. We felt confident we had made the wise choice.

But as the evidence pours in the Intelligence Committee's review of the pre-war intelligence; David Kay's interim report on the failure to find WMD in Iraq; an impressive study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board's critique; thoughtful commentaries like that of Ken Pollack in this month's Atlantic Monthly; and investigative reporting including a lengthy front page story by Barton Gellman of the Washington Post on January 7,

we are finding out that Powell and other policymakers were wrong, British intelligence was wrong, and those of us who believed the intelligence were wrong . Indeed, I doubt there would be discussions of David Kay's possible departure if the Iraq Survey Group were on the verge of uncovering large stockpiles of weapons or an advanced nuclear weapons program.

But if 9/11 was a failure to connect the dots, it appears that the Intelligence Community, in the case of Iraq's WMD, connected the dots to the wrong conclusions . If our intelligence products had been better, I believe many policymakers, including me, would have had a far clearer picture of the sketchiness of our sources on Iraq's WMD programs, and our lack of certainty about Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities.

Let me add that policymakers -- including members of Congress -- have a duty to ask tough questions, to probe the information being presented to them. We also have a duty to portray that information publicly as accurately as we can.

The WMDs episode led to the (bipartisan) Iraq War, the greatest strategic debacle in American history. The WMDs episode was marked by fake evidence (yellowcake; aluminum tubes), planted stories, gaslighting, and a consensus of elite opinion along the Acela Corridor, exactly as today. The intelligence community was wrong. The national security establishment was wrong. The press was wrong. The Congressional leadership was wrong. The President was wrong. Everybody was wrong (except for a few outliers who couldn't get jobs afterwards anyhow, exactly because they were right). And now, today, we are faced with the same demand that we believe what the intelligence community says, without question, and without evidence that the public can see and examine. The only difference is that this time, the stakes are greater: Rather than blowing a few trillion and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of faraway brown people, we're rushing toward a change in the Constitutional Order that in essence makes the intelligence community a fourth branch of the government.

Why are we doing that? Well, if you look at the verdicts after each of the quotes I've found, taking the quotes as a proxy for elite opinion, one reason might be that the portion of our elites involved in the Russia narrative -- who, let us remember, are limited in space and scope -- are:

If power is lying in the street, beware of who picks it up. Matters might not improve.

NOTES .

[1] The hit count (100 for the spike in January 2017) is oddly low; sadly, although 100 looks like a blue link, we cannot click through to check the data. However, even if the aggregates are low, I think we can assume that both the shape of the trend line and its geographic distribution are directionally correct, because the spikes occur at reasonable places for them to occur. Sidebar: Note the horrid user interface design, which uses inordinate amounts of screen space to no purpose, disrespecting the time-pressed professional user.

[2] We might even go so far as to speculate that -- given these limitations in space -- that while "our" asserts Democrat leadership as a National party, Democrats are in fact a State party. Removing the hyphen from "nation-state" is a neat way of encapsulating our current legitimacy crisis.

[3] "Intelligence community," like "deep state," connotes unity among institutions that are in fact riven by faction.

ADDENDUM: Scott Horton

I didn't add this material to the post proper, because I only had screen shots, and I wasn't able to find the post in time using Google, or Facebook's lousy search. So after ten minutes of plowing through Facebook's infinite scroll, here is the embed* from Scott Horton that I sought:

And a screen shot personally taken by me:

Note the lead: "European intelligence analysts ," so reminiscent of Bush's "British intelligence has learned " (the sixteen words ). What they "learned," of course, was the faked evidence on Niger yellowcake. Go through my list of "verdicts," starting with "credulous," and see what does not apply to Horton.

Horton is a Contributing Editor to Harper's Magazine, has a law practice in New York, and is affiliate with Columbia Law School and the Open Society Institute.

Corey Robin's reaction ( via ):

I agree. And from a voter:

The key point, for me, is this: "Liberal Democrats do not view anyone outside of places like Orange and Lexington County (whom they go all-out to court) as people fit to make their own choices." It's important to watch for outright denial of agency, to others, not merely lack of agency. That's true for Horton, it was true for Clinton's "deplorables" comment, and it was true for Obama's "bitter"/"cling to" Kinseley gaffe.

It would be nice if Senator Sanders didn't signal boost this stuff. Here's another usage example of "intelligence community":

Or, to put this another way, Sanders needs to get his supporters' backs, and fast, with messaging that doesn't take a "duck and cover" approach by repeating the catchphrases of the current onslaught, but contextualizes and decontaminates it. I didn't say that would be easy

NOTE * I like the picture the Time chose very much; apparently, the evul left is young, female, swarthy, and/or black. No suburban Republicans here! The "AbolishICE" t-shirt -- and not, say, #MedicareForAll -- is also a nice touch.

[Jul 22, 2018] Tucker Carlson SLAMS Intelligence Community On Russia

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... After the Creation of the "CIA" Unelected, Unconstitutional CIA Intelligence Agency Interfered In Foreign Presidential Elections At Least 81 Times In 54 Years. The US was found to have interfered in foreign elections at least 81 times in 31 countries between 1946 and 2000 – not counting Libya, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, The US-backed military coups or regime change efforts, Proxy-Wars. Just saying ..."
"... Tucker Carlson has been analyzing policies/ideas on a deeper level this year. He is painting US a big picture for us to see. It's quite refreshing to see Fox News actually allow objective truth be aired on on occasion. ..."
"... The Intelligence Agencies are the Praetorian Guard in the United States. ..."
"... Party politics is a means of control. When you come to realize that we all have a tendency to agree that the major issues have no party loyalty, and we're all on the same side, you can look past minor differences and move forward to working for the greater good... ..."
"... I just saw another Tucker Carlson news clip that Tony Podesta is offered immunity to testify against Paul Manafort? WTF? Why aren't Podestas charged?! ..."
"... Neocons, military industrial complex and liberal leftists have penetrated deeply into the government intelligence communities, wall street banking, both houses of Us congress, mainstream media as well as Hollywood people, even in an academia. This country is deep sh*t. I am surprised liberal leftists have not crucified Tucker Carlson yet for speaking out. ..."
"... Russiagate is DemoKKKrat horse cookies. Putin is correct. DemoKKKrats are bad losers. $1.2 billion gone, servers gone! ..."
Jul 22, 2018 | www.youtube.com

Jaime Tapia , 5 hours ago (edited)

Guys Did you know: After the Creation of the "CIA" Unelected, Unconstitutional CIA Intelligence Agency Interfered In Foreign Presidential Elections At Least 81 Times In 54 Years. The US was found to have interfered in foreign elections at least 81 times in 31 countries between 1946 and 2000 – not counting Libya, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, The US-backed military coups or regime change efforts, Proxy-Wars. Just saying. ¯\_(^)_/¯

Boycott israeli products , 5 hours ago

Tucker Carlson is a special character. 95% of time i disagree with Tucker but 5% of time he's just exceptionally good. In April his 8 minute monologue was epic. I love Jimmy Dore's passion... specially when he pronounes "they're lying!!!" Jimmy clearly hates liars ;-) We love you Jimmy for your integrity and intelligence.

Sooner Mac , 5 hours ago

Weapons of mass destruction, 9/11, Bin Laden, Lybia, Gulf of Tonkin, Opium fields in Afghanistan, Operation Mockingbird, Operation Paperclip..... A few reasons not to trust your CIA and FBI. I am sure you guys can name some more.

The Alienated TV , 5 hours ago

I think Tucker Carlson and Jimmy are two of the most responsible journalists on the planet. Keep up the good work.

Connor Phillip , 5 hours ago

"Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex" FZappa

Guillermo Rivas , 5 hours ago

Tucker Carlson has been analyzing policies/ideas on a deeper level this year. He is painting US a big picture for us to see. It's quite refreshing to see Fox News actually allow objective truth be aired on on occasion.

Kunal Sharma , 6 hours ago

The Intelligence Agencies are the Praetorian Guard in the United States.

Joe Boyko , 5 hours ago

Pulling off the partisan blinders is the first step toward enlightenment... Party politics is a means of control. When you come to realize that we all have a tendency to agree that the major issues have no party loyalty, and we're all on the same side, you can look past minor differences and move forward to working for the greater good...

Pisstrooper pan shaker , 5 hours ago

THE CIA HAS BEEN OVERTHROWING GOVERMENTS FOR DECADES,and you wonder why Trump doesn't trust them? It's because he doesn't want war. He ain't no saint but at least we have an anti war President.

Poseidon Cichlidon , 5 hours ago (edited)

Morning Joe's panel said today that the Democrats need to run on this Russia conspiracy theory, and nothing else, in order to win the midterms. If they bring up free college or medicare for all it will "weaken their message and confuse the voters". Once again the corporate neoliberal warmonger Democrats and their rich TV puppets are setting us up for failure, no voter gives a damn about Russia, MSNBC wants our progressive candidates to lose instead of reform their corrupt party!

SONIX , 7 minutes ago

I just saw another Tucker Carlson news clip that Tony Podesta is offered immunity to testify against Paul Manafort? WTF? Why aren't Podestas charged?!

Cynthia Johnson , 5 hours ago (edited)

Yep, Bernie is pushing the Russiagate story and Tucker Carlson on Fox News nails it. The world isn't upside down, it's doing back flips.

Vegan4ThePlanet , 4 hours ago (edited)

"So this is the Hostage Tape" CLASSIC LINE, Great one, LMAO

DlchMcV , 4 hours ago (edited)

I think what has happened to the Liberals, is that for decades and decades they were the most progressive, tolerant party. They really did want to do more for the people and tried to introduce things that the right would instantly point to and call "socialist!!" Corporations started to look at these liberals as representatives they could pay off but without suspect, unlike Republicans, who were widely known to accept money from Corporations, Big Pharma and huge construction companies (Haliburton anyone?).

Over time, Liberals saw the benefits of being chummy with these same big $$ companies and voted on bills, etc in the ways that would make these corps very happy and more profitable. No one wanted to believe that Liberals were doing the same thing as Republicans but now we know they are. It's not a secret anymore. Most politicians aren't in it to make their country, their state or their cities better; they're in it to make their bank accounts unbelievably huge and that's it. They're greedy people with no integrity, pretending to serve the people.

Louis-Ferdinand Féline , 1 hour ago

I'm a righty, and I'm so surprised to see a liberal agree with Tucker in all the things I care about! Imagine what we could accomplish if we put aside our differences for a time and work on what we agree on! No more immoral wars for Israel! TRY BUSH, CHENEY, AND ALL NEOCONS THAT LED US TO WAR WITH IRAQ FOR TREASON!!

Dosh cratonin , 5 hours ago

You are so right. Thank you for bringout the truth. Neocons, military industrial complex and liberal leftists have penetrated deeply into the government intelligence communities, wall street banking, both houses of Us congress, mainstream media as well as Hollywood people, even in an academia. This country is deep sh*t. I am surprised liberal leftists have not crucified Tucker Carlson yet for speaking out.

swiSSy Schweizer , 6 hours ago

Russiagate is DemoKKKrat horse cookies. Putin is correct. DemoKKKrats are bad losers. $1.2 billion gone, servers gone! DmoKKKrats cannot even prove climate change

[Jul 21, 2018] The Intelligence Community , in particular CIA, is a central executive force in the circus, in collaboration with MI6 and the obedient assets in the NATO sphere, but they have grown so incompetent due to incessant politicizing and sycophantism that they are perhaps little more a paper tiger by now?

Notable quotes:
"... Was it Rosenstein who ordered the arrest of the Russian gun lobbyist woman the day after the summit? ..."
"... There is much to suggest that Special Counsel Mueller takes his orders from Rosenstein, but who does Rosenstein answer to, and is he untouchable within the USA legal system? How much cognitive dissonance is the public supposed to handle in relation to Rosenstein not being held accountable for his crimes, including high treason? ..."
Jul 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

veto , Jul 21, 2018 6:14:27 PM | 35

Who is actually in charge over there, among the Borg? And how much in charge? They cannot function yet as the collective electronic mind of science fiction, can they?

Was it Rosenstein who ordered the arrest of the Russian gun lobbyist woman the day after the summit? That looks very much like an act of desperation. There is much to suggest that Special Counsel Mueller takes his orders from Rosenstein, but who does Rosenstein answer to, and is he untouchable within the USA legal system? How much cognitive dissonance is the public supposed to handle in relation to Rosenstein not being held accountable for his crimes, including high treason?

Who are the 'globalists' actually and which is their chain of command? Which positions do Soros, Bezos, CIA-MI6 have? What is the role of Mossad?

As it appears, after the ascendance of Trump, the actors are not sure themselves anymore about any of this, that is about who is in charge, or in particular about how much authority and insurance their actual real-life handlers do possess and vouch for. They waver, in the case of media hysterically so.

"The Intelligence Community", in particular CIA, is a central executive force in the circus, in collaboration with MI6 and the obedient assets in the NATO sphere, but they have grown so incompetent due to incessant politicizing and sycophantism that they are perhaps little more a paper tiger by now? If this fact, with the help of Trump and allies, would be perceived clearer by the political classes of the USA, much good would be the result.

[Jul 20, 2018] Doubting The Intelligence Of The Intelligence Community by Ilana Mercer

Highly recommended!
Intelligence community is a new Praetorian guard which since JFK murder can decide the fate of presidents.
Notable quotes:
"... Peter Strzok, the disgraced and disgraceful Federal Bureau of Investigation official, is the very definition of a slimy swamp creature. Strzok twitched, grimaced and ranted his way to infamy during a joint hearing of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, on July 12. ..."
"... Strzok is the youthful face of the venerated "Intelligence Community," itself part of the sprawling political machine that makes up the D.C. comitatus ..."
"... Smug, self-satisfied, cheating creature that he is, Strzok can't take responsibility for his own misconduct, and blames Russia for dividing America. In the largely progressive bureau, moreover, Agent Strzok is neither underling nor outlier, for that matter. ..."
"... A "blind bootlicking faith in spooks" is certainly unwarranted and may even be foolish. What of odious individuals like former FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and his predecessor, James Comey, now openly campaigning for the Democrats? Are these leaders outliers in the "Intelligence Community"? ..."
"... Similarly, it's hard to think of a more partisan operator than John O. Brennan -- he ran the CIA under President Obama. True to type, he cast a vote for Communist Party USA, back in 1976, when the current Russia monomania would have been justified. Brennan has dubbed President Trump a traitor for having dared to doubt people like himself. ..."
"... The very embodiment of the Surveillance State at its worst is Michael V. Hayden. Hayden has moved seamlessly from the National Security Agency and the CIA to CNN where he beats up on Trump. The former Bush employee hollered treason: "One of the most disgraceful performances of an American president in front of a Russian leader," Hayden inveighed. Not only had POTUS dared to explore the possibility of a truce with Russia, which is a formidable nuclear power; but the president had the temerity to express a smidgen of skepticism about a community littered with spooks like Mr. Hayden. ..."
"... Pray tell, since when does the Deep State -- FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, DNI, (Director of National Intelligence), on and on -- represent, or stand for, the American People? The president, conversely, actually got the support of at least 60 million Americans. ..."
"... Outside the Beltway, ordinary folks -- Deplorables, if you will -- have to sympathize with the president's initial and honest appraisal of the Intelligence Community's collective intelligence. This is the community that has sent us into quite a few recreational, hobby wars. ..."
Jul 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

Peter Strzok, the disgraced and disgraceful Federal Bureau of Investigation official, is the very definition of a slimy swamp creature. Strzok twitched, grimaced and ranted his way to infamy during a joint hearing of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, on July 12.

In no way had he failed to discharge his professional unbiased obligation to the public, asserted Strzok. He had merely expressed the hope that "the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating such horrible, disgusting behavior."

But we did not elect YOU, Mr. Strzok. We elected Mr. Trump.

Strzok is the youthful face of the venerated "Intelligence Community," itself part of the sprawling political machine that makes up the D.C. comitatus , now writhing like a fire breathing mythical monster against President Donald Trump.

Smug, self-satisfied, cheating creature that he is, Strzok can't take responsibility for his own misconduct, and blames Russia for dividing America. In the largely progressive bureau, moreover, Agent Strzok is neither underling nor outlier, for that matter. He's an overlord, having risen "to become the Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division, the second-highest position in that division."

As Ann Coulter observed, the FBI is not the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover. Neither is the Intelligence Community Philip Haney's IC any longer. Haney was a heroic, soft-spoken, demure employee at the Department of Homeland Security. Agents like him are often fired if they don't get with the program. He didn't. Haney's method and the authentic intelligence he mined and developed might have stopped the likes of the San Bernardino mass murderers and many others. Instead, his higher-ups in the "Intelligence Community" made Haney and his data disappear.

Post Haney, the FBI failed to adequately screen and stop Syed Farook and blushing bride Tashfeen Malik.

A "blind bootlicking faith in spooks" is certainly unwarranted and may even be foolish. What of odious individuals like former FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and his predecessor, James Comey, now openly campaigning for the Democrats? Are these leaders outliers in the "Intelligence Community"?

As Peter Strzok might say to his paramour in a private tweet, "Who ya gonna believe, the Intelligence Community or your own lying eyes?" The Bureau in particular and the IC cabal, in general, appear to be dominated by the likes of the dull-witted Mr. Strzok.

Similarly, it's hard to think of a more partisan operator than John O. Brennan -- he ran the CIA under President Obama. True to type, he cast a vote for Communist Party USA, back in 1976, when the current Russia monomania would have been justified. Brennan has dubbed President Trump a traitor for having dared to doubt people like himself.

The very embodiment of the Surveillance State at its worst is Michael V. Hayden. Hayden has moved seamlessly from the National Security Agency and the CIA to CNN where he beats up on Trump. The former Bush employee hollered treason: "One of the most disgraceful performances of an American president in front of a Russian leader," Hayden inveighed. Not only had POTUS dared to explore the possibility of a truce with Russia, which is a formidable nuclear power; but the president had the temerity to express a smidgen of skepticism about a community littered with spooks like Mr. Hayden.

As one wag noted , not unreasonably, ours is "a highly-politicized intelligence community, infiltrated over decades by cadres of Deep State operatives and sleeper agents, whose goal is to bring down this presidency."

The latest pillorying heaped upon the president by the permanent establishment has it that, "Trump chose to stand with Vladimir Putin, instead of the American People." Trump, to be precise, had the temerity to "openly question his own intelligence agencies' firm finding that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S."

Pray tell, since when does the Deep State -- FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, DNI, (Director of National Intelligence), on and on -- represent, or stand for, the American People? The president, conversely, actually got the support of at least 60 million Americans.

That's a LOT of support. Outside the Beltway, ordinary folks -- Deplorables, if you will -- have to sympathize with the president's initial and honest appraisal of the Intelligence Community's collective intelligence. This is the community that has sent us into quite a few recreational, hobby wars.

And this is the community that regularly intercepts but fails to surveys and stop the likes of mass murderers Syed Farook and bride Tashfeen Malik. Or, Orlando nightclub killer Omar Mateen, whose father the Bureau saw fit to hire as an informant. The same "community" has invited the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Arab-American Institute to help shape FBI counterterrorism training.

The FBI might not be very intelligent at all. About the quality of that intelligence, consider: On August 3, 2016, as the mad media were amping up their Russia monomania, a frenzied BuzzFeed -- it calls itself a news org -- reported that "the Russian foreign ministry had wired nearly $30,000 through a Kremlin-backed bank to its embassy in Washington, DC."

Intercepted by American intelligence, the Russian wire stipulated that the funds were meant "to finance the election campaign of 2016." Was this not "meddling in our election" or what? Did we finally have irrefutable evidence of Kremlin culpability? The FBI certainly thought so. "Worse still, this was only one of 60 transfers that were being scrutinized by the FBI," wrote the Economist, in November of 2017. "Similar transfers were made to other countries." As it transpired, the money was wired from the Kremlin to embassies the world over. Its purpose? Russia was preparing to hold parliamentary elections in 2016 and had sent funds to Russian embassies "to organize the polling for expatriates."

While it did update its Fake News factoids, Buzzfeed felt no compunction whatsoever to remove the erroneous item or publicly question their sources in the unimpeachable "Intelligence Community."

Most news media are just not as inquisitive as President Trump.

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She is the author of " Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa " (2011) & " The Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed " (June, 2016). She's on Twitter , Facebook , Gab & YouTube

[Jul 17, 2018] IMHO believing in the Crowdstrike analysis is like believing in Santa Claus

Putin statement about $400 million 'donation' to Hillary Clinton by MI6-connected Bill Browder in his Helsinki presser is obviously of great interest. This has given some new insights into the DNC false flag operation dynamics.
Notable quotes:
"... The FBI would get info about these hackers through the CrowdStrike team's disk images, memory dumps, network logs and other reports. CrowdStrike's Robert Johnston also said he worked with FBI investigators during his work at the DNC so the FBI also got some of their info directly. ..."
"... IMHO believing in the Crowdstrike analysis is like believing in Santa Claus. They did propagate unsubstantiated "security porno" like a hack of Ukrainians for a while. After this incident, Dmitry Alperovich looks like a sleazy used car salesman, not like a real specialist and, in any case, his qualification is limited to the SMTP protocol. ..."
"... What if it was Crowdstrike which compiled and planted the malware using Vault 7 tools and then conducted full-scale false flag operation against Russians to deflect allegations that Bernie was thrown under the bus deliberately and unlawfully. They have motivation and means to do this. ..."
Jul 17, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Keith Harbaugh , a day ago

PT, regarding your questions: "How did the FBI obtain information about activity on the DNC and DCCC servers", "what is the source of the information?",
"how do they know what happened on specific dates as alleged in the complaint?", I believe the answers are implicit in the first part of this news article:

"The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S." By Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger and Scott Shane, New York Times , 2016-12-13.

It describes in considerable detail how, STARTING IN SEPTEMBER 2015, the FBI tried strenuously to alert the DNC to the fact that it was being hacked by Russia, but the DNC, remarkably, chose to ignore these warnings.

Here's how the article begins:

When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally [ sic! ], to the help desk.

His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named "the Dukes," a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government.

The F.B.I. knew it well: The bureau had spent the last few years trying to kick the Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the government's best-protected networks.

BTW, I sincerely thank TTG for providing this link in one of his previous comments.

TTG -> Keith Harbaugh , 8 hours ago
Keith et al,

The FBI warned the DNC of the Dukes (aka APT29, Cozy Bear) in September 2015. These are the hackers that the Dutch AIVD penetrated and warned the NSA in real time when they attacked Pentagon systems in 2015. Their goal seemed to be intelligence collection as one would expect as the Dutch said they are affiliated with the SVR.

The Fancy Bear hackers (aka APT28) are the ones referred to in the recent indictment of the GRU officers. They penetrated the DNC systems in April 2016 and weren't discovered until CrowdStrike identified them. They're the ones who took data and released it through DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks as part of a coordinated information operation (IO). I'm not at all surprised that the GRU would lead this IO as a military operation. The FBI would get info about these hackers through the CrowdStrike team's disk images, memory dumps, network logs and other reports. CrowdStrike's Robert Johnston also said he worked with FBI investigators during his work at the DNC so the FBI also got some of their info directly. There is absolutely no need to take physical possession of the servers.

The detail of some of the GRU officers' online activity indicates their computers were penetrated by US or allied IC/LEA much like the Dutch AIVD penetrated the FSB computers. This was probably a main source for much of the indictment's evidence. That the IC would release information about this penetration for this indictment is extraordinary. Normally this stuff never sees the light of day. It sets the precedent for the release of further such intelligence information in future indictments.

Likbez -> TTG
TTG,

IMHO believing in the Crowdstrike analysis is like believing in Santa Claus. They did propagate unsubstantiated "security porno" like a hack of Ukrainians for a while. After this incident, Dmitry Alperovich looks like a sleazy used car salesman, not like a real specialist and, in any case, his qualification is limited to the SMTP protocol.

What if it was Crowdstrike which compiled and planted the malware using Vault 7 tools and then conducted full-scale false flag operation against Russians to deflect allegations that Bernie was thrown under the bus deliberately and unlawfully. They have motivation and means to do this.

Now we also see a DNC motivation of keeping the content of affected servers from FBI eyes -- Browder money.

[Jul 16, 2018] It was known that Dov Zakheim had secretly arranged for $2.3 trillion dollars to be mis-appropriated through Pentagon channels when he had been the Pentagon Comptroller

Notable quotes:
"... Evidence and expert testimony confirm without a doubt that the attacks on September 11, 2001 against the Pentagon (as well as the World Trade Center and the Solomon Building in N.Y.) were a well-planned, well-financed, psychological operation – a false flag attack on American soil – designed to trigger and manipulate the American people, the Congress, and the U.S. Military into a full-scale war-mobilization posture with the intent of overthrowing, scattering, and re-making the Middle East and Africa for the direct political, cultural, and economic benefit of the Zionist state of Israel ..."
Jul 16, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2018 at 10:05 pm

Read Scott Bennett's letter to President Trump . it will make you think.

https://ahtribune.com/us/israelgate/2358-dov-zakheim.html

Joe Tedesky , July 15, 2018 at 12:04 pm

"Part of my mission was to investigate, discover, and expose all acts of "waste, fraud, and abuse" by Terrorist Financing Operations Director Dov Zakheim who was my senior supervisor. It was known that Dov Zakheim had secretly arranged for $2.3 trillion dollars to be mis-appropriated through Pentagon channels when he had been the Pentagon Comptroller." Scott Bennett

Gregory Herr , July 15, 2018 at 11:49 pm

Double WOW. Great catch Joe.

"Evidence and expert testimony confirm without a doubt that the attacks on September 11, 2001 against the Pentagon (as well as the World Trade Center and the Solomon Building in N.Y.) were a well-planned, well-financed, psychological operation – a false flag attack on American soil – designed to trigger and manipulate the American people, the Congress, and the U.S. Military into a full-scale war-mobilization posture with the intent of overthrowing, scattering, and re-making the Middle East and Africa for the direct political, cultural, and economic benefit of the Zionist state of Israel."

[Jul 16, 2018] What is the journalism equivalent for 'regulatory capture'

Notable quotes:
"... The Dems. and journalists are jumping all over themselves to fawn over the intelligence services as the defenders of democracy. ..."
Jul 16, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Louis Fyne , July 16, 2018 at 9:15 am

The Dems. and journalists are jumping all over themselves to fawn over the intelligence services as the defenders of democracy.

What is the journalism equivalent for 'regulatory capture'?

And even assuming that everything in the indictments are 100% true, then the DNC were grossly negligent in handling their communications. And Clinton too, with her email server. And the Obama administration for letting this happen.

Arizona Slim , July 16, 2018 at 12:48 pm

I just finished reading Donna Brazile's book, Hacks .

According to Brazile, the DNC's IT department was alerted by the FBI. This was back in 2015 when a G-man called the DNC headquarters and was transferred to the DNC's help desk, which had been outsourced to a Chicago-based company called The MIS Department. And, you guessed it, this company had connections to Obama.

Well, it gets worse. The help desk guy who answered the phone thought it was a crank call. And, after a cursory examination of the DNC computer network, he concluded that there was no hack.

[Jul 15, 2018] What Mueller won t find by Bob In Portland

Highly recommended!
So Mueller was a CIA mole in FBI fromthe very beginning. Interesting...
Notable quotes:
"... You could say that Mueller married into the CIA, except that his great uncle was Richard Bissell. So between his family and his wife's family Mueller had two of the three people that Kennedy fired before he was assassinated by a "lone nut", as well as the mayor who hosted the assassination. The third man fired was Allen Dulles, who sat on the Warren Commission and managed to keep the CIA out of the investigation into JFK's murder. Perhaps Dulles was a guest at the wedding. ..."
"... Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections. ..."
"... Mueller, who had been appointed Assistant U.S. Prosecutor under GHW Bush, became FBI Director under George W. Bush just in time not to see the CIA fingerprints on 9/11, which should not be surprising considering whom he didn't see when he investigated BCCI. ..."
"... Additionally, Mueller oversaw the anthrax letter case, never investigating Battelle Memorial Corporation, which had a building within a mile of the mailbox where the letters had been mailed. (Battelle Memorial's corporate motto is "It Can Be Done".) Instead, he centered FBI investigations on scientists in government labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, who had neither the expertise nor the equipment to make the weaponized military grade anthrax found in the letters. One scientist sued and won millions. The other allegedly "committed suicide". Battelle is noteworthy because it handles the US military's anthrax program. Mueller had no interest that two of the targets who received anthrax letters were at the time the most vociferous opponents of the Bush Administration's Patriot Act. ..."
"... Perhaps his greatest accomplishment aiding the Deep State as FBI Director was his shutting down of Operation Green Quest, the FBI's investigation into the funding behind 9/11 and the terrorist network behind it. Names began popping up like Grover Norquist, the Muslim Brotherhood, old Nazis and the royal family of Luxembourg. Nothing to see here. Move along. ..."
"... @detroitmechworks ..."
"... Only thing missing for me was the tie in to Pappy Bush and the rest of the family. Mueller the consigliere of the CIA. Oh man how fucked are we? ..."
"... Great history of how corrupt Mueller has always been and how he has covered up for so many crimes. I'm just stunned by the number of people who have decided that Mueller's history and the history of the CIA, FBI and the other intelligence agencies wasn't that bad after all just because they are going after Trump. This selective amnesia is simply amazing, isn't it? ..."
"... Clinton's role in helping the CIA to smuggle drugs into Arkansas is never talked about either. Or if it is it's called "a right wing attempt to bring them down." ..."
"... that explains why centrist and liberal media have a disturbing tendency to rehabilitate some of the most vile, reactionary forces on the American right simply because they say vaguely negative things about Donald Trump -- a phenomenon we call "Trumpwashing." ..."
"... Just like Mueller, Brennan is one more war criminal whose actions seem to have been forgotten. ..."
"... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
"... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
"... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
"... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
"... The seas were calm and the skies were clear." ..."
"... "The reason why the ship went down is because of the massive storm that came out of nowhere." ..."
"... It would appear at first glance this is basically an effort at espionage only ..."
"... as it appears they don't ..."
"... I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against the charges. ..."
"... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
"... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
"... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
"... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
Jul 12, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

In the 1950s, when the science fiction genre started making itself felt in movies, there was always the pivotal scene where the protagonist discovers the dark secret but no one will believe him: a flying saucer hidden under the sand in a field, truckloads of pod people to replace real people, or that the friendly aliens' book "To Serve Man" wasn't a guide to helping humans, but a cookbook. It's that moment of sudden realization that no one will believe the hero because it sounds too crazy to believe.

Granted, to the uninitiated, coming to a realization so shocking and threatening to your current mental construction of the world can appear like paranoia. It becomes a question of the discoverer's knowledge and senses over what everyone else believes. Everyone else seems to be allowing him or herself to be absorbed into the great growing evil.

Today many of us, certainly readers here at Caucus99, are finding ourselves in similar positions. Our political structure is a lie, the people who are supposed to represent us and our interests don't, our law enforcement protects the property of the rich, not our lives, and often are in cahoots with the criminals from whom we are supposed to be protected. I am sure that many of our old friends and acquaintances have been alienated from some of us here when we began talking about Hillary's track record during the Presidential campaign, for example. In our current pasteboard world, if you are a Republican or Democrat you must assume that your designated political party, maybe with a couple of exceptions, are there to look after you.

And there that crazy friend goes, yelling about cookbooks.

I suppose my introduction to the corruption of those in power, at thirteen, was the assassination of JFK. Not actually the assassination, but the murder of Oswald two days later, in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters. I had slept overnight at a friend's and we came back from shooting basketballs to watch the transfer of Oswald to another facility. That was the moment that I realized all wasn't what it seemed. But, like most kids my age, the Beatles came along in a month or so and I was swept into the world of rock and roll, which kept me occupied until I began noticing girls. Until 1968. I was still noticing girls and rock and roll, but I was also noticing the number of progressives being gunned down by "lone nuts". And I was noticing Vietnam.

I'm not sharing this to explain to you how I became (that loathsome term) a "conspiracy theorist". I just want to explain to you that the democracy of the United States, and all the characters running across the stage in Washington, D.C., are the cookbook.

I wrote an essay here back in April of 2017 explaining how the Russiagate scandal had been designed to give Hillary Clinton a casus belli for her future war against Russia, and that what we were seeing since she lost has been a recycling of it to get Trump in line with the goals of the Deep State. So far nothing much has happened that has moved me from that belief. Now that the Deep State seems to have persuaded our Dear Leader that he can go on being himself as long as he understands the actual hierarchy and doesn't get in the way the Deep State, everything seems to be back on track. At least until Donald's next tweet.

But in order to understand the depth of criminality in our system one has to understand how things are done. After World War II a lot of social awareness began putting pressure on the old system that had driven the world into the Great Depression. FDR had demonstrated that the government could look out for the poor, could give them jobs when there were no other jobs to be had. The GI Bill sent millions of vets to college and helped to create the middle class we used to have. Unions had real power in negotiating wages and terms of service. Government could create a system to help the elderly. The African Americans, coming back home from fighting a war against fascism, refused go to the coloreds only water fountains. In short, the United States were in for some growing pains.

What happened? As I mentioned above there was a rash of murders of progressive political candidates and leaders in the sixties. But in order for the forces behind a return to the old rules to keep a lid on any revolutions there had to be something better than shooting every progressive who raised his head above the lectern. Thus the wave of recruitment of agents and assets in the late sixties by the CIA, FBI and other agencies. Although I didn't know it directly at the time, arriving on campus in 1968 it was evident that there was a "presence" of people looking over the shoulders of student activists.

Which brings me to another great revelation. It's not just politicians and political parties that are serving the Deep State. Any agency that can be corrupted by power will be, eventually.

Which brings us to the courts.

There are certain things that must be preserved for a ruling class to remain legitimate in the eyes of the public. Some people don't think much beyond the flag. But there are other things. The media is better than ever at keeping uncomfortable truths from the majority of Americans. But what happens where the criminality of the Deep State collides with our judicial system?

Let me introduce you to the man of the hour in Washington, Robert Swann Mueller III. Robert was born into the upper crust in our American class system. At one point in his education in private schools John Kerry was a classmate. (Kerry was also a fellow Bonesman with the Bushes.) Mueller met his eventual bride, Ann Cabell Standish, at one of the dances they attended. They married in 1966, three years after John Kennedy's assassination. If you have read much about the JFK assassination you would recognize her middle name. Her grandfather, Charles Cabell, had been second in command at the CIA when John Kennedy was elected President. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fired three men from leadership positions at the CIA: Director Allen Dulles, Cabell and Richard Bissell. Charles Cabell was Ann's grandfather. Her grand uncle, Earle Cabell, was the mayor of Dallas at the time of Kennedy's murder there. Recently declassified JFK documents revealed that Mayor Cabell was also an asset of the CIA at the time. Small world. You could say that Mueller married into the CIA, except that his great uncle was Richard Bissell. So between his family and his wife's family Mueller had two of the three people that Kennedy fired before he was assassinated by a "lone nut", as well as the mayor who hosted the assassination. The third man fired was Allen Dulles, who sat on the Warren Commission and managed to keep the CIA out of the investigation into JFK's murder. Perhaps Dulles was a guest at the wedding.

Soon thereafter Mueller decided to go to Vietnam because, he said, a classmate had died there and patriotism and so forth. He became an officer and eventually ended up as an aide-de-camp for the 3rd Marine Division's commanding general, General William K. Jones. Something else was going on in Vietnam. The CIA had installed its Phoenix Program. I cannot do justice to the Phoenix Program and won't considering Doug Valentine's work on it is available for everyone, but the Phoenix Program was the CIA's attempt to totally control the Vietnamese population. Besides massacres of villages, the program assassinated suspected leaders and spies for the Vietcong, coerced others into being their agents, and kept up files on all the relevant Vietnamese down to the village level. Like in later wars, the CIA incorporated torture, murder and psychological techniques in order to control their targets. As an aide-de-camp to a commanding Marine general, there is no way that Mueller didn't know about the Phoenix Program. He probably saw daily briefings.

When he came back to the US he studied law and quickly became a federal prosecutor.

One of the things to mark his career was to deny a pardon to Patty Hearst for her part in the whole Symbionese Liberation Army's "terror" campaign. What did the SLA have to do with anything? A short history: Donald DeFreeze, a small-time criminal in Los Angeles agreed to become an informant for the LAPD in order to stay out of jail. After awhile he got tired of ratting out others and asked to get out of the program. Instead, DeFreeze was incarcerated at the Vacaville Medical Facility for criminally insane prisoners in the California penal system. There DeFreeze met Colston Westbrook who gave classes for the "Black Cultural Association", an experimental behavior modification unit inside the prison. Who was Westbrook? He was a CIA agent, trained in psychological warfare and part of the Phoenix Program. DeFreeze was modified by Westbrook and company for two years. Soon thereafter, he was transferred to Soledad Prison, from which he "escaped" and became the infamous "Cinque". Then came the Symbionese Liberation Army, a caricature of a black militant group filled with mostly white people with military backgrounds. The murder of Marcus Foster, a progressive black leader in the San Francisco East Bay, was done by white men in blackface, according to eyewitnesses. The SLA claimed credit for it. The SLA kidnapped Hearst, subjected her to torture, rape, sensory deprivation and mind control tactics, just like the CIA did in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Then came the bank robberies.

I bring up the Patty Hearst case because, in 2000, decades after her prison sentence had been commuted, Mueller still opposed her pardon. Guess what he didn't notice when he rejected her pardon? This has been his pattern throughout his career. We'll return to Patty Hearst shortly.

Mueller has presided over many cases where it's been important for the prosecutor to overlook the fingerprints of the CIA. He prosecuted what was known in the San Francisco Bay Area as the "drug tug" case which had connections to an island in Panama. It was a drug smuggling case and had tentacles into things like bank frauds in Northern California. He prosecuted Manuel Noriega's drug-smuggling without noticing Oliver North's drug-smuggling, arms running and money laundering through Panama as a part of Iran-contra.

Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections.

For example, he prosecuted Pan Am 103. Initially, and then later confirmed by an insurance investigator's report, the bomb that brought down the airliner was believed to be placed onboard by baggage handlers working at the Frankfurt Airport. They were given the bomb by a terrorist cell who in turn got it from one Monzer al-Kassar, who was a very large heroin dealer, estimated at supplying twenty percent of the US's heroin at the time. A big operator. And, in fact, one of the passengers on the plane was a drug mule for al-Kassar. Al-Kassar also happened to be a part of the Iran-contra operation, supplying weapons for North's Enterprise. The operation was, according to the early reports, carried out by a cell of Palestinian terrorists based in Frankfurt, the Palestinian Liberation Front-General Command, who got the bomb from al-Kassar and put the bomb on that airline.

Mueller, put in charge of the case, pursued an entirely different direction, accusing two Libyans of bombing the plane. At the time Libya and Khadafy were getting blamed for a lot of terrorist activity, but the case against the two was so weak as to hardly be circumstantial.

There were other questions arising from Pan Am 103. A top official in the FBI, Oliver "Buck" Revell, rushed onto the tarmac in London to pull his son and daughter-in-law off of Pan Am 103 before it went on to explode over Lockerbie, Scotland. Also changing flight plans were South African President Pik Botha and his negotiating team. Apparently, someone that Revell and Pik Botha knew gave them the warning.

There was one group that didn't get warned. That was the McKee Team, an assembled group of US intelligence agents tasked to investigate American hostages in Beruit. They allegedly discovered a link between the hostage takers, drug traffickers and the CIA. They were returning to the US, against orders, presumably to spill the beans. This was essentially a clean-up operation, tying up loose strings of the Iran-contra operation. So was Noriega's prosecution.

That's why Mueller got the case. He knew where to look and where not to look.

He also prosecuted ancillary Iran-contra cases. He prosecuted John Gotti for dealing cocaine in the New York City area. The cocaine he sold was part of the the Iran-contra (CIA) plan where Southern Air Transport flew weapons to Latin America for the contras (whom Congress had voted against aiding) and bringing back cocaine from Latin America on its return flights, to include Mena, Arkansas. One of the CIA's pilots, Barry Seal, bragged that he had a "get-out-of-jail" letter written for him by then-Governor Bill Clinton. At the time, Asa Hutchinson was the federal prosecutor for that corner of Arkansas. He also didn't notice all that cocaine. Hutchson later served as George W. Bush's first "drug czar" before going into politics. How coincidental.

Mueller, who had been appointed Assistant U.S. Prosecutor under GHW Bush, became FBI Director under George W. Bush just in time not to see the CIA fingerprints on 9/11, which should not be surprising considering whom he didn't see when he investigated BCCI. As head of our country's biggest law enforcement agency Mueller did not pursue the House of Saud's part in 9/11 even though fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and a number of them could be traced to Saudi intelligence, and the money chain could be traced to Saudis living in the US, some of whom flew out of the US while all other US flights were grounded. He did not investigate Mohammed Atta's time in Frankfort, Germany, where he was employed by a front company for the BND, West Germany's equivalent to the CIA. Nor did Mueller investigate Huffman Aviation where Mo Atta and another hijacker matriculated in flying planes into buildings. Huffman is interesting because while Mo was studying in Huffman's Venice, Florida aviation school a Huffman plane was busted in Orlando with 43 pounds of heroin. Curiously, the pilot walked away from the DEA without being charged and no one was prosecuted at Huffman.

Ask Colleen Rowley about Mueller's leadership in the 9/11 investigation.

Additionally, Mueller oversaw the anthrax letter case, never investigating Battelle Memorial Corporation, which had a building within a mile of the mailbox where the letters had been mailed. (Battelle Memorial's corporate motto is "It Can Be Done".) Instead, he centered FBI investigations on scientists in government labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, who had neither the expertise nor the equipment to make the weaponized military grade anthrax found in the letters. One scientist sued and won millions. The other allegedly "committed suicide". Battelle is noteworthy because it handles the US military's anthrax program. Mueller had no interest that two of the targets who received anthrax letters were at the time the most vociferous opponents of the Bush Administration's Patriot Act.

Perhaps his greatest accomplishment aiding the Deep State as FBI Director was his shutting down of Operation Green Quest, the FBI's investigation into the funding behind 9/11 and the terrorist network behind it. Names began popping up like Grover Norquist, the Muslim Brotherhood, old Nazis and the royal family of Luxembourg. Nothing to see here. Move along.

A closer examination of Robert Mueller would probably find a lot more of these cases and I encourage others to continue the search. For example, it's been alleged that Mueller sent innocent men to jail for crimes committed by Whitey Bulger for the benefit of someone or something within the government and that this allowed Bulger to continue his criminal activities for years.

***

It's been seventy years since the CIA was created, fifty years since JFK was most likely murdered by them. In order to avoid any consequences for their crimes more and more institutions have had to be infiltrated and corrupted by them. Many of the heroes of the Left have turned out to be purveyors of "modified limited hangouts" which served the Deep State. Ramsey Clark, who was given the mantle of "good guy" by the media of the Left, was active as LBJ's Attorney General in blocking Jim Garrison's investigation into the JFK assassination and was named by Doug Valentine in his THE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME as a major proponent of the CIA's OPERATION CHAOS and the FBI's COINTELPRO. While the media spent a good deal of time talking about how great they were in releasing the Pentagon Papers to the public, the hero who exposed the military, Daniel Ellsberg, turns out to have been CIA, operating with CIA black ops in Vietnam. And while the Pentagon Papers exposed our military's great errors in Vietnam the CIA was generally spared. Again. Bob Woodward, our hero of Watergate, had been a courier for the Office of Naval Intelligence only a few years earlier. Thus, the CIA and Deep State, which had soured on Nixon, orchestrated that President's departure.

I raise this because Robert Mueller's current task is the investigation of our sitting President. No matter how much you dislike Trump you can't help but notice that the "evidence" against him conspiring with Putin and Russia is thin gruel. And while Trump, like most politicians who ascend to the big seat, has a lot of questionable, even indictable business connections around him, the great dangers of a Putin-Trump conspiracy trumpeted by the media have been fading because, apparently, there was never a there there. Thus, as Mueller oversees this case, he will find people surrounding Trump who have lied to FBI agents, who have perhaps not registered as foreign agents, and other crimes that routinely happen out of the public spotlight and aren't prosecuted. What was obvious to me from the start, that this was a psyop that involved U.S. intelligence, Ukrainian intelligence, Clinton and the DNC, will not be obvious to Mueller. Thus, as his career has shown, Mueller has been put in place not merely to prosecute those around Trump as a means of pressure on his administration, but to not see the CIA's hand in it.

When one begins examining high-profile court cases in post-1963 America one sees a cast of people who keep popping up. Prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, coroners, witnesses, reporters, authors. This ensemble keeps reappearing in these show trials. We may not know what Mueller will find, but we know what he won't find.

There was a review at Truthdig back in 2016 of Jeffrey Toobin's book on Patty Hearst, AMERICAN HEIRESS (Toobin himself worked as an associate counsel to Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh during the investigation Iran–Contra affair and Oliver North's criminal trial). In part it reads: "Toobin features the characters who populated the edges of Hearst's story. Robert Shapiro, who would later work with [F. Lee] Bailey on the O.J. Simpson case, makes a cameo appearance. Lance Ito, the judge in that case, briefly shared a shooting range with a machine-gun toting SLA member. Reverend Jim Jones offered to help with the food distribution effort; that enterprise also employed Sara Jane Moore, who served 32 years for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford during his 1975 visit to San Francisco. Congressman Leo Ryan, who represented Randy and Catherine Hearst's district, endorsed the commutation of Patty's sentence. "Off to Guyana," he wrote Patty in 1978. "See you when I return. Hang in there." Jim Jones' henchmen shot and killed Ryan before he could board his flight home. Robert Mueller, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco before taking over as FBI director, strenuously opposed Hearst's pardon, claiming that her attitude, born of wealth and social position, "has always been that she is a person above the law.""

When Mueller wrote that line he must have laughed out loud.

Wow! Where did you get all those facts about Mueller.

That isn't connecting the dots. Its painting a bloody Mona Lisa.

I had no idea how dirty this man was. He is the CIA version of Zelig or Forest Gump. He makes Bill Clinton look like an amateur.

Beginning with the double CIA family ties and proceeding through whitewashing 911, this man is so central to our rotten government that its a wonder someone hasn't done what you just did a lot sooner.

My hat is off to you. Someone should post this article on our blog.

detroitmechworks on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 3:15pm
It's almost become a parody of a dystopia...

The one that keeps jumping to mind is the mid 80's game "Paranoia" which was a cartoonish comedy about the drugged citizens of a complex where the state oversaw everything, and the people were obsessed with celebrities and junk food and oh my goooooodd...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_ (role-playing_game)

Seriously though, so much of this makes absolute sense if you just abandon the concept that democracy has any play whatsoever in our society.

So with that in mind, a little music from the era, and a little self parody as well.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/LR4XNqrqxrU?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

arendt on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 6:36pm
In my hatred of role-playing games, I missed Paranoia

@detroitmechworks

Thanks for pointing to it. I got laughs just reading the wikipedia page.

It sounds like Kafka meets that Russian guy who was simultaneously head of the secret police and leader of the resistance.

LOL.

The one that keeps jumping to mind is the mid 80's game "Paranoia" which was a cartoonish comedy about the drugged citizens of a complex where the state oversaw everything, and the people were obsessed with celebrities and junk food and oh my goooooodd...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_ (role-playing_game)

Seriously though, so much of this makes absolute sense if you just abandon the concept that democracy has any play whatsoever in our society.

So with that in mind, a little music from the era, and a little self parody as well.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/LR4XNqrqxrU?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

detroitmechworks on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 6:48pm
West End Games had a lot of incredible hits...

@arendt even considering they were working from licenses half the time. They ended up essentially creating the universe bibles for Ghostbusters and the Star Wars EU prior to the reboots.

Unfortunately, that didn't translate into respect. However, I still to this day am amazed at the complexity of thought that went into many of the rules and the ability they had to match mechanics to maintaining the play feel.

Paranoia in particular was hilarious. Kafka and Three Stooges, and even a little Joseph Heller. Later editions even managed to work in criticisms of late stage capitalism by having players ALWAYS broke and any unexpected expenses needing to be made up through crime... which was illegal, to avoid budget shortfalls... which was also illegal...

#3

Thanks for pointing to it. I got laughs just reading the wikipedia page.

It sounds like Kafka meets that Russian guy who was simultaneously head of the secret police and leader of the resistance.

LOL.

Linda Wood on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 3:19pm
Brilliant and wonderful essay!

Bob, thank you. As detailed and extensive as it is, your essay is concise by making it clear exactly what's so wrong with Mueller:

Mueller has presided over many cases where it's been important for the prosecutor to overlook the fingerprints of the CIA...

Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections...

Thus, as his career has shown, Mueller has been put in place not merely to prosecute those around Trump as a means of pressure on his administration, but to not see the CIA's hand in it...

For me, the anthrax case is the most important. Biological weapons are no joke. I believe we learned, from whistle-blowing scientists, not from the FBI investigation, that the CIA had one of the many illegal biological weapons programs being run with our tax dollars leading up to the anthrax attack. So whether Battelle was one of the CIA's contractors or yet another cut out, the investigation by Mueller simply stated those entities, all of them, were eliminated from the investigation.

arendt on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 4:48pm
Some relevant quotes from Hannah Arendt

The chief difference between the despotic and the totalitarian secret police lies in the difference between the "suspect" and the "objective enemy". The latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his own desire to overthrow it. He is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be provoked or whose past justifies suspicion, but a "carrier of tendencies" like a carrier of disease. Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler behaves like a man who persistently insults another man until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibility, go and kill him in self-defense.
p423-4

"From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the change from the suspect to the objective enemy is the totalitarian replacement of the suspected offense by the possible crime ...While the suspect is arrested because he is thought to be capable of committing a crime that more or less fits his personality, the totalitarian possible crime is based on the logical anticipation of objective developments.

The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.

"The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out to be...Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p403)

ggersh on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 5:32pm
And Mr. transparency was O himself

@arendt

"The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out to be...Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p403)

The chief difference between the despotic and the totalitarian secret police lies in the difference between the "suspect" and the "objective enemy". The latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his own desire to overthrow it. He is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be provoked or whose past justifies suspicion, but a "carrier of tendencies" like a carrier of disease. Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler behaves like a man who persistently insults another man until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibility, go and kill him in self-defense.
p423-4

"From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the change from the suspect to the objective enemy is the totalitarian replacement of the suspected offense by the possible crime ...While the suspect is arrested because he is thought to be capable of committing a crime that more or less fits his personality, the totalitarian possible crime is based on the logical anticipation of objective developments.

The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.

"The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out to be...Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p403)

on the cusp on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 5:13pm
This is the most interesting essay I have read here.

Bravo, Bob.

ggersh on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 5:36pm
Great story!!!

Only thing missing for me was the tie in to Pappy Bush and the rest of the family. Mueller the consigliere of the CIA. Oh man how fucked are we?

snoopydawg on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 5:45pm
Outstanding

Great history of how corrupt Mueller has always been and how he has covered up for so many crimes. I'm just stunned by the number of people who have decided that Mueller's history and the history of the CIA, FBI and the other intelligence agencies wasn't that bad after all just because they are going after Trump. This selective amnesia is simply amazing, isn't it?

Clinton's role in helping the CIA to smuggle drugs into Arkansas is never talked about either. Or if it is it's called "a right wing attempt to bring them down."

Good to see you writing here again, Bob.

Snode on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 5:52pm
Wow!

This awesome. I knew about Colleen Rowley, but the rest.....2 things, what about Comey? and Bush1 being in Dallas the day of the JFK assassination?

CS in AZ on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 6:02pm
Wow, thank you

I almost skipped reading this one, assumed at first from the headline it was going to be about the Russia "investigation" which I've been steadfast in not paying any attention to.

But wow, this is so much better than I'd expected, a fascinating tapestry. A lot to absorb. At this point I'm just feeling overwhelmed at how little "we the people" in this country have any say in, or even any knowledge about, what is going on.

Thank you for this excellent history and synthesis.

snoopydawg on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 7:04pm
Here's some history of another creep who has found redemption

from those who believe the fairy tale of Russia Gate. John Brennan has also become a darling of the left. Greenwald wrote about him after Obama appointed him to his cabinet.

Joe posted this link that explains why centrist and liberal media have a disturbing tendency to rehabilitate some of the most vile, reactionary forces on the American right simply because they say vaguely negative things about Donald Trump -- a phenomenon we call "Trumpwashing."

Just like Mueller, Brennan is one more war criminal whose actions seem to have been forgotten.

Wink on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 9:56pm
It's relatively safe to

conclude from this, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the Mueller investigation of "Russiagate" won't get anywhere near the Oval Office.
Mostly becuz "Deep State" itself is up to its eyebrows in the affair. And also becuz Trump has very little to do with it. I'm sure they'd Love to bury Hillary in this, but it looks like that won't happen either. A shame.

snoopydawg on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 11:21pm
Mueller doesn't want to show the Russians his evidence

I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they did.

Mueller Scrambles To Limit Evidence After Indicted Russians Actually Show Up In Court

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social media in order to sow discord among American voters.

The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.

Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing.

The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors

Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.

Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!

Deja on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 11:46pm
A Red list?

@snoopydawg @snoopydawg
What the hell? Do these people even know they're on this list, or part of this evidence? Or, are they not even real people, or are they maybe even govt employees needed to play a role? There's that cookbook again, maybe. Yikes!

The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors

I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they did.

Mueller Scrambles To Limit Evidence After Indicted Russians Actually Show Up In Court

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social media in order to sow discord among American voters.

The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.

Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing.

The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors

Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.

Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!

snoopydawg on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 12:49am
Who knows?

@Deja

It's obvious that the whole damn Russia Gate conspiracy was just made up. It started when Wikileaks said that they were going to release the emails between Hillary and Podesta that showed how they rigged the primary against Bernie. The reason why they did it was to keep people from talking about the contents of the emails. And it worked. The media didn't focus on their contents, but only on how Wikileaks obtained them.

Another reason for the Russian propaganda crap is so people will give their permission for the upcoming war against Russia that had already been planned for over two years before the election. And they will. I've seen so many comments that says what Russia (Putin) did and is still doing was an act of war. Today on ToP one person said that "we need to assassinate Putin." Was that person HRd for promoting violence which is against the site rules? Nope. Those that believe Russia actually did interfere with the election also think that the republicans are also Putin's puppets and that is why they won't go against Trump. The front pagers have been pushing lies about Russia's actions it should be obvious to anyone with a working brain. I'll see a definitive statement like " The seas were calm and the skies were clear." But they will rewrite their statement to "The reason why the ship went down is because of the massive storm that came out of nowhere." Hopefully you get my drift on how they're blatantly lying in their statements.

Hillary's BFF, Nuland and McCain were the ones that worked the hardest on overthrowing the Ukraine government. The USA wanted to put its own puppet government on Russia's border. Plus the USA and NATO have been installing troops into countries that surround Russia's borders.

The original reason why the Mueller investigation was created was to find evidence that Trump colluded with Putin to win the election. None of the Mueller indictments have anything to do with that charge. This is why he was taken off guard when the Russian lawyers showed up to defend their clients. Hope that you read the entire article.

#13 #13
What the hell? Do these people even know they're on this list, or part of this evidence? Or, are they not even real people, or are they maybe even govt employees needed to play a role? There's that cookbook again, maybe. Yikes!

The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors

snoopydawg on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 2:40am
Heh. This is being spun differently over on ToP

@snoopydawg

This also proves my point above how information is selectively posted over there. Just certain parts of the articles are posted, but the parts of the articles that show the information in a different light are left out. This is from a comment..

It would appear at first glance this is basically an effort at espionage only , but I'm not much more sure than you are.

If they don't have a US presence ( as it appears they don't ), I can't understand why they even care that Mueller has charged them. As you point out, they won't be extradited, so none of this really matters. They could have their lawyers just play a DVD of them confessing followed by giving Mueller the double birds all around and it wouldn't make any difference, so the only logical answer for this is to try and pry state secrets out legally via the courts instead of through hacking and spying.

Oops. From the article ..

I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against the charges.

I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they did.

Mueller Scrambles To Limit Evidence After Indicted Russians Actually Show Up In Court

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social media in order to sow discord among American voters.

The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.

Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing.

The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors

Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.

Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!

Wink on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 6:08pm
Well, it gets everyone

off the hook.
@snoopydawg
Especially Mueller. Finding the 13 Russians guilty that is. Mueller can then claim, "See! The Russians did it," which gives Hillbots a warm fuzzy and reason to scold BernieBros with a "told ya so!!" AND, no reason to investigate further. Investigation over. Case closed! Everyone gets what they want. Alas... Their lawyer showed up.

I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they did.

Mueller Scrambles To Limit Evidence After Indicted Russians Actually Show Up In Court

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social media in order to sow discord among American voters.

The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.

Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing.

The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors

Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.

Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!

snoopydawg on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 11:30pm
Well of course it was a PR stunt!
As Powerline notes, Mueller probably didn't see that coming - and the indictment itself was perhaps nothing more than a PR stunt to bolster the Russian interference narrative.

I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against the charges. Rather, the Mueller prosecutors seem to have obtained the indictment to serve a public relations purpose, laying out the case for interference as understood by the government and lending a veneer of respectability to the Mueller Switch Project.

One of the Russian corporate defendants nevertheless hired counsel to contest the charges. In April two Washington-area attorneys -- Eric Dubelier and Kate Seikaly of the Reed Smith firm -- filed appearances in court on behalf of Concord Management and Consulting. Josh Gerstein covered that turn of events for Politico here. -Powerline Blog

Deja on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 11:49pm
Now I want to see it too

@snoopydawg
Especially since it's supposed to contain all these names of stooges, duped into participating in US politics by the Kremlin. It's ridiculous.

As Powerline notes, Mueller probably didn't see that coming - and the indictment itself was perhaps nothing more than a PR stunt to bolster the Russian interference narrative.

I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against the charges. Rather, the Mueller prosecutors seem to have obtained the indictment to serve a public relations purpose, laying out the case for interference as understood by the government and lending a veneer of respectability to the Mueller Switch Project.

One of the Russian corporate defendants nevertheless hired counsel to contest the charges. In April two Washington-area attorneys -- Eric Dubelier and Kate Seikaly of the Reed Smith firm -- filed appearances in court on behalf of Concord Management and Consulting. Josh Gerstein covered that turn of events for Politico here. -Powerline Blog

mimi on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 1:08am
I need to print this out and hang it at my bedside

because I believe it will be gone in its digital format in no time. Thank You for writing this out. You did good. Thank you.

GreyWolf on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 12:57pm
Bookmarked (with two separate archives)

@mimi This page is also at:archive.org archive.is because I believe it will be gone in its digital format in no time.

Thank You for writing this out. You did good. Thank you.

gulfgal98 on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 7:16pm
One of the best and most complete essays

I have read here in a long time. While I linked ot our Twitter account last night, I did not have time to read it before I posted it. I am going to link this again because I think it is such an important essay for others to read.

Thank you again for such an outstanding essay!

[Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team

Highly recommended!
Looks like another Steele dossier and it has Brennan fingertips all over. Looks like another exercise in creation of a parallel reality. The content of the document implies that malware was installed in GRU computers and those computers were monitored 24/7 by CIA. The documents describes both GNU officers and DNC employees as unsophisticated idiots. DNC employees who who should undergo some basic security training were easily deceived by fishing emails from a foreign country. And a good practice is to disable hotlinks in emails.
I always suspected that Guccifer 2.0 was a false flag operation to hide the leak of DNC documents. If this is true this was really sophisticated false flag.
BTW GRU is military intelligence unit, so to hack into civil computers is kind of out of their main sphere of activities. They also should be aware about NSA capabilities of intercepting the traffic.
I especially like the following tidbit: "On or about June 1,2016, the Conspirators attempted to delete traces of their presence on the DCCC network using the computer program CCleaner." This is how third rate hackers (wannabes) behave.
Link to the original document: https://www.scribd.com/document/383793520/Netyksho-Et-Al-Indictment#fullscreen&from_embed
First of all the investigation of DNC was botched by hiring a private, connected to Democratic Party security company (Crowdstrike), so no data from it are acceptable in court. FBI did not have any access to the data.
Which means that Mueller is a patsy of more powerful forces
How about speed of download that proved to be excessive for Internet connection? Nothing is said about Dmitri Alperovitch role is all this investigation, which completely discredit all that results? See for example diuscusstion at Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart- Say Hello to Fancy Bear And, again, the question is: Was Guccifer 2.0 in itself a USA false flag operation ?
Looks like Mueller is acting as an operative of Democratic Party. Could not dig up enough dirt on Trump, so he now saddled his beloved horse, trying to provoke Russia to respond.
And this John Le Carre style details about individuals supposedly involved. Probably were provided by CIA ;-)
Jul 13, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

... ... ...

4. By in or around April 2016, the Conspirators also hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ("DCCC") and the Democratic National Committee ("DNC"). The Conspirators covertly monitored the computers of dozens of DCCC and DNC employees, implanted hundreds of files containing malicious computer code ("malware"), and stole emails and other documents from the DCCC and DNC.

5. By in or around April 2016, the Conspirators began to plan the release of materials stolen from the Clinton Campaign, DCCC, and DNC.

6. Beginning in or around June 2016, the Conspirators staged and released tens of thousands of the stolen emails and documents. They did so using fictitious online personas, including "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0."

7. The Conspirators also used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release additional stolen documents through a website maintained by an organization ("Organization Iй), that had previously posted documents stolen from U.S. persons, entities, and the U.S. government The Conspirators continued their U.S. election-interference operations through in or around November 2016.

8. To hide their connections to Russia and the Russian government, the Conspirators used false identities and made false statements about their identities. To further avoid detection, the Conspirators used a network of computers located across the world, including in the United States, and paid for this infrastructure using cryptocurrency.

... ... ...

13. Defendant ALEKSEY VIKTOROVICH LUKASHEV (Лукашсв Алексей Викторович) was a Senior Lieutenant in the Russian military assigned to ANTONOV's department within Unit 26165. LUKASHEV used various online personas, including "Den Katenberg" and "Yuliana Martynova." In on around 2016, LUKASHEV sent spcarphisliing emails to members of the Clinton Campaign and affiliated individuals, including the chairman of the Clinton Campaign.

14. Defendant SERGEY ALEKSANDROVICH MORGACHEV (Моргачев Сергей Александрович) was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Russian military assigned to Unit 26165. MORGACHEV oversaw a department within Unit 26165 dedicated to developing and managing malware, including a hacking tool used by the GRU known as "X-Agent." During the hacking of the DCCC and DNC networks, MORGACHEV supervised the co-conspirators who developed and monitored the X-Agent malware implanted on those computers.

15. Defendant NIKOLAY YURYEVICH KOZACHEK (Козачек Николай Юрьевич) was a Lieutenant Captain in the Russian military assigned to MORGACHEV's department within Unit 26165. KOZACHEK used a variety of monikers, including "kazak" and "blablablal234565 " KOZACHEK developed, customized, and monitored X-Agent malware used to hack the DCCC and DNC networks beginning in or around April 2016.

16. Defendant PAVEL VYACHESLAVOVICH YERSHOV (Ершов Павел Вячеславович) was a Russian military officer assigned to MORGACHEV's department within Unit 26165. In or around 2016, YERSHOV assisted KOZACHEK and other co-conspirators in testing and customizing X-Agent malware before actual deployment and use.

17. Defendant ARTEM ANDREYEVICH MALYSHEV (Малышев Арт е м Андреевич) was a Second Lieutenant in the Russian military assigned to MORGACHEV's department within Unit 26165. MALYSIIEV used a variety of monikers, including "djangomagicdev" and "realblatr." In or around 2016, MALYSHEV monitored X-Agent malware implanted on the DCCC and DNC networks.

18. Defendant ALEKSANDR VLADIMIROVICH OSADCHUK (Осадчук Александр В ладимирович) was a Colonel in the Russian military and the commanding officer of Unit 74455. Unit 74455 was located at 22 Kirova Street, Khimki, Moscow, a building referred to within the GRU as the 'Tower." Unit 74455 assisted in the release of stolen documents through the DC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0 personas, the promotion of those releases, and the publication of anti-Clinton content on social media accounts operated by the GRU.

19. Defendant ALEKSEY ALEKSANDROVICH POTEMKIN (Потемкин Алексей Александрович) was an officer in the Russian military assigned to Unit 74455. POTEMKIN was a supervisor in a department within Unit 7445f responsible for the administration of computer infrastructure used in cyber operations. Infrastructure and social media accounts administered by POTEMKIN'S department were used, among other things, to assist in the release of stolen documents through the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2 0 personas.

21, ANTONOV, BADIN, YKRMAKOV, LUKASHEV, and their co-conspiratore targeted victims using a technique known as spearphishing to steal victims' passwords or otherwise gain access to their computers. Beginning by at least March 2016, the Conspirators targeted over 300 individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign, DCCC, and DNC.

a. For example, on or about March 19, 2016, LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators created and sent a spearphishing email to the chairman of the Clinton Campaign. LUKASHEV used the account "John356gh" at an online service that abbreviated lengthy website addresses (referred to as a "URL-shortcning service"). LIJKASHEV used the account to mask a link contained in the spearphishing email, which directed the recipient to a GRU-created website. LUKASHEV altered the a security notification from Google (a technique known as "spoofing"), instructing the user to change his password by clicking the embedded link. Those instructions wore followed. On or about March 21, 2016, LUKASHEV, YERMAKOV, and their co-conspirators stole the contents of the chairman's email account, which consisted of over 50,000 emails.

Starting on or about March 19, 2016, LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators sent spearphishing emails to the personal accounts of other individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign, including its campaign manager and a senior foreign policy advisor. On or about March 25, 2016, LUKASHEV used the same john356gh account to mask additional links included in spearphishing emails sent to numerous individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign, including Victims 1 and 2. LUKASliEV sent these emails from the Russia-based email account [email protected] that he spoofed to appear to be from Google. On or about March 28,2016, YERMAKOV researched the names of Victims 1 and 2 and their association with Clinton on various social media sites. Through their spearphishing operations, LUKASHEV, YERMAKOV, and their co-conspirators successfully stole email credentials and thousands of emails from numerous individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign. Many of these stolen emails. Including those from Victims 1 and 2, were later released by the Conspirators through DCLeaks.

On or about April 6, 2016, the Conspirators created an email account in the name (with a one-letter deviation from the actual spelling) of a known member of the Clinton Campaign. The Conspirators then used that account to send spearphishing emails to the work accounts of more than thirty different Clinton Campaign employees. In the spearphishipg emails, LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators embedded a link purporting to direct the recipient to a document titled "hillary-clinton-favorable-rating.xlsx " In fact, this link directed the recipients' computers to a GRU-crcatcd website.

22. The Conspirators spearphished individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign throughout the summer of 2016. For example, on or about July 27, 2016, the Conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-
party provider and used by Clinton's personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.

Hacking into the DCCC Network

23. Beginning in or around March 2016, the Conspirators, in addition to their spearphishing efforts, researched the DCCC and DNC computer networks to identify technical specifications and vulnerabilities.

  1. For example, beginning on or about March 15,2016, YERMAKOV ran a technical query for the DNC's internet protocol configurations to identify connected devices.
  2. On or about the same day, YERMAKOV searched for opcn-source information about the DNC network, the Democratic Party, and Hillary Clinton.
  3. On or about April 7. 2016. YKRMAKOV ran я technical query for the DNC's internet protocol configurations to identify connected devices.

24. By in or around April 2016, within days of YERMAKOV's searches regarding the DCCC, the Conspirators hacked into the DCCC computer network. Once they gained access, they installed and managed different types of malware to explore the DCCC network and steal data.

a. On or about April 12,2016. the Conspirators used the stolen credentials of a I )CCC On or about April 12,2016, the Conspirators used the stolen credentials of a DCCC Employee ('"DCCC Employee 1") to access the DCCC network. DCCC Employee 1 had received a spearphishing email from the Conspirators on or about April 6,2016, and entered her password after clicking on the link.

b. Between in or around April 2016 and June 2016, the Conspirators installed multiple versions of their X-Agent malware on at least ten DCCC computers, which allowed them to monitor individual employees' computer activity, steal passwords, and maintain access to the DCCC network.

c. X-Agent malware implanted on the DCCC network transmitted information from the victims' computers to a GRU-leased server located in Arizona. The Conspirators referred to this server as their "AMS" panel. KOZACHEK, MALYSHEV, and their со-conspirators logged into the AMS panel to use X-Agent's keylog and screenshot functions in the course of monitoring and surveilling activity on the DCCC computers. 'Ibe keylog function allowed the Conspirators to capture keystrokes entered by DCCC employees. The screenshot function allowed the Conspirators to take pictures of the DCCC employees' computer screens.

d. For example, on or about April 14, 2016, the Conspirators repeatedly activated X-Agent's keylog and screensiot functions to surveil DCCC Employee 1's computer activity over the course of eight hours. During that time, the Conspirators captured DCCC Employee 1 's communications with co-workers and the passwords she entered while working on fundraising and voter outreach projects. Similarly, on or about April 22, 2016, the Conspirators activated X-Agcnt's keylog and screenshot functions to capture the discussions of another DCCC Employee ("DCCC Employee 2") about the DCCC's finances, as well as her individual banking information and other personal topics.

25. On or about April 19, 2016, KOZAC1IEK, YERSIIOV, and their co-conspirators remotely configured an overseas computer to relay communications between X-Agent malware and the AMS panel and then tested X-Agent's ability to connect to this computer. The Conspirators referred to this computer as a "middle server." The middle server acted as a proxy to obscure the connection between malware at the DCCC and the Conspirators' AMS panel. On or about April 20, 2016, the Conspirators directed X-Agent malware on the DCCC computers to connect to this middle server and receive directions from the Conspirators.

Hacking into the DNC Network

26. On or about April 18, 2016, the Conspirators hacked into the DNC's computers through their access to the DCCC network. The Conspirators then installed and managed different types of malware (as they did in the DCCC network) to explore the DNC network and steal documents, a. On or about April 18, 2016, the Conspirators activated X-Agent's keylog and screenshot functions to steal credentials of a DCCC employee who was authorized
to access the DNC network. The Conspirators hacked into the DNC network from the DCCC network using stolen credentials. By in or around June 2016, they gained access to approximately thirty-three DNC computers.

In or around April 2016, the Conspirators installed X Agent malware on tho DNC network, including the same versions installed on the DCCC network.
MALYSHEV and his co-conspifators monitored the X-Agent malware from the AMS panel and captured data from the victim computers. The AMS panel collected thousands of keylog and screenshot results from the DCCC and DNC computers, such as a screenshot and keystroke capture of DCCC Employee 2 viewing the DCCC's online banking information.

Theft of DCCC and DNC Documents

27. The Conspirators searched for and identified computers within the DCCC and DNC networks that stored information related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, for example, on or about April 15, 2016, the Conspirators searched one hacked DCCC computer for terms that included "hillary," "cruz," and "trump." The Conspirators also copied select DCCC folders, including "Benghazi Investigations." The Conspirators targeted computers containing information such as opposition research and field operation plans for the 2016 elections.

28. To enable them to steal a large number of documents at once without detection, the Conspirators used a publicly available tool to gather and compress multiple documents on the DCCC and DNC networks. The Conspirators then used other GRU malware, known as "X-Tunncl," to move the stolen documents cutside the DCCC and DNC networks through encrypted channels.

a. For example, on or about April 22, 2016, the Conspirators compressed gigabytes of data from DNC computers, including opposition research. The Conspirators later moved the compressed DNC data using X-Tunnel to a GRU-leased computer located in Illinois.

b. On or about April 28, 2016, the Conspirators connected to and tested the same computer located in Illinois. Later that day, the Conspirators used X-Tunnel to connect to that computer to steal additional documents from the DCCC network.

29. Between on or about May 25, 2016 and June 1, 2016, the Conspirators hacked the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server and stole thousands of emails from the work accounts of DNC employees. During that time, YERMAKOV researched PowerShell commands related to accessing and managing the Microsoft Exchange Server.

30. On or about May 30, 2016, MALYSHEV accessed the AMS panel in order to upgrade custom AMS software on die server. That day, the AMS panel received updates from approximately thirteen different X-Agent malware implants on DCCC and DNC computers.

31. During the hacking of the DCCC and DNC networks, the Conspirators covered their tracks by Intentionally deleting logs and computer flies. For example, on or about May 13, 2016, the Conspirators cleared the event logs from a DNC computer. On or about June 20, 2016, the Conspirators deleted logs from the AMS panel that documented their activities on the panel, including the login history. Efforts to Remain on the X'CC and PNC Networks

32. Despite the Conspirators' efforts to hide their activity, beginning in or around May 2016, both the DCCC and DNC became aware that they had been hacked and hired a security company ("Company 1") to identify the extent of the intrusions. By in or around June 2016, Company 1 took steps to exclude intruders from the networks. Despite these efforts, a Linux-based version of X-Agent, programmed to communicate with the GRU-registercd domain linuxkml.net, remained on the DNC network until in or around October 2016.

33. In response to Company Ts efforts, the Conspirators took countermeasures to maintain access to the DCCC and DNC networks.

a. Oil 01 about May 31, 2016, YERMAKOV searched for opcn-sourcc information about Company 1 and its reporting on X-Agent and X-Tunnel. On or about June 1,2016, the Conspirators attempted to delete traces of their presence on the DCCC network using the computer program CCleaner.
b. On or about June 14, 2016, the Conspirators registered the domain actblues.com,
which mimicked the domain of a political fundraising platform that included a
DCCC donations page. Shortly thereafter, the Conspirators used stolen DCCC
credentials to modify the DCCC website and redirect visitors to the actblucs.com

On or about June 14, 2016, the Conspirators registered the domain actblues.com,
which mimicked the domain of a political fundraising platform that included a
DCCC donations page. Shortly thereafter, the Conspirators used stolen DCCC
credentials to modify the DCCC website and redirect visitors to the actblucs.com
domain.
On or about June 20, 2016, after Company 1 had disabled X-Agent on the DCCC
network, the Conspirators spent ever seven hours unsuccessfully trying to connect
to X-Agent. The Conspirators also tried to access the DCCC network using
previously stolen credentials.

34. In or around September 2016, the Conspirators also successfully gained access to DNC
computers hosted on a third-party cloud-computing service. These computers contained test
applications related to the DNC's analytics. After conducting reconnaissance, the Conspirators
gathered data by creating backups, or "snapshots," of the DNC's eloud-based systems using the
cloud provider's own technology. The Conspirators then moved the snapshots to cloud-based
accounts they had registered with the same service, thereby stealing the data from the DNC.
Stolen Documents Released through DCLcaks

35. More than a month before the release of any documents, the Conspirators constructed the online persona DCLeaks to release and publicize stolen election-related documents. On or about April 19, 2016, after attempting to register the domain clcctionleaks.com, the Conspirators registered the domain dcleaks.com through a service that anonymizcd the registrant. The funds used to pay for the dcleaks.com domain originated from an online cryptocutrrecy service that the Conspirators also used to fund the lease of a virtual private server registered with the operational email account [email protected]. The dirbinsaabol email account was also used to register the john356gh URL-shortening account used by LUKASHEV to spearphish the Clinton Campaign chairman and other campaign-related individuals.

36. On or about June 8,2016, the Conspirators launched the public website dcleaks.com, which they used to release stolen emails. Before it shut down in or around March 2017, the site received over one million page views. The Conspirators falsely claimed on the site that DCLeaks was started by a group of "American hacktivists," when in fact it was started by the Conspirators.

37. Starting in or around June 2016 and continuing through the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Conspirators used DCLeaks to release emails stolen from individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign. The Conspirators also released documents they had stolen in other spearphishing operations, including those they had conducted in 2015 that collected emails from individuals affiliated with the Republican Party.

38. On or about June 8,2016, and at approximately the same time that the dcleaks.com website was launched, the Conspirators created a DCLeaks Facebook page using a preexisting social media account under the fictitious name "Alice Donovan." In addition to the DCLeaks Facebook page, the Conspirators used other social media accounts in the names of fictitious U.S. persons such as "Jason Scott" and "Richard Gingrey" to promote the DCLeaks website. The Conspirators accessed these accounts from computers managed by POTEMKFN and his co-conspirators.

39. On or about June 8, 2016, the Conspirators created the Twitter account @dcleaks_. The Conspirators operated the @dclcaks_ Twitter account from the same computer used for other efforts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. For example, the Conspirators used the same computer to operate the Twitter account @BaltimorcIsWhr, through which they encouraged U.S. audiences to "[j]oin our flash mob" opposing Clinton and to post images with the hashtag #BlacksAgainstHillary.

Stolen Documents Released through Guccifer 2.0

40. On or about June 14, 2016, the DNC -- through Company 1 -- publicly announced that it had been hacked by Russian government actors. In response, the Conspirators created the online persona Guccifer 2.0 and falsely claimed to be a lone Romanian hacker to undermine the allegations of Russian responsibility for the intrusion.
41. On or about June 15,2016, the Conspirators logged into a Moscow-based server used and managed by Unit 74455 and, between 4:19 PM and 4:56 PM Moscow Standard Time, searched for certain words and phrases, including:

Search terms

42. Later that day, at 7:02 PM Moscow Standard Time, the online persona Guccifer 2.0 published its first post on a blog site created through WordPress. Titled "DNC's servers hacked by a lone hacker," the post used numerous English words and phrases that the Conspirators had searched for earlier that day (bolded below):

Worldwide known cyber security company [Company 1] announced that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by
"sophisticated" hacker groups.

I'm very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) [...]

Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking
into DNC's network. [...]

Some hundred sheets! This's a serious case, isn't it? [...]

I guess [Company 1] customers should think twice about company's competence.

F[***J the Illuminati and their conspiracies! МШШ F[***]

[Company 1] !!!!!!!!

43. Between in or around June 2016 and October 2016, the Conspirators used Guccifer 2.0 to release documents through WordPrcss that they had stolen from the DCCC and DNC. The Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, also shared stolen documents with certain individuals.

a. On or about August 15,2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, received a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress. The Conspirators responded using the Guccifer 2.0 persona and sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate's opponent. On or about August 22,2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, transferred approximately 2.5 gigabytes of data stolen from the DCCC to a then-registered state lobbyist and online source of political news. The stolen data included donor records and personal identifying information for more than 2,000 Democratic donors.

On or about August 22, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent a reporter stolen documents pertaining to the Black Lives Matter movement. The reporter responded by discussing when to release the documents and offering to write an article about their release.

44. The Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, also communicated with U.S. persons about the release of stolen documents. On or about August 15, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, wrote to a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. TVump, "thank u for writing back... do u find anyt[h]ing interesting in the docs i posted?" On or about August 17, 2016, the Conspirators added, "please tell me if i can help u anyhow ... it would be a great pleasure to me." On or about September 9,2016, the Conspirators, again posing as Guccifer 2.0, referred to a stolen DCCC document posted online and asked the person, "what do u think of the info on the tunout model for the democrats entire presidential campaign." The person responded, "[p]retty standard."

45. The Conspirators conducted operations as Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks using overlapping computer infrastructure and financing.

a. For example, between on or about March 14, 2016 and April 28. 2016, the Conspirators used the same pool of bitcoin funds to purchase a virtual private network ("VPN") account and to lease a server in Malaysia. In or around June 2016, the Conspirators used the Malaysian server to host the dcleaks.com website.

On or about July 6, 2016, the Conspirators used the VPN to log into the @Guccifcr_2 Twitter account. The Conspirators opened that VPN account from
the same server that was also used to register malicious domains for the hacking of the DCCC and DNC networks.

On or about June 27, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, contacted a U.S. reporter with an offer to provide stolen emails from "Hillary Clinton's staff." The Conspirators then sent the reporter the password to access a nonpublic, password-protected portion of dc.eaks.com containing emails stolen from Victim 1 bу LUKASHEV, YERMAKOV, and thier co-conspirators in or around March 2016.

46. On or about January 12,2017, the Conspirators published a statement on the Guccifer 2.0 WordPrcss blog, falsely claiming that the intrusions and release of stolen documents had "totally no relation to the Russian government"

Use of Organization 1

47. In order to expand their interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Conspirators transferred many of the documents they stole from the DNC and the chairman of the Clinton Campaign to Organization 1. The Conspirators posing as Guccifer 2.0, discussed the release of the stolen documents and the timing of those releases with Organization 1 to heighten their impact on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

a. On or about Juno 22, 2016, Organization 1 sent a private message to Guccifer 2.0 to "[s]end any new material [stolen from the DNC] here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact than what you are doing." On or about July 6, 2016, Organization 1 added, "if you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after." The Conspirators responded, "ok... i see." Organization I explained, "we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary ... so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting "

b After failed attempts to transfer the stolen documents starting in late June 2016, on or about July 14, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent Organization 1 an email with an attachment titled "wk dnc linkl.txt.gpg." The Conspirators explained to Organization 1 that the encrypted file contained Instructions on how to access an online archive of stolen DNC documents. On or about July 18, 2016, Organization 1 confirmed it had "the 1Gb or so archive" and would make a release of the stolen documents "this week."

48. On or about July 22, 2016, Organization 1 released over 20,000 emails and other documents stolen from the DNC network by the Conspirators. This release occurred approximately three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention. Organization 1 did not disclose Guccifer 2.0's role in providing them. The latest-in-time email released through Organization 1 was dated on or about May 25,2016, approximately the same day the Conspirators hacked the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server.

49. On or about October 7, 2016, Organization 1 released the first set of emails from the chairman of the Clinton Campaign that had been stolen by LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators. Between on or about October 7, 2016 and November 7, 2016, Organization 1 released approximately thirty-three tranches of documents mat had been stolen from the chairman of the Clinton Campaign. In total, over 50,000 stolen documents were released.

... ... ...

[Jul 09, 2018] The CIA s return to the bad old days, when it engaged in a global program of assassinating political leaders

Notable quotes:
"... IS THE LEASH NOW OFF THE 'OTHER CIA?' https://southfront.org/is-the-leash-now-off-the-other-cia/ ..."
"... Under Donald Trump, who is on record favoring CIA kidnapping and torture programs, the CIA has been given a green light to carry out "targeted assassinations." ..."
Jul 09, 2018 | www.unz.com

redmudhooch , July 3, 2018 at 12:58 pm GMT

IS THE LEASH NOW OFF THE 'OTHER CIA?' https://southfront.org/is-the-leash-now-off-the-other-cia/

Under Donald Trump, who is on record favoring CIA kidnapping and torture programs, the CIA has been given a green light to carry out "targeted assassinations."

Although most of these targeted kills have been carried out by drone attacks in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia, where civilian deaths from "collateral damage" are estimated to be well over three hundred, recent events point to the CIA's return to the "bad old days," when it engaged in a global program of assassinating political leaders.

... ... ...

[Jul 09, 2018] Seymour Hersh on 'fantasy' of White House's bin Laden assassination tale

See also Great Minds-Seymour Hersh - Bin Laden- A Prisoner of War. It Was a Hit... - YouTube
Jul 09, 2018 | www.youtube.com

In an exclusive interview, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh talks about his recent report on the assassination of Osama bin Laden, what the Obama administration will not let the public know and the holes in the presented narrative. Watch the interview with RT's Anya Parampil.


Hang The Bankers , 3 years ago

Bin Laden was dead well before then. Lies upon lies.

Mitt Notned , 3 years ago

Shoot, Bin Laden died in a cave in Tora Bora 14 years ago or something from kidney failure. This raid was fake, fake, fake. For one thing, a dessert people have a tradition of burial at sea? Come on. Footage used of Bin Laden was all old, and he was yellow from kidney failure in the late 1990's. The most of the SEAL team was wiped out in what can only be called a murder by proxy, as they were sent into a known hot zone with a crappy helo. Coverup. I don't trust anything in the government or the MSM, Watch the Corbett Report from yesterday to see how we operate. Sickening.

lansing street blues , 3 years ago (edited)

Sheesh....more lies and deceit. Didn't Benazir Bhutto say he died in 2001? And look what happened to her...and Seal Team 6. Murderous bastards

InfiniteFreeThinkers , 3 years ago (edited)

"Obama did authorize a raid to get Bin Laden and the American SEAL Team Six DID fly into Pakistan and killed Bin Laden and after that everything is simply not true" WTF Hersh? OBL been dead since 2001 or so. I hope he's just mistaken w/ his 'sources' and not being an intentional gatekeeper!

elmo2you , 3 years ago (edited)

I just can't shake the confusion of how much this man sounds and looks like a mix of Alan Alda (M*A*S*H) and Hickok45. As for the story, if true then all parts of the US government that were involved in this deserve no better than what Bin Laden got. As for all the people shouting that Bin Laden was already dead, maybe you should all check your sources, for the info that this conclusion was based on is not all that reliable/credible either. This version of events now put forward by Hesh makes more sense than most other theories so far. At least to those who actually know some about what is happening on the world theatre away from the public eye. The White House can deny all they want, the net will eventually close around them.

Amir Fahmi , 3 years ago

Israel propaganda is fantasy.

JohnPavilonis , 3 years ago

Will the real Slim Shady please stand up... please stand up... please stand up... Bin Laden died many years ago!!!! Many many... Years ago!!!

[Jul 09, 2018] "Joshua Ryne Goldberg, a 20-year old living at his parents' house in US state of Florida, is accused of posing online as "Australi Witness," an IS supporter who publicly called for a series of attacks against individuals and events in western countries.

Jul 09, 2018 | www.unz.com

KA , September 11, 2015 at 9:21 am GMT

"Joshua Ryne Goldberg, a 20-year old living at his parents' house in US state of Florida, is accused of posing online as "Australi Witness," an IS supporter who publicly called for a series of attacks against individuals and events in western countries.

An affidavit sworn at the time of the arrest says that, between August 19 and August 28, Mr Goldberg "distributed information pertaining to the manufacturing of explosives, destructive devices, or weapons of mass destruction in furtherance of an activity that constitutes a Federal crime of violence".

US Attorney Lee Bentley III, said Goldberg instructed a confidential source how to make a bomb similar to two used in the Boston Marathon bombings two years ago that killed three people and injured more than 260 others.

"Goldberg further admitted that he believed the information would create a genuine bomb," Agent Berry alleged.

In the leadup to an exhibition in Garland, Texas, at which pictures of the Prophet Mohammed were to be displayed, "Australi Witness" tweeted the event's address and reposted a tweet urging people to go there with "weapons, bombs or with knifes".

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/australian-is-jihadist-is-actually-an-jewish-american-troll-20150911-gjk852.html#ixzz3lQ8fY9YK
Follow us: @theage on Twitter | theageAustralia on Facebook

Deduction , September 11, 2015 at 10:24 am GMT
@KA

Yes, Jews can be evil little sh*ts just like Muslims and indeed anyone can. It is the trend that matters, as nothing is all or nothing, but I repeat myself!

Anyway, I've got a question for you KA, to see if you can be consistent and whether you possess the supposedly stereotypical Middle Eastern shame mindset of all or nothing.

I'm a British anti-imperialist and I firmly believe that millions of British people should not start moving to Arab and Muslims countries and colonise them.

As I am an anti-imperialist I also believe that millions of Arabs and Muslims should not be allowed to move to Britain and furthermore that those who have already come here should go home.

Do you agree with me? Are you a consistent anti-imperialist? Or are you just playing for your team to win and conquer all?

[Jul 06, 2018] It used to be that the only things one could be certain of were "death taxes." Now of course we must add to that list the very dependable presence of CIA / State Dept lies parroted by MSM all over the West.

Jul 06, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Gary Weglarz , July 5, 2018 at 1:01 pm

It used to be that the only things one could depend on were "death & taxes." Now of course we must add to that list the very dependable presence of CIA / State Dept lies parroted by MSM all over the West. Lies which are endlessly repeated in defiance of all physical reality and often in direct opposition to actual events in the actual world we live in.

From the Ukraine coup, to Russia-gate, to the "Assad's gassing his own people" regime change propaganda, to the totally surreal Alice in Wonderland Skripnal poisoning nonsense in the U.K, the Western MSM have been as dependable as the rising sun.

They can and do provide fact-free, evidence-free reporting directly from the bowels of the deep state in support of the neocolonial West, including unending support for the never ending resort to mass violence the West relies upon to keep the rest of the planet subjugated -- just as it has for the last 500+ years.

[Jul 03, 2018] Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence

Highly recommended!
Looks like Brennan abused his power as a head of CIA and should be held accountable for that.
Notable quotes:
"... Did the U.S. "Intelligence Community" judge that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election? ..."
"... it is not that ..."
"... even that is misleading ..."
"... the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence Research did, in fact, have a different opinion but was not allowed to express it ..."
"... The second thing to remember is that reports of the intelligence agencies reflect the views of the heads of the agencies and are not necessarily a consensus of their analysts' views. The heads of both the CIA and FBI are political appointments, while the NSA chief is a military officer; his agency is a collector of intelligence rather than an analyst of its import, except in the fields of cryptography and communications security. ..."
"... Among the assertions are that a persona calling itself "Guccifer 2.0" is an instrument of the GRU, and that it hacked the emails on the Democratic National Committee's computer and conveyed them to Wikileaks. What the report does not explain is that it is easy for a hacker or foreign intelligence service to leave a false trail. In fact, a program developed by CIA with NSA assistance to do just that has been leaked and published. ..."
"... Retired senior NSA technical experts have examined the "Guccifer 2.0" data on the web and have concluded that "Guccifer 2.0's" data did not involve a hack across the web but was locally downloaded. Further, the data had been tampered with and manipulated, leading to the conclusion that "Guccifer 2.0" is a total fabrication. ..."
"... "Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries." ..."
"... DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying ..."
"... Prominent American journalists and politicians seized upon this shabby, politically motivated, report as proof of "Russian interference" in the U.S. election without even the pretense of due diligence. They have objectively acted as co-conspirators in an effort to block any improvement in relations with Russia, even though cooperation with Russia to deal with common dangers is vital to both countries. ..."
Jun 29, 2018 | jackmatlock.com

Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence Posted on by Jack Did the U.S. "Intelligence Community" judge that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election?

Most commentators seem to think so. Every news report I have read of the planned meeting of Presidents Trump and Putin in July refers to "Russian interference" as a fact and asks whether the matter will be discussed. Reports that President Putin denied involvement in the election are scoffed at, usually with a claim that the U.S. "intelligence community" proved Russian interference. In fact, the U.S. "intelligence community" has not done so. The intelligence community as a whole has not been tasked to make a judgment and some key members of that community did not participate in the report that is routinely cited as "proof" of "Russian interference."

I spent the 35 years of my government service with a "top secret" clearance. When I reached the rank of ambassador and also worked as Special Assistant to the President for National Security, I also had clearances for "codeword" material. At that time, intelligence reports to the president relating to Soviet and European affairs were routed through me for comment. I developed at that time a "feel" for the strengths and weaknesses of the various American intelligence agencies. It is with that background that I read the January 6. 2017 report of three intelligence agencies: the CIA, FBI, and NSA.

This report is labeled "Intelligence Community Assessment," but in fact it is not that . A report of the intelligence community in my day would include the input of all the relevant intelligence agencies and would reveal whether all agreed with the conclusions. Individual agencies did not hesitate to "take a footnote" or explain their position if they disagreed with a particular assessment. A report would not claim to be that of the "intelligence community" if any relevant agency was omitted.

The report states that it represents the findings of three intelligence agencies: CIA, FBI, and NSA, but even that is misleading in that it implies that there was a consensus of relevant analysts in these three agencies. In fact, the report was prepared by a group of analysts from the three agencies pre-selected by their directors, with the selection process generally overseen by James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Clapper told the Senate in testimony May 8, 2017, that it was prepared by "two dozen or so analysts -- hand-picked, seasoned experts from each of the contributing agencies." If you can hand-pick the analysts, you can hand-pick the conclusions. The analysts selected would have understood what Director Clapper wanted since he made no secret of his views. Why would they endanger their careers by not delivering?

What should have struck any congressperson or reporter was that the procedure Clapper followed was the same as that used in 2003 to produce the report falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein had retained stocks of weapons of mass destruction. That should be worrisome enough to inspire questions, but that is not the only anomaly.

The DNI has under his aegis a National Intelligence Council whose officers can call any intelligence agency with relevant expertise to draft community assessments. It was created by Congress after 9/11 specifically to correct some of the flaws in intelligence collection revealed by 9/11. Director Clapper chose not to call on the NIC, which is curious since its duty is "to act as a bridge between the intelligence and policy communities."

During my time in government, a judgment regarding national security would include reports from, as a minimum, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) of the State Department. The FBI was rarely, if ever, included unless the principal question concerned law enforcement within the United States. NSA might have provided some of the intelligence used by the other agencies but normally did not express an opinion regarding the substance of reports.

What did I notice when I read the January report? There was no mention of INR or DIA! The exclusion of DIA might be understandable since its mandate deals primarily with military forces, except that the report attributes some of the Russian activity to the GRU, Russian military intelligence. DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, is the U.S. intelligence organ most expert on the GRU. Did it concur with this attribution? The report doesn't say.

The omission of INR is more glaring since a report on foreign political activity could not have been that of the U.S. intelligence community without its participation. After all, when it comes to assessments of foreign intentions and foreign political activity, the State Department's intelligence service is by far the most knowledgeable and competent. In my day, it reported accurately on Gorbachev's reforms when the CIA leaders were advising that Gorbachev had the same aims as his predecessors.

This is where due diligence comes in. The first question responsible journalists and politicians should have asked is "Why is INR not represented? Does it have a different opinion? If so, what is that opinion? Most likely the official answer would have been that this is "classified information." But why should it be classified? If some agency heads come to a conclusion and choose (or are directed) to announce it publicly, doesn't the public deserve to know that one of the key agencies has a different opinion?

The second question should have been directed at the CIA, NSA, and FBI: did all their analysts agree with these conclusions or were they divided in their conclusions? What was the reason behind hand-picking analysts and departing from the customary practice of enlisting analysts already in place and already responsible for following the issues involved?

As I was recently informed by a senior official, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence Research did, in fact, have a different opinion but was not allowed to express it . So the January report was not one of the "intelligence community," but rather of three intelligence agencies, two of which have no responsibility or necessarily any competence to judge foreign intentions. The job of the FBI is to enforce federal law. The job of NSA is to intercept the communications of others and to protect ours. It is not staffed to assess the content of what is intercepted; that task is assumed by others, particularly the CIA, the DIA (if it is military) or the State Department's INR (if it is political).

The second thing to remember is that reports of the intelligence agencies reflect the views of the heads of the agencies and are not necessarily a consensus of their analysts' views. The heads of both the CIA and FBI are political appointments, while the NSA chief is a military officer; his agency is a collector of intelligence rather than an analyst of its import, except in the fields of cryptography and communications security.

One striking thing about the press coverage and Congressional discussion of the January report, and of subsequent statements by CIA, FBI, and NSA heads is that questions were never posed regarding the position of the State Department's INR, or whether the analysts in the agencies cited were in total agreement with the conclusions.

Let's put these questions aside for the moment and look at the report itself. On the first page of text, the following statement leapt to my attention:

We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election. The US Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze US political processes or US public opinion.

Now, how can one judge whether activity "interfered" with an election without assessing its impact? After all, if the activity had no impact on the outcome of the election, it could not be properly termed interference. This disclaimer, however, has not prevented journalists and politicians from citing the report as proof that "Russia interfered" in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

As for particulars, the report is full of assertion, innuendo, and description of "capabilities" but largely devoid of any evidence to substantiate its assertions. This is "explained" by claiming that much of the evidence is classified and cannot be disclosed without revealing sources and methods. The assertions are made with "high confidence" or occasionally, "moderate confidence." Having read many intelligence reports I can tell you that if there is irrefutable evidence of something it will be stated as a fact. The use of the term "high confidence" is what most normal people would call "our best guess." "Moderate confidence" means "some of our analysts think this might be true."

Among the assertions are that a persona calling itself "Guccifer 2.0" is an instrument of the GRU, and that it hacked the emails on the Democratic National Committee's computer and conveyed them to Wikileaks. What the report does not explain is that it is easy for a hacker or foreign intelligence service to leave a false trail. In fact, a program developed by CIA with NSA assistance to do just that has been leaked and published.

Retired senior NSA technical experts have examined the "Guccifer 2.0" data on the web and have concluded that "Guccifer 2.0's" data did not involve a hack across the web but was locally downloaded. Further, the data had been tampered with and manipulated, leading to the conclusion that "Guccifer 2.0" is a total fabrication.

The report's assertions regarding the supply of the DNC emails to Wikileaks are dubious, but its final statement in this regard is important: "Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries." In other words, what was disclosed was the truth! So, Russians are accused of "degrading our democracy" by revealing that the DNC was trying to fix the nomination of a particular candidate rather than allowing the primaries and state caucuses to run their course. I had always thought that transparency is consistent with democratic values. Apparently those who think that the truth can degrade democracy have a rather bizarre -- to put it mildly–concept of democracy.

Most people, hearing that it is a "fact" that "Russia" interfered in our election must think that Russian government agents hacked into vote counting machines and switched votes to favor a particular candidate. This, indeed, would be scary, and would justify the most painful sanctions. But this is the one thing that the "intelligence" report of January 6, 2017, states did not happen. Here is what it said: " DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying ."

This is an important statement by an agency that is empowered to assess the impact of foreign activity on the United States. Why was it not consulted regarding other aspects of the study? Or -- was it in fact consulted and refused to endorse the findings? Another obvious question any responsible journalist or competent politician should have asked.

Prominent American journalists and politicians seized upon this shabby, politically motivated, report as proof of "Russian interference" in the U.S. election without even the pretense of due diligence. They have objectively acted as co-conspirators in an effort to block any improvement in relations with Russia, even though cooperation with Russia to deal with common dangers is vital to both countries.

This is only part of the story of how, without good reason, U.S.-Russian relations have become dangerously confrontational. God willin and the crick don't rise, I'll be musing about other aspects soon.

Thanks to Ray McGovern and Bill Binney for their research assistance.

Jack F. Matlock, Jr.
Booneville, Tennessee
June 29, 2018

[Jun 28, 2018] Did Senator Warner and Comey 'Collude' on Russia-gate by Ray McGovern

Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. was in talks for a deal with Julian Assange but then FBI Director James Comey ordered an end to negotiations after Assange offered to prove Russia was not involved in the DNC leak, as Ray McGovern explains. ..."
"... Special to Consortium News ..."
"... The report does not say what led Comey to intervene to ruin the talks with Assange. But it came after Assange had offered to "provide technical evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases," Solomon quotes WikiLeaks' intermediary with the government as saying. It would be a safe assumption that Assange was offering to prove that Russia was not WikiLeaks' source of the DNC emails. ..."
"... If that was the reason Comey and Warner ruined the talks, as is likely, it would reveal a cynical decision to put U.S. intelligence agents and highly sophisticated cybertools at risk, rather than allow Assange to at least attempt to prove that Russia was not behind the DNC leak. ..."
"... On March 31, 2017, though, WikiLeaks released the most damaging disclosure up to that point from what it called "Vault 7" -- a treasure trove of CIA cybertools leaked from CIA files. This disclosure featured the tool "Marble Framework," which enabled the CIA to hack into computers, disguise who hacked in, and falsely attribute the hack to someone else by leaving so-called tell-tale signs -- like Cyrillic, for example. The CIA documents also showed that the "Marble" tool had been employed in 2016. ..."
"... In fact, VIPS and independent forensic investigators, have performed what former FBI Director Comey -- at first inexplicably, now not so inexplicably -- failed to do when the so-called "Russian hack" of the DNC was first reported. In July 2017 VIPS published its key findings with supporting data. ..."
"... Why did then FBI Director Comey fail to insist on getting direct access to the DNC computers in order to follow best-practice forensics to discover who intruded into the DNC computers? (Recall, at the time Sen. John McCain and others were calling the "Russian hack" no less than an "act of war.") A 7th grader can now figure that out. ..."
Jun 27, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Did Sen. Warner and Comey 'Collude' on Russia-gate? June 27, 2018 • 68 Comments

The U.S. was in talks for a deal with Julian Assange but then FBI Director James Comey ordered an end to negotiations after Assange offered to prove Russia was not involved in the DNC leak, as Ray McGovern explains.

By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium News

An explosive report by investigative journalist John Solomon on the opinion page of Monday's edition of The Hill sheds a bright light on how Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and then-FBI Director James Comey collaborated to prevent WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from discussing "technical evidence ruling out certain parties [read Russia]" in the controversial leak of Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 election.

A deal that was being discussed last year between Assange and U.S. government officials would have given Assange "limited immunity" to allow him to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been exiled for six years. In exchange, Assange would agree to limit through redactions "some classified CIA information he might release in the future," according to Solomon, who cited "interviews and a trove of internal DOJ documents turned over to Senate investigators." Solomon even provided a copy of the draft immunity deal with Assange.

But Comey's intervention to stop the negotiations with Assange ultimately ruined the deal, Solomon says, quoting "multiple sources." With the prospective agreement thrown into serious doubt, Assange "unleashed a series of leaks that U.S. officials say damaged their cyber warfare capabilities for a long time to come." These were the Vault 7 releases, which led then CIA Director Mike Pompeo to call WikiLeaks "a hostile intelligence service."

Solomon's report provides reasons why Official Washington has now put so much pressure on Ecuador to keep Assange incommunicado in its embassy in London.

Assange: Came close to a deal with the U.S. (Photo credit: New Media Days / Peter Erichsen)

The report does not say what led Comey to intervene to ruin the talks with Assange. But it came after Assange had offered to "provide technical evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases," Solomon quotes WikiLeaks' intermediary with the government as saying. It would be a safe assumption that Assange was offering to prove that Russia was not WikiLeaks' source of the DNC emails.

If that was the reason Comey and Warner ruined the talks, as is likely, it would reveal a cynical decision to put U.S. intelligence agents and highly sophisticated cybertools at risk, rather than allow Assange to at least attempt to prove that Russia was not behind the DNC leak.

The greater risk to Warner and Comey apparently would have been if Assange provided evidence that Russia played no role in the 2016 leaks of DNC documents.

Missteps and Stand Down

In mid-February 2017, in a remarkable display of naiveté, Adam Waldman, Assange's pro bono attorney who acted as the intermediary in the talks, asked Warner if the Senate Intelligence Committee staff would like any contact with Assange to ask about Russia or other issues. Waldman was apparently oblivious to Sen. Warner's stoking of Russia-gate.

Warner contacted Comey and, invoking his name, instructed Waldman to "stand down and end the discussions with Assange," Waldman told Solomon. The "stand down" instruction "did happen," according to another of Solomon's sources with good access to Warner. However, Waldman's counterpart attorney David Laufman , an accomplished federal prosecutor picked by the Justice Departent to work the government side of the CIA-Assange fledgling deal, told Waldman, "That's B.S. You're not standing down, and neither am I."

But the damage had been done. When word of the original stand-down order reached WikiLeaks, trust evaporated, putting an end to two months of what Waldman called "constructive, principled discussions that included the Department of Justice."

The two sides had come within inches of sealing the deal. Writing to Laufman on March 28, 2017, Waldman gave him Assange's offer to discuss "risk mitigation approaches relating to CIA documents in WikiLeaks' possession or control, such as the redaction of Agency personnel in hostile jurisdictions," in return for "an acceptable immunity and safe passage agreement."

On March 31, 2017, though, WikiLeaks released the most damaging disclosure up to that point from what it called "Vault 7" -- a treasure trove of CIA cybertools leaked from CIA files. This disclosure featured the tool "Marble Framework," which enabled the CIA to hack into computers, disguise who hacked in, and falsely attribute the hack to someone else by leaving so-called tell-tale signs -- like Cyrillic, for example. The CIA documents also showed that the "Marble" tool had been employed in 2016.

Misfeasance or Malfeasance

Comey: Ordered an end to talks with Assange.

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which includes among our members two former Technical Directors of the National Security Agency, has repeatedly called attention to its conclusion that the DNC emails were leaked -- not "hacked" by Russia or anyone else (and, later, our suspicion that someone may have been playing Marbles, so to speak).

In fact, VIPS and independent forensic investigators, have performed what former FBI Director Comey -- at first inexplicably, now not so inexplicably -- failed to do when the so-called "Russian hack" of the DNC was first reported. In July 2017 VIPS published its key findings with supporting data.

Two month later , VIPS published the results of follow-up experiments conducted to test the conclusions reached in July.

Why did then FBI Director Comey fail to insist on getting direct access to the DNC computers in order to follow best-practice forensics to discover who intruded into the DNC computers? (Recall, at the time Sen. John McCain and others were calling the "Russian hack" no less than an "act of war.") A 7th grader can now figure that out.

Asked on January 10, 2017 by Senate Intelligence Committee chair Richard Burr (R-NC) whether direct access to the servers and devices would have helped the FBI in their investigation, Comey replied : "Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that's involved, so it's the best evidence."

At that point, Burr and Warner let Comey down easy. Hence, it should come as no surprise that, according to one of John Solomon's sources, Sen. Warner (who is co-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee) kept Sen. Burr apprised of his intervention into the negotiation with Assange, leading to its collapse.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for a total of 30 years and prepared and briefed, one-on-one, the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985.

If you enjoyed this original article please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.

[Jun 27, 2018] Disclaimer

Jun 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

says: June 5, 2018 at 8:29 pm GMT 800 Words The fates of Christianity and Communism are both strange and ironic.

Christianity was the New Faith of heretical Jews who turned against Jewish Tradition. It was led by radical Jews at odds with Traditional Jews. But even though spread overwhelmingly by Jews, it became the Faith of non-Jews who came to oppress Jews.

Communism was the New Ideology of radical Jews who reviled Jewish Community and Culture. Karl Marx loathed Jewishness and its association with greed, exploitation, and capitalism. And he inspired a generation of radical Jews who were committed to universal justice based on 'scientific' and 'materialist' reading of history. Early communism was dominated by radical Jews as early Christianity was dominated by heretical Jews.

But as with Christianity, Communism eventually came to be owned by non-Jews who turned anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist. Why did this problem arise? Because even as many Jews turned toward universalism and against their own tribalism, many Jews remained tribal or made common cause with forces at war with radical universalism. Suppose ALL JEWS around the world had embraced universal socialism when Soviet Union was coming into its own. Soviet Union would likely not have turned against Jews. But, in fact, even as many Jews did become full-fledged communists and univeralists, many Jews remained either Jewish or allied with International Capitalists that waged war on Communism.
And over time, there were signs of second thoughts or dual loyalty among Communist Jews. Were they communist first or Jewish first? Or did they try to be both at the same time? But can one be Jewish-tribalist and communist all at once? (Can one be Jewish and Christian at once?)

Likewise, there would have been no Christian 'antisemitism' IF All Jews had converted to Christianity and gave up on tribalism. But even as a good number of Jews did adopt the New Faith, the bulk of the Jewish community kept with Tribalism. So, even though Christianity was founded by Jews, it turned into an anti-Jewish religion. Too many Jews were seen as resistant and even hostile to the Universal Faith.

Furthermore, there is something intrinsic to Jewish personality and temperament that ultimately recoils from universalism. Even as secularists, Jews tend to feel 'special' and 'unique', indeed superior over dimwit goyim. This egotism among Jews makes them both universalist and anti-universalist. It makes them universalist ON THEIR OWN TERMS. Because they are so smart, wise, and prophetic, their superior ideas must be good and right for all of mankind. They want to play the role of Moses laying down the Laws for all peoples. But once the goy masses adopt the New Law as universal truth, Jews begin to grow bored with established universalism that now seems mediocre and humdrum. It was exciting when they conceived of it and presented it to humanity as The Shining Truth. But once that Truth becomes official dogma to every idiot on the street, Jews grow bored and react against univeralism that has lost its luster.
This contradiction is seen in Judaism itself. It says there is only one God, the only true God; Jews know better than pagans who believe in silly stupid idols. And yet, Jews want to keep this God for themselves through the special Covenant. Thus, Jewish God is universal in conception but tribal in contract(to Jews).

Of late, Jews came up with a new faith that might be called Homomania. Will it also go the way of Christianity and Communism? Will it turn against Jews and/or will Jews grow tired of it?
And yet, Homomania may remain as a weapon of Jews because, unlike Christianity and Communism, it favors elite-minoritism. It is essentially a special alliance between homo minority elites and Jewish minority elites. So, even as majority of dimwit goyim become enamored of Homomania, it can never belong to them in the way the Christianity or Communism could. No matter how many goyim worship Homomania, the object of worship won't be universal brotherhood of man but elite tooter-hood of fancy neo-aristo fruits(financed by Jews). Also, unlike Christianity and Communism that eventually came to favor mediocrity -- Jesus favored the meek, and Marx & Lenin stood for common workers -- , the very nature of Homomania is celebration of elitism, vanity, egotism, narcissism, privilege, new fashions & fads, and fancy-pants stuff that homos love so much. As Jews are rich and homos are whoopsy-vain, they make natural allies in the Current Year.

'Neoconservatism' also isn't likely to fall into the hands of non-Jews. Unlike the spiritual populism of Christianity and economic populism of Communism, Neoconservatism was devised to be esoteric-elitist-hegemonic based on carefully crafted coordination among media, academia, think-tanks, Intelligence services, Deep State, and Israel. So, even though Neo-conservatism pays lip-service to Humanitarianism and Spreading Democracy, its real agenda and operations are a very exclusive affair. Leo Strauss came up with a way to Talk the Walk and Walk the Talk.

[Jun 26, 2018] American Pravda The JFK Assassination, Part II Who Did It by Ron Unz

An excellent even headed analysis of events and major hypothesis about the assassination. Remarkable conclusion: " So although committed partisans can continue endless, largely fruitless debates over "Who Killed JFK," I think that the one firm conclusion we can draw from the remarkable history of this pivotal event of the twentieth century is that all of us have lived for many decades within the synthetic reality of ' Our American Pravda.' "
Notable quotes:
"... As Lane recounted in his 1991 bestseller, Plausible Denial , his strategy generally proved quite successful, not only allowing him to win the jury verdict against Hunt, but also eliciting sworn testimony from a former CIA operative of her personal involvement in the conspiracy along with the names of several other participants, though she claimed that her role had been strictly peripheral. ..."
"... Hunt's explosive death-bed confession was recounted in a major 2007 Rolling Stone article and also heavily analyzed in Talbot's books, especially his second one, but otherwise largely ignored by the media. ..."
"... Many of these same apparent conspirators, drawn from the same loose alliance of groups, had previously been involved in the various U.S. government-backed attempts to assassinate Castro or overthrow his Communist government, and they had developed a bitter hostility towards President Kennedy for what they considered his betrayal during the Bay of Pigs fiasco and afterward. ..."
"... While this framework for the assassination is certainly possible, it is far from certain. One may easily imagine that most of the lower-level participants in the Dallas events were driven by such considerations but that the central figures who organized the plot and set matters into motion had different motives. ..."
"... A new presidential election was less than a year away, and Kennedy's shifting stance on Civil Rights seemed likely to cost him nearly all the Southern states that had provided his margin of electoral victory in 1960. A series of public declarations or embarrassing leaks might have helped remove him from office by traditional political means, possibly replacing him with a Cold War hard-liner such as Barry Goldwater or some other Republican. Would the militarists or business tycoons often implicated by liberal JFK researchers have really been so desperate as to not wait those extra few months and see what happened? ..."
"... While his involvement is certainly possible, obvious questions arise. Dulles was a seventy-year-old retiree, with a very long and distinguished career of public service and a brother who had served as Eisenhower's secretary of state. He had just published The Craft of Intelligence , which was receiving very favorable treatment in the establishment media, and he was embarked on a major book tour. Would he really have risked everything -- including his family's reputation in the history books -- to organize the murder of America's duly-elected president ..."
"... On the other hand, it is very easy to imagine that such individuals had some awareness of the emerging plot or may even have facilitated it or participated to a limited extent. And once it succeeded, and their personal enemy had been replaced, they surely would have been extremely willing to assist in the cover-up and protect the reputation of the new regime, a role that Dulles may have played as the most influential member of the Warren Commission. But such activities are different than acting as the central organizer of a presidential assassination. ..."
"... Furthermore, the strong evidence that many CIA operatives were involved in the conspiracy very much suggests that they were recruited and organized by some figure high in their own hierarchy of the intelligence or political worlds rather than the less likely possibility that they were brought in solely by leaders of the parallel domain of organized crime. And while crime bosses might possibly have organized the assassination itself, they surely had no means of orchestrated the subsequent cover-up by the Warren Commission, nor would there have been any willingness by America's political leadership to protect mafia leaders from investigation and proper punishment for such a heinous act. ..."
"... As a total newcomer to the enormous, hidden world of JFK conspiracy analysis, I was immediately surprised by the mere sliver of suspicion directed towards Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, the slain leader's immediate successor and the most obvious beneficiary. ..."
"... Although liberals had grown to revile LBJ by the late 1960s for his escalation of the unpopular Vietnam War, over the decades those sentiments have faded, while warm memories of his passage of the landmark Civil Rights legislation and his creation of the Great Society programs have elevated his stature in that ideological camp. Furthermore, such legislation had long been blockaded in Congress and only became law because of the 1964 Democratic Congressional landslide following JFK's martyrdom, and it might be difficult for liberals to admit that their fondest dreams were only realized by an act of political parricide. ..."
"... An additional factor helping to explain the extreme unwillingness of Talbot, Douglass, and others to consider Johnson as an obvious suspect may be the realities of the book publishing industry. ..."
"... if he had devoted any space to voicing suspicions that our 35th president had been murdered by our 36th, surely the weight of that extra element of "outrageous conspiracy theory" would have ensured that his book sank without a trace. ..."
"... If the plot succeeded and Johnson became president, the conspirators must surely have felt reasonably confident that they would be protected rather than tracked down and punished as traitors by the new president. Even a fully successful assassination would entail enormous risks unless the organizers believed that Johnson would do exactly what he did, and the only means of ensuring this would be to sound him out about the plan, at least in some vague manner, and obtain his passive acquiesce. ..."
"... Based on these considerations, it seems extremely difficult to believe that any JFK assassination conspiracy took place entirely without Johnson's foreknowledge, or that he was not a central figure in the subsequent cover-up. ..."
"... A very useful corrective to the "See No Evil" approach to Johnson from liberal JFK writers is Roger Stone's The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ , published in 2013. Stone, a longtime Republican political operative who got his start under Richard Nixon, presents a powerful case that Johnson was the sort of individual who might easily have lent his hand to political murder, and also that he had strong reasons to do so. ..."
"... Certainly one remarkable aspect of Johnson's career is that he was born dirt-poor, held low-paying government jobs throughout his entire life, yet took the oath of office as the wealthiest president in modern American history , having accumulated a personal fortune of over $100 million in present-day dollars, with the financial payoffs from his corporate benefactors having been laundered through his wife's business. This odd anomaly is so little remembered these days that a prominent political journalist expressed total disbelief when I mentioned it to him a decade ago. ..."
"... The pressure and financial aid threats secretly applied to Israel by the Kennedy Administration eventually became so severe that they led to the resignation of Israel's founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in June 1963. But all these efforts were almost entirely halted or reversed once Kennedy was replaced by Johnson in November of that same year. ..."
"... So although committed partisans can continue endless, largely fruitless debates over "Who Killed JFK," I think that the one firm conclusion we can draw from the remarkable history of this pivotal event of the twentieth century is that all of us have lived for many decades within the synthetic reality of "Our American Pravda." ..."
Jun 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

A strong dam may hold back an immense quantity of water, but once it breaks the resulting flood may sweep aside everything in its path. I had spent nearly my entire life never doubting that a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy nor that a different lone gunman took the life of his younger brother Robert a few years later. Once I came to accept that these were merely fairy tales widely disbelieved by many of the same political elites who publicly maintained them, I began considering other aspects of this important history, the most obvious being who was behind the conspiracy and what were their motives.

On these questions, the passage of a half-century and the deaths, natural or otherwise, of nearly all the contemporary witnesses drastically reduces any hope of coming to a firm conclusion. At best, we can evaluate possibilities and plausibilities rather than high likelihoods let alone near certainties. And given the total absence of any hard evidence, our exploration of the origins of the assassination must necessarily rely upon cautious speculation.

From such a considerable distance in time, a bird's-eye view may be a reasonable starting point, allowing us to focus on the few elements of the apparent conspiracy that seem reasonably well established. The most basic of these is the background of the individuals who appear to have been associated with the assassination, and the recent books by David Talbot and James W. Douglass effectively summarize much of the evidence accumulated over the decades by an army of diligent assassination researchers. Most of the apparent conspirators seem to have had strong ties to organized crime, the CIA, or various anti-Castro activist groups, with considerable overlap across these categories. Oswald himself certainly fit this same profile although he was very likely the mere "patsy" that he claimed to be, as did Jack Ruby, the man who quickly silenced him and whose ties to the criminal underworld were long and extensive.

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An unusual chain of events provided some of the strongest evidence of CIA involvement. Victor Marchetti, a career CIA officer, had risen to become Special Assistant to the Deputy Director, a position of some importance, before resigning in 1969 over policy differences. Although he fought a long battle with government censors over his book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence , he retained close ties with many former agency colleagues.

During the 1970s, the revelations of the Senate Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations had subjected the CIA to a great deal of negative public scrutiny, and there were growing suspicions of possible CIA links to JFK's assassination. In 1978 longtime CIA Counter-intelligence chief James Angleton and a colleague provided Marchetti with an explosive leak, stating that the agency might be planning to admit a connection to the assassination, which had involved three shooters, but place the blame upon E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer who had become notorious during Watergate, and scapegoat him as a rogue agent, along with a few other equally tarnished colleagues. Marchetti published the resulting story in The Spotlight , a weekly national tabloid newspaper operated by Liberty Lobby, a rightwing populist organization based in DC. Although almost totally shunned by the mainstream media, The Spotlight was then at the peak of its influence, having almost 400,000 subscribers, as large a readership as the combined total of The New Republic , The Nation , and National Review .

Marchetti's article suggested that Hunt had actually been in Dallas during the assassination, resulting in a libel lawsuit with potential damages large enough to bankrupt the publication. Longtime JFK assassination researcher Mark Lane became aware of the situation and volunteered his services to Liberty Lobby, hoping to use the legal proceedings, including the discovery process and subpoena power, as a means of securing additional evidence on the assassination, and after various court rulings and appeals, the case finally came to trial in 1985.

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As Lane recounted in his 1991 bestseller, Plausible Denial , his strategy generally proved quite successful, not only allowing him to win the jury verdict against Hunt, but also eliciting sworn testimony from a former CIA operative of her personal involvement in the conspiracy along with the names of several other participants, though she claimed that her role had been strictly peripheral. And although Hunt continued for decades to totally deny any connection with the assassination, near the end of his life he made a series of video-taped interviews in which he admitted that he had indeed been involved in the JFK assassination and named several of the other conspirators, while also maintaining that his own role had been merely peripheral. Hunt's explosive death-bed confession was recounted in a major 2007 Rolling Stone article and also heavily analyzed in Talbot's books, especially his second one, but otherwise largely ignored by the media.

Many of these same apparent conspirators, drawn from the same loose alliance of groups, had previously been involved in the various U.S. government-backed attempts to assassinate Castro or overthrow his Communist government, and they had developed a bitter hostility towards President Kennedy for what they considered his betrayal during the Bay of Pigs fiasco and afterward. Therefore, there is a natural tendency to regard such animosity as the central factor behind the assassination, a perspective generally followed by Talbot, Douglass, and numerous other writers. They conclude that Kennedy died at the hands of harder-line anti-Communists, outraged over his perceived weakness regarding Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam, sentiments that were certainly widespread within right-wing political circles at the height of the Cold War.

While this framework for the assassination is certainly possible, it is far from certain. One may easily imagine that most of the lower-level participants in the Dallas events were driven by such considerations but that the central figures who organized the plot and set matters into motion had different motives. So long as all the conspirators were agreed on Kennedy's elimination, there was no need for an absolute uniformity of motive. Indeed, men who had long been involved in organized crime or clandestine intelligence operations were surely experienced in operational secrecy, and many of them may not have expected to know the identities, let alone the precise motives, of the men at the very top of the remarkable operation they were undertaking.

We must also sharply distinguish between the involvement of particular individuals and the involvement of an organization as an organization. For example, CIA Director John McCone was a Kennedy loyalist who had been appointed to clean house a couple of years before the assassination, and he surely was innocent of his patron's death. On the other hand, the very considerable evidence that numerous individual CIA intelligence officers and operatives participated in the action has naturally raised suspicions that some among their highest-ranking superiors were involved as well, perhaps even as the principal organizers of the conspiracy.

These reasonable speculations may have been magnified by elements of personal bias. Many of the prominent authors who have investigated the JFK assassination in recent years have been staunch liberals, and may have allowed their ideology to cloud their judgment. They often seek to locate the organizers of Kennedy's elimination among those rightwing figures whom they most dislike, even when the case is far from entirely plausible.

But consider the supposed motives of hard-line anti-Communists near the top of the national security hierarchy who supposedly may have organized Kennedy's elimination because he backed away from a full military solution in the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis incidents. Were they really so absolutely sure that a President Johnson would be such an enormous improvement as to risk their lives and public standing to organize a full conspiracy to assassinate an American president?

A new presidential election was less than a year away, and Kennedy's shifting stance on Civil Rights seemed likely to cost him nearly all the Southern states that had provided his margin of electoral victory in 1960. A series of public declarations or embarrassing leaks might have helped remove him from office by traditional political means, possibly replacing him with a Cold War hard-liner such as Barry Goldwater or some other Republican. Would the militarists or business tycoons often implicated by liberal JFK researchers have really been so desperate as to not wait those extra few months and see what happened?

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Based on extremely circumstantial evidence, Talbot's 2015 book The Devil's Chessboard , something of a sequel to Brothers , suggests that former longtime CIA Director Allan Dulles may have been the likely mastermind, with his motive being a mixture of his extreme Cold Warrior views and his personal anger at his 1961 dismissal from his position.

While his involvement is certainly possible, obvious questions arise. Dulles was a seventy-year-old retiree, with a very long and distinguished career of public service and a brother who had served as Eisenhower's secretary of state. He had just published The Craft of Intelligence , which was receiving very favorable treatment in the establishment media, and he was embarked on a major book tour. Would he really have risked everything -- including his family's reputation in the history books -- to organize the murder of America's duly-elected president , an unprecedented act utterly different in nature than trying to unseat a Guatemalan leader on behalf of supposed American national interests? Surely, using his extensive media and intelligence contacts to leak embarrassing disclosures about JFK's notorious sexual escapades during the forthcoming presidential campaign would have been be a much safer means of attempting to achieve an equivalent result. And the same is true for J. Edgar Hoover and many of the other powerful Washington figures who hated Kennedy for similar reasons.

On the other hand, it is very easy to imagine that such individuals had some awareness of the emerging plot or may even have facilitated it or participated to a limited extent. And once it succeeded, and their personal enemy had been replaced, they surely would have been extremely willing to assist in the cover-up and protect the reputation of the new regime, a role that Dulles may have played as the most influential member of the Warren Commission. But such activities are different than acting as the central organizer of a presidential assassination.

Just as with the hard-line national security establishment, many organized crime leaders had grown outraged over the actions of the Kennedy Administration. During the late 1950s, Robert Kennedy had intensely targeted the mob for prosecution as chief counsel to the Senate Labor Rackets Committee. But during the 1960 election, family patriarch Joseph Kennedy used his own longstanding mafia connections to enlist their support for his older son's presidential campaign, and by all accounts the votes stolen by the corrupt mob-dominated political machines in Chicago and elsewhere helped put JFK in the White House, along with Robert Kennedy as his Attorney General. Frank Sinatra, an enthusiastic Kennedy supporter, had also helped facilitate this arrangement by using his influence with skeptical mob leaders.

However, instead of repaying such crucial election support with political favors, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, perhaps ignorant of any bargain, soon unleashed an all-out war against organized crime, far more serious than anything previously mounted at the federal level, and the crime bosses regarded this as a back-stabbing betrayal by the new administration. Once Joseph Kennedy was felled by an incapacitating stroke in late 1961, they also lost any hope that he would use his influence to enforce the deals he had struck the previous year. FBI wiretaps reveal that mafia leader Sam Giancana decided to have Sinatra killed for his role in this failed bargain, only sparing the singer's life when he considered how much he personally loved the voice of one of the most famous Italian-Americans of the 20th century.

These organized crime leaders and some of their close associates such as Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa certainly developed a bitter hatred toward the Kennedys, and this has naturally led some authors to point to the mafia as the likely organizers of the assassination, but I find this quite unlikely. For many decades, American crime bosses had had a complex and varied relationship with political figures, who might sometimes be their allies and at other times their persecutors, and surely there must have been many betrayals over the years. However, I am not aware of a single case in which any even moderately prominent political figure on the national stage was ever targeted for assassination, and it seems quite unlikely that the sole exception would be a popular president, whom they would have likely regarded as being completely out of their league. On the other hand, if individuals who ranked high in Kennedy's own DC political sphere set in motion a plot to eliminate him, they might have found it easy to enlist the enthusiastic cooperation of various mafia leaders.

Furthermore, the strong evidence that many CIA operatives were involved in the conspiracy very much suggests that they were recruited and organized by some figure high in their own hierarchy of the intelligence or political worlds rather than the less likely possibility that they were brought in solely by leaders of the parallel domain of organized crime. And while crime bosses might possibly have organized the assassination itself, they surely had no means of orchestrated the subsequent cover-up by the Warren Commission, nor would there have been any willingness by America's political leadership to protect mafia leaders from investigation and proper punishment for such a heinous act.

If a husband or wife is found murdered, with no obvious suspect or motive at hand, the normal response of the police is to carefully investigate the surviving spouse, and quite often this suspicion proves correct. Similarly, if you read in your newspapers that in some obscure Third World country two bitterly hostile leaders, both having unpronounceable names, had been sharing supreme political power until one was suddenly struck down in a mysterious assassination by unknown conspirators, your thoughts would certainly move in an obvious direction. Most Americans in the early 1960s did not perceive their own country's politics in such a light, but perhaps they were mistaken. As a total newcomer to the enormous, hidden world of JFK conspiracy analysis, I was immediately surprised by the mere sliver of suspicion directed towards Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, the slain leader's immediate successor and the most obvious beneficiary.

The two Talbot books and the one by Douglass, totaling some 1500 pages, devote merely a few paragraphs to any suspicions of Johnson's involvement. Talbot's first book reports that immediately after the assassination, the vice president had expressed a frantic concern to his personal aides that a military coup might be in progress or a world war breaking out, and suggests that these few casual words demonstrate his obvious innocence, although a more cynical observer might wonder if those remarks had been uttered for exactly that reason. Talbot's second book actually quotes an apparent low-level conspirator as claiming that Johnson had personally signed off on the plot and admits that Hunt believed the same thing, but treats such unsubstantiated accusations with considerable skepticism, before adding a single sentence acknowledging that Johnson may indeed have been a passive supporter or even an accomplice. Douglass and Peter Dale Scott, author of the influential 1993 book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK , apparently seem never to have even entertained the possibility.

Ideological considerations are probably an important reason for such remarkable reticence. Although liberals had grown to revile LBJ by the late 1960s for his escalation of the unpopular Vietnam War, over the decades those sentiments have faded, while warm memories of his passage of the landmark Civil Rights legislation and his creation of the Great Society programs have elevated his stature in that ideological camp. Furthermore, such legislation had long been blockaded in Congress and only became law because of the 1964 Democratic Congressional landslide following JFK's martyrdom, and it might be difficult for liberals to admit that their fondest dreams were only realized by an act of political parricide.

Kennedy and Johnson may have been intensively hostile personal rivals, but there seem to have been few deep ideological differences between the two men, and most of the leading figures in JFK's government continued to serve under his successor, surely another source of enormous embarrassment to any ardent liberals who came to suspect that the former had been murdered by a conspiracy involving the latter. Talbot, Douglass, and many other left-leaning advocates for an assassination conspiracy prefer to point the finger of blame towards far more congenial villains such as hard-line, anti-Communist Cold Warriors and right-wing elements, notably including top CIA officials, such as former director Allan Dulles.

An additional factor helping to explain the extreme unwillingness of Talbot, Douglass, and others to consider Johnson as an obvious suspect may be the realities of the book publishing industry. By the 2000s, JFK assassination conspiracies had long become passé and were treated with disdain in mainstream circles. Talbot's strong reputation, his 150 original interviews, and the quality of his manuscript broke that barrier, and attracted The Free Press as his very respectable publisher, while later drawing a strongly positive review by a leading academic scholar in the New York Times Sunday Book Review and an hour long television segment broadcast on C-Span Booknotes . But if he had devoted any space to voicing suspicions that our 35th president had been murdered by our 36th, surely the weight of that extra element of "outrageous conspiracy theory" would have ensured that his book sank without a trace.

However, if we cast off these distorting ideological blinders and the practical considerations of American publishing, the prima facie case for Johnson's involvement seems quite compelling.

Consider a very simple point. If a president is struck down by an unknown group of conspirators, his successor would normally have had the strongest possible incentive to track them down lest he might become their next victim. Yet Johnson did nothing, appointing the Warren Commission that covered up the entire matter, laying the blame upon an erratic "lone gunman" conveniently dead. This would seem remarkably odd behavior for an innocent LBJ. This conclusion does not demand that Johnson was the mastermind, nor even an active participant, but it raises a very strong suspicion that he at least had had some awareness of the plot, and enjoyed a good personal relationship with some of the principals.

A similar conclusion is supported by a converse analysis. If the plot succeeded and Johnson became president, the conspirators must surely have felt reasonably confident that they would be protected rather than tracked down and punished as traitors by the new president. Even a fully successful assassination would entail enormous risks unless the organizers believed that Johnson would do exactly what he did, and the only means of ensuring this would be to sound him out about the plan, at least in some vague manner, and obtain his passive acquiesce.

Based on these considerations, it seems extremely difficult to believe that any JFK assassination conspiracy took place entirely without Johnson's foreknowledge, or that he was not a central figure in the subsequent cover-up.

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But the specific details of Johnson's career and his political situation in late 1963 greatly strengthen these entirely generic arguments. A very useful corrective to the "See No Evil" approach to Johnson from liberal JFK writers is Roger Stone's The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ , published in 2013. Stone, a longtime Republican political operative who got his start under Richard Nixon, presents a powerful case that Johnson was the sort of individual who might easily have lent his hand to political murder, and also that he had strong reasons to do so.

Among other things, Stone gathers together an enormous wealth of persuasive information regarding Johnson's decades of extremely corrupt and criminal practices in Texas, including fairly plausible claims that these may have included several murders. In one bizarre 1961 incident that strangely foreshadows the Warren Commission's "lone gunman" finding, a federal government inspector investigating a major Texas corruption scheme involving a close LBJ ally was found dead, shot five times in the chest and abdomen by a rifle, but the death was officially ruled a "suicide" by the local authorities, and that conclusion was reported with a straight face in the pages of the Washington Post .

Certainly one remarkable aspect of Johnson's career is that he was born dirt-poor, held low-paying government jobs throughout his entire life, yet took the oath of office as the wealthiest president in modern American history , having accumulated a personal fortune of over $100 million in present-day dollars, with the financial payoffs from his corporate benefactors having been laundered through his wife's business. This odd anomaly is so little remembered these days that a prominent political journalist expressed total disbelief when I mentioned it to him a decade ago.

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The Dark Side of Camelot strongly suggest that personal blackmail was a greater factor than geographical ticket-balancing. In any event, Kennedy's paper-thin 1960 victory would have been far more difficult without Texas narrowly falling into the Democratic column, and election fraud there by Johnson's powerful political machine seems almost certainly to have been an important factor.

Under such circumstances, Johnson naturally expected to play a major role in the new administration, and he even issued grandiose demands for a huge political portfolio, but instead he found himself immediately sidelined and treated with complete disdain, soon becoming a forlorn figure with no authority or influence. As time went by, the Kennedys made plans to get rid of him, and just a few days before the assassination, they were already discussing whom to place on the reelection ticket in his stead. Much of Johnson's long record of extreme corruption both in Texas and in DC was coming to light following the fall of Bobby Baker, his key political henchman, and with strong Kennedy encouragement, Life Magazine was preparing a huge expose of his sordid and often criminal history, laying the basis for his prosecution and perhaps a lengthy prison sentence. By mid-November 1963, Johnson seemed a desperate political figure at the absolute end of his rope, but a week later he was the president of the United States, and all those swirling scandals were suddenly forgotten. Stone even claims that the huge block of magazine space reserved for the Johnson expose was instead filled by the JFK assassination story.

Aside from effectively documenting Johnson's sordid personal history and the looming destruction he faced at the hands of the Kennedys in late 1963, Stone also adds numerous fascinating pieces of personal testimony, which may or may not be reliable. According to him, as his mentor Nixon was watching the scene at the Dallas police station where Jack Ruby shot Oswald, Nixon immediately turned as white as a ghost, explaining that he had personally known the gunman under his birth-name of Rubenstein. While working on a House Committee in 1947, Nixon had been advised by a close ally and prominent mob-lawyer to hire Ruby as an investigator, being told that "he was one of Lyndon Johnson's boys." Stone also claims that Nixon once emphasized that although he had long sought the presidency, unlike Johnson "I wasn't willing to kill for it." He further reports that Vietnam Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and numerous other prominent political figures in DC were absolutely convinced of Johnson's direct involvement in the assassination..

Stone has spent more than a half-century as a ruthless political operative, a position that provided him with unique personal access to individuals who participated in the great events of the past, but one that also carries the less than totally candid reputation of that profession, and individuals must carefully weigh these conflicting factors against each other. Personally, I tend to credit most of the eyewitness stories he provides. But even readers who remain entirely skeptical should find useful the large collection of secondary source references to the sordid details of LBJ's history that the book provides.

Finally, a seemingly unrelated historical incident had originally raised my own suspicions of Johnson's involvement.

U.S.S. Liberty , our most advanced intelligence-gathering ship, to remain offshore in international waters and closely monitor the military situation. There have been published claims that he had granted Israel a green-light for its preemptive attack, but fearful of risking a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet patrons of Syria and Egypt, had strictly circumscribed the limits of the military operation, sending the Liberty to keep an eye on developments and perhaps also to "show Israel who was boss."

Whether or not this reconstruction is correct, the Israelis soon launched an all-out attack on the nearly defenseless ship despite the large American flag it was flying, deploying attack jets and torpedo boats to sink the vessel during an assault that lasted several hours, while machine-gunning the lifeboats to ensure that there would be no survivors. The first stage of the attack had targeted the main communications antenna, and its destruction together with heavy Israeli jamming prevented any communications with other U.S. naval forces in the region..

Liberty and drive off the attackers, each time they were recalled, apparently upon direct orders from the highest authorities of the U.S. government. Once the Israelis learned that word of the situation had reached other U.S. forces, they soon discontinued their attack, and the heavily-damaged Liberty eventually limped into port, with over 200 dead and wounded sailors and NSA signal operators, representing the greatest loss of American servicemen in any naval incident since World War II.

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Liberty survivor, risked severe legal consequences and published Assault on the Liberty in 1979 .

As it happened, NSA intercepts of Israeli communications between the attacking jets and Tel Aviv, translated from the Hebrew, fully confirmed that the attack had been entirely deliberate, and since many of the dead and wounded were NSA employees, the suppression of these facts greatly rankled their colleagues. My old friend Bill Odom, the three-star general who ran the NSA for Ronald Reagan, later shrewdly circumvented the restrictions of his political masters by making those incriminating intercepts part of the standard curriculum of the Sigint training program required for all intelligence officers.

In 2007 an unusual set of circumstances finally broke the thirty year blackout in the mainstream media. Real estate investor Sam Zell, a Jewish billionaire extremely devoted to Israel, had orchestrated a leveraged-buyout of the Tribune Company Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune , investing merely a sliver of his own money, with the bulk of the financing coming from the pension funds of the company he was acquiring. Widely heralded as "the grave dancer" for his shrewd financial investments, Zell publicly boasted that the deal gave him nearly all of the upside potential of the company, while he bore relatively little of the risk. Such an approach proved wise since the complex deal quickly collapsed into bankruptcy, and although Zell emerged almost unscathed, the editors and journalists lost decades of their accumulated pension dollars, while massive layoffs soon devastated the newsrooms of what had been two of the country's largest and most prestigious newspapers. Perhaps coincidentally, just as this business turmoil hit in late 2007, the Tribune ran a massive 5,500 word storyy Liberty attack, representing the first and only time such a comprehensive account of the true facts has ever appeared in the mainstream media.

By all accounts, Johnson was an individual of towering personal ego, and when I read the article, I was struck by the extent of his astonishing subservience to the Jewish state. The influence of campaign donations and favorable media coverage seemed completely insufficient to explain his reaction to an incident that had cost the lives of so many American servicemen. I began to wonder if Israel might have played an extraordinarily powerful political trump-card, thereby showing LBJ "who was really boss," and once I discovered the reality of the JFK assassination conspiracy a year or two later, I suspected I knew what that trump-card might have been. Over the years, I had become quite friendly with the late Alexander Cockburn, and the next time we had lunch I outlined my ideas. Although he had always casually dismissed JFK conspiracy theories as total nonsense, he found my hypothesis quite intriguing.

Liberty incident certainly demonstrated the exceptionally close relationship between President Johnson and the government of Israel, as well as the willingness of the mainstream media to spend decades hiding events of the most remarkable nature if they might tread on particular toes.

These important considerations should be kept in mind as we begin exploring the most explosive yet under-reported theory of the JFK assassination. Almost twenty-five years ago the late Michael Collins Piper published Final Judgment presenting a very large body of circumstantial evidence that Israel and its Mossad secret intelligence service, together with their American collaborators, probably played a central role in the conspiracy.

For decades following the 1963 assassination, virtually no suspicions had ever been directed towards Israel, and as a consequence none of the hundreds or thousands of assassination conspiracy books that appeared during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had hinted at any role for the Mossad, though nearly every other possible culprit, ranging from the Vatican to the Illuminati, came under scrutiny. Kennedy had received over 80% of the Jewish vote in his 1960 election, American Jews featured very prominently in his White House, and he was greatly lionized by Jewish media figures, celebrities, and intellectuals ranging from New York City to Hollywood to the Ivy League. Moreover, individuals with a Jewish background such as Mark Lane and Edward Epstein had been among the leading early proponents of an assassination conspiracy, with their controversial theories championed by influential Jewish cultural celebrities such as Mort Sahl and Norman Mailer. Given that the Kennedy Administration was widely perceived as pro-Israel, there seemed no possible motive for any Mossad involvement, and bizarre, totally unsubstantiated accusations of such a monumental nature directed against the Jewish state were hardly likely to gain much traction in an overwhelmingly pro-Israel publishing industry.

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The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy described the extreme efforts of the Kennedy Administration to force Israel to allow international inspections of its allegedly non-military nuclear reactor at Dimona, and thereby prevent its use in producing nuclear weapons. Dangerous Liaisons: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn appeared in the same year, and covered similar ground.

Although entirely hidden from public awareness at the time, the early 1960s political conflict between the American and Israeli governments over nuclear weapons development had represented a top foreign policy priority of the Kennedy Administration, which had made nuclear non-proliferation one of its central international initiatives. It is notable that John McCone, Kennedy's choice as CIA Director, had previously served on the Atomic Energy Commission under Eisenhower, being the individual who leaked the fact that Israel was building a nuclear reactor to produce plutonium..

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The pressure and financial aid threats secretly applied to Israel by the Kennedy Administration eventually became so severe that they led to the resignation of Israel's founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in June 1963. But all these efforts were almost entirely halted or reversed once Kennedy was replaced by Johnson in November of that same year.

Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel had previously documented that U.S. Middle East Policy completely reversed itself following Kennedy's assassination, but this important finding had attracted little attention at the time.

Skeptics of a plausible institutional basis for a JFK assassination conspiracy have often noted the extreme continuity in both foreign and domestic policies between the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, arguing that this casts severe doubt on any such possible motive. Although this analysis seems largely correct, America's behavior towards Israel and its nuclear weapons program stands as a very notable exception to this pattern..

An additional major area of concern for Israeli officials may have involved the efforts of the Kennedy Administration to sharply restrict the activities of pro-Israel political lobbies. During his 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy had met in New York City with a group of wealthy Israel advocates, led by financier Abraham Feinberg, and they had offered enormous financial support in exchange for a controlling influence in Middle Eastern policy. Kennedy managed to fob them off with vague assurances, but he considered the incident so troubling that the next morning he sought out journalist Charles Bartlett, one of his closest friends, and expressed his outrage that American foreign policy might fall under the control of partisans of a foreign power, promising that if he became president, he would rectify that situation. And indeed, once he had installed his brother Robert as Attorney General, the latter initiated a major legal effort to force pro-Israel groups to register themselves as foreign agents, which would have drastically reduced their power and influence. But after JFK's death, this project was quickly abandoned, and as part of the settlement, the leading pro-Israel lobby merely agreed to reconstitute itself as AIPAC.

ORDER IT NOW

Final Judgment went through a number of a reprintings following its original 1994 appearance, and by the sixth edition released in 2004, had grown to over 650 pages, including numerous long appendices and over 1100 footnotes, the overwhelming majority of these referencing fully mainstream sources. The body of the text was merely serviceable in organization and polish, reflecting the total boycott by all publishers, mainstream or alternative, but I found the contents themselves remarkable and generally quite compelling. Despite the most extreme blackout by all media outlets, the book sold more than 40,000 copies over the years, making it something of an underground bestseller, and surely bringing it to the attention of everyone in the JFK assassination research community, though apparently almost none of them were willing to mention its existence. I suspect these other writers realized that even any mere acknowledgement of the existence of the book, if only to ridicule or dismiss it, might prove fatal to their media and publishing career. Piper himself died in 2015, aged 54, suffering from the health problems and heavy-drinking often associated with grim poverty, and other journalists may have been reluctant to risk that same dismal fate.

As an example of this strange situation, the bibliography of Talbot's 2005 book contains almost 140 entries, some rather obscure, but has no space for Final Judgment , nor does his very comprehensive index include any entry for "Jews" or "Israel." Indeed, at one point he very delicately characterizes Sen. Robert Kennedy's entirely Jewish senior staff by stating "There was not a Catholic among them." His 2015 sequel is equally circumspect, and although the index does contain numerous entries pertaining to Jews, all these references are in regards to World War II and the Nazis, including his discussion of the alleged Nazi ties of Allen Dulles, his principal bête noire . Stone's book, while fearlessly convicting President Lyndon Johnson of the JFK assassination, also strangely excludes "Jews" and "Israel" from the long index and Final Judgment from the bibliography, and Douglass's book follows this same pattern.

Furthermore, the extreme concerns that the Piper Hypothesis seems to have provoked among JFK assassination researchers may explain a strange anomaly. Although Mark Lane was himself of Jewish origins and left-wing roots, after his victory for Liberty Lobby in the Hunt libel trial, he spent many years associated with that organization in a legal capacity, and apparently became quite friendly with Piper, one of its leading writers. According to Piper, Lane told him that Final Judgment made "a solid case" for a major Mossad role in the assassination, and he viewed the theory as fully complementary to his own focus on CIA involvement. I suspect that concerns about these associations may explain why Lane was almost completely airbrushed out of the Douglass and 2007 Talbot books, and discussed in the second Talbot book only when his work was absolutely essential to Talbot's own analysis. By contrast, New York Times staff writers are hardly likely to be as versed in the lesser-known aspects of the JFK assassination research community, and being ignorant of this hidden controversy, they gave Lane the long and glowing obituaryy that his career fully warranted.

When weighing the possible suspects for a given crime, considering their past pattern of behavior is often a helpful approach. As discussed above, I can think of no historical example in which organized crime initiated a serious assassination attempt against any American political figure even moderately prominent on the national stage. And despite a few suspicions here and there, the same applies to the CIA.

By contrast, the Israeli Mossad and the Zionist groups that preceded the establishment of the Jewish state seem to have had a very long track record of assassinations, including those of high-ranking political figures who might normally be regarded as inviolate. Lord Moyne, the British Minister of State for the Middle East, was assassinated in 1944 and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator sent to help resolve the first Arab-Israel war, suffered the same fate in September 1948. Not even an American president was entirely free of such risks, and Piper notes that the memoirs of Harry Truman's daughter Margaret reveal that Zionist militants had tried to assassinate her father using a letter laced with toxic chemicals in 1947 when they believed he was dragging his heels in supporting Israel, although that failed attempt was never made public. The Zionist faction responsible for all of these incidents was led by Yitzhak Shamir, who later became a leader of Mossad and director of its assassination program during the 1960s, before eventually becoming Prime Minister of Israel in 1986.

ORDER IT NOW

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by journalist Ronen Bergman suggests that no other country in the world may have so regularly employed assassination as a standard tool of state policy.

ORDER IT NOWW

There are other notable elements that tend to support the Piper Hypothesis. Once we accept the existence of a JFK assassination conspiracy, the one individual who is virtually certain to have been a participant was Jack Ruby, and his organized crime ties were almost entirely to the huge but rarely-mentioned Jewish wing of that enterprise, presided over by Meyer Lansky, an extremely fervent supporter of Israel. Ruby himself had particularly strong connections with Lansky lieutenant Mickey Cohen, who dominated the Los Angeles underworld and had been personally involved in gun-running to Israel prior to the 1948 war. Indeed, according to Dallas rabbi Hillel Silverman , Ruby had privately explained his killing of Oswald by saying "I did it for the Jewish people."

JFK film should also be mentioned. Arnon Milchan, the wealthy Hollywood producer who backed the project, was not only an Israeli citizen, but had also reportedly played a central role in the enormous espionage projectt to divert American technology and materials to Israel's nuclear weapons project, the exact undertaking that the Kennedy Administration had made such efforts to block. Milchan has even sometimes been described as "the Israeli James Bond." JFK scrupulously avoided presenting any of the details that Piper later regarded as initial clues to an Israeli dimension, instead seeming to finger America's fanatic home-grown anti-Communist movement and the Cold War leadership of the military-industrial complex as the guilty parties.

Summarizing over 300,000 words of Piper's history and analysis in just a few paragraphs is obviously an impossible undertaking, but the above discussion provides a reasonable taste of the enormous mass of circumstantial evidence mustered in favor of the Piper Hypothesis..

Final Judgment struck me as quite persuasive, a good fraction of the names and references were unfamiliar, and I simply do not have the background to assess their credibility, nor whether the description of the material presented is accurate.

Under normal circumstances, I would turn to the reviews or critiques produced by other authors, and comparing them against Piper's claims, then decide which argument seemed the stronger. But although Final Judgment was published a quarter-century ago, the near-absolute blanket of silence surrounding the Piper Hypothesis, especially from the more influential and credible researchers, renders this impossible.

However, Piper's inability to secure any regular publisher and the widespread efforts to smother his theory out of existence, have had an ironic consequence. Since the book went out of print years ago, I had a relatively easy time securing the rights to include it in my collection of controversial HTML Books, and I have now done so, thereby allowing everyone on the Internet to conveniently read the entire text and decide for themselves, while easily checking the multitude of references or searching for particular words or phrases..

Final Judgment The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy Michael Collins Piper • 2005 • 310,000 Words

This edition actually incorporates several much shorter works, originally published separately. One of these, consisting of an extended Q&A, describes the genesis of the idea and answers numerous questions surrounding it, and for some readers might represent a better starting point.

Default Judgment Questions, Answers & Reflections About the Crime of the Century Michael Collins Piper • 2005 • 48,000 Words

There are also numerous extended Piper interviews or presentations easily available on YouTube, and when I watched two or three of them a couple of years ago, I thought he effectively summarized many of his main arguments, but I cannot remember which ones they were.

The Kennedy assassination surely ranks as one of the most dramatic and heavily reported events of the twentieth century, yet the overwhelming evidence that our president died at the hands of a conspiracy rather than an eccentric "lone gunman" was almost entirely suppressed by our mainstream media during the decades that followed, with endless ridicule and opprobrium heaped on many of the stubborn truth-tellers. Indeed, the very term "conspiracy theory" soon became a standard slur aimed against all those who sharply questioned establishmentarian narratives, and there is strong evidence that such pejorative use was deliberately promoted by government agencies concerned that so much of the American citizenry was growing skeptical of the implausible cover story presented by the Warren Commission. But despite all these efforts, the period may mark the inflection point at which public trust in our national media began its precipitous decline. Once an individual concludes that the media lied about something as monumental as the JFK assassination, he naturally begins to wonder what other lies may be out there.

Although I now consider the case for an assassination conspiracy overwhelming, I think that the passage of so many decades has removed any real hope of reaching a firm conclusion about the identities of the main organizers or their motives. Those who disagree with this negative assessment are free to continue sifting the enormous mountain of complex historical evidence and debating their conclusions with others having similar interests.

However, among the cast of major suspects, I think that the most likely participant by far was Lyndon Johnson, based on any reasonable assessment of means, motive, and opportunity, as well as the enormous role he obviously must have played in facilitating the subsequent Warren Commission cover-up. Yet although such an obvious suspect must surely have been immediately apparent to any observer, Johnson seems to have received only a rather thin slice of the attention that books regularly directed to other, far less plausible suspects. So the clear dishonesty of the mainstream media in avoiding any recognition of a conspiracy seems matched by a second layer of dishonesty in the alternative media, which has done its best to avoid recognizing the most likely perpetrator.

Final Judgment provided an enormous mass of circumstantial evidence suggesting a major, even dominant, role for the Israeli Mossad in organizing the elimination of both our 35rd president and also his younger brother, a scenario that seems second in likelihood only to that of Johnson's involvement. Yet Piper's hundreds of thousands of words of analysis have seemingly vanished into the ether, with very few of the major conspiracy researchers even willing to admit their awareness of a shocking book that sold over 40,000 copies, almost entirely by underground word-of-mouth.

So although committed partisans can continue endless, largely fruitless debates over "Who Killed JFK," I think that the one firm conclusion we can draw from the remarkable history of this pivotal event of the twentieth century is that all of us have lived for many decades within the synthetic reality of "Our American Pravda."

[Jun 26, 2018] Interesting players on the ground in Dallas that day included GHW Bush

Jun 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

The Alarmist , June 25, 2018 at 9:13 am GMT

I'm reminded of an old joke:

Q: Who fired the shot that killed Mussolini?
A: A thousand Italian marksmen.

Johnson has been my perennial favourite as the person who had the most to gain, but he could not have done it without his Texas machinery, not the least of which was KBR, and they certainly had a lot to gain by elevating their boy to the pinnacle of power if the rumours, that JFK planned to scale back in Viet Nam, were true. Coincidence that it happened in Dallas? Hardly, in that scenario.

Other interesting players on the ground in Dallas that day included GHW Bush, who, unlike most Americans, can't quite remember where he was when the President was shot. Was he behind it? Almost certainly not, but he may have been an unwitting co-conspirator by doing something tangentially connected, e.g. delivering cash. This is pure speculation, but it is interesting that he rose out of relative obscurity to become a Texas oilman, partnered with a former CIA operative, with oil interests in a number of international hotspots, and that formed the basis for him to build a fortune as well as launch a long and storied political career that saw him elected to Congress, then appointed to the head of the CIA, and ultimately crowned as President.

I particularly loved it when Trump tried to connect Ted Cruz's father to Oswald. It is not entirely out of the question, given his father, while a anti-Batista rebel turned refugee-student at the U of Texas might have crossed paths with Oswald while in Texas .

Yes, all roads seem to lead to Texas, except for that one that goes to NOLA, but that isn's so far from TX, and it seems like the kind of place oil industry types might go to cat around and conspire on a coup. It's also one of the few places in the South where Israelis might not appear to be so out of place.

As for the Israelis well, they're the Israelis. If they saw a shot to capture effective control of our government by offing a guy more likely to keep them in check for a venal type who probably didn't give a rat's behind for the Israelis, but salivated over destabilising the middle east, because destabilizing the middle east actually made Texas oil and other oil assets around the world controlled by or lifted by Texans in the oil industry far more valuable, then who can blame them for joining the cabal and taking the shot?

[Jun 26, 2018] The cultivation of a positive American image abroad was a primary concern of the Deep State, and given what immeasurable harm the exposure of a CIA coup would have done to America's standing as 'leader of the free world' I cannot imagine the plot was CIA-hatched or led. CIA connivance and behind-the-scenes assistance raises very interesting possibilities, though.

Jun 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

Abe , Website June 25, 2018 at 5:55 pm GMT

Very nice. Just one thing, though- anyone who was an adult during the Cold War understands the immense importance of propaganda and 'optics' as they say now. In 1981 the French Communist Party won 15% of the Presidential vote. Together with the Socilaist Party that was a combined 40%.

Much of what constituted American' political theater' in the Cold War era consisted of 'double bank-shot' efforts to convince a somewhat cold and borderline hostile European public to support the trans-Atlantic alliance and the American system which underlay it, a difficult proposition given that European leftists were ideologically opposed to America's capitalist system, while seemingly natural-ally European rightists were often repulsed by the gauche nature of American culture, critical of unrestrained 'Anglo-Saxon' capitalism, plus resentful of American pop-cultural 'imperialism' as well.

In such a climate the cultivation of a positive American image abroad was a primary concern of the Deep State, and given what immeasurable harm the exposure of a CIA coup would have done to America's standing as 'leader of the free world' I cannot imagine the plot was CIA-hatched or led. CIA connivance and behind-the-scenes assistance raises very interesting possibilities, though.

[Jun 26, 2018] Why Trump delayed release of the Kennedy files yet again

Jun 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

Si1ver1ock , June 25, 2018 at 5:58 pm GMT

Something to consider is that these people in the intelligence agencies are supposed to protect America , but they can't even spot an assassination when it occurs right under their noses with a pile of evidence stacked to the ceiling. The majority of Americans can see it, but not the people tasked with "keeping us safe." WTF?

In the RFK assassination we have video and photos of CIA assassins in the hotel when it occurs, but they can't see that either.

We have endless crime shows on TV with forensic experts tracking killers, but our real law enforcement officials can't see anything wrong with the way WTC building 7 implodes.

We are talking about treason and it is ongoing, not simply in the past. Trump delayed release of the Kennedy files yet again.

Who killed RFK?

Eighthman , June 25, 2018 at 6:36 pm GMT
A remote viewer psychic came up with an interesting notion as to why JFK was murdered. The power brokers believed he was reckless and a danger to the whole world.

It's a miracle that the Cuban missile crisis didn't end the world. USSR sub commanders had immediate authority to use nuclear weapons if attacked – and they were depth charged.

It may have been the icing on the cake.

[Jun 26, 2018] LJB and a crew of Texas Oil magnates and John Birch Society types in place and ready to help. They even posted a 'Wanted for Treason' poster the day Kennedy arrived

Jun 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

nickels , June 25, 2018 at 8:30 pm GMT

LBJ had a crew of Texas Oil magnates and John Birch Society types in place and ready to help. They even posted a 'Wanted for Treason' poster the day Kennedy arrived:
If this is to be believed, the Birch society was in bed with the Zio crew, which might be believable, because the crusade against Russia was mostly utilizing the bitterness of the Trotskyites against Stalin's siezure of the Russian state, and thus a natural alliance between the Zio and Birch groups:

http://www.dcdave.com/article4/050308.htm

Details on the Hunt crew:

https://stevenhager420.wordpress.com/2013/11/27/h-l-hunt-is-a-key-to-the-jfk-assassination/

Si1ver1ock , June 25, 2018 at 9:46 pm GMT

On these questions, the passage of a half-century and the deaths, natural or otherwise, of nearly all the contemporary witnesses drastically reduces any hope of coming to a firm conclusion.

Perhaps. One thing that becomes more clear over time is who benefited. Look closely at those who were put into positions to enable the coverup, people like George Joannides and Richard Helms. Who was promoted?

The Israel angle is interesting, but Israel doesn't work for me. My government owes me an explanation. They have a duty to uphold the constitution. They swear an oath to see that the laws are faithfully executed. It is their duty to protect America from All Enemies Foreign and Domestic.

[Jun 26, 2018] Autopsy controversy

Jun 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

Paul Jolliffe , June 26, 2018 at 1:23 am GMT

@Ivan2

I agree.

The late Harold Weisberg once told me exactly the same thing: figuring out precisely who was in control of the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the evening of 11/22/63 was the key to unraveling the cover-up.

U. S. Military authorities ran that thing and made every single damned decision. (Not RFK or Jacqueline Kennedy.)

Hell, there is credible, provocative and reasonably persuasive evidence the no less a figure than the legendary USAF Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay flew in to Bethesda and was playing a major role in directing the autopsy.

The (suspiciously undated) autopsy report was re-written after Ruby shot "Oswald" on Sunday morning, and the original "draft notes" were burned. The hand-written version was then edited with very significant changes, most infamously the original wording that JFK had a "puncture" wound in his neck – WHICH MEANT A SHOT FROM THE FRONT! – was changed in the typed version as "much smaller".

These changes were not because Humes, Boswell and Finck demanded them. These changes were done at the behest of military brass, for reasons known only to themselves.

The autopsy was the start of the cover-up, and the autopsy was controlled by the U.S. Military.

By the way, LeMay was the inspiration for the General Buck Turgidson in "Dr. Strangelove".

[Jun 26, 2018] Interesting similarities berween JFK assasination and 9/11

Notable quotes:
"... The CIA command structure exercises not authority, but something akin to the divine right of kings, concealed for appearances' sake as state secrets ..."
Jun 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

utu , June 25, 2018 at 8:29 pm GMT

@Buzz Mohawk

While commenting at the Part I I had similar thoughts concerning the 9/11 as you. The preponderance of mutually contradictory technical theories of JFK assassination completely detracted anybody from looking at the qui bono which inevitably would lead to Israel.

It occurred to me that 9/11 may share a similar fate.

This thought was very depressing. Relatively recently we have learned about the term of the 'cognitive infiltration' from Cass Sustain. It seems clear to me that exactly this cognitive infiltrations were successfully carried out in the case of JFK truthers.

Ron Unz , June 25, 2018 at 11:46 pm GMT
In writing my article, I'd forgotten to mention that in 1946 Zionist groups led by future Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir had apparently planned to assassinate British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. There's a link to a 2003 article from the Daily Telegraph:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1430766/Jewish-groups-plotted-to-kill-Bevin.html

Interestingly enough, the British government files also claim that an American Jewish activist named Rabbi Korff planned to organize some sort of aerial terrorist bombing attack against London around the same time. Korff later enjoyed a moment of considerable fame as a very high-profile supporter of President Richard Nixon shortly before his resignation during the Watergate Scandal.

renfro , June 25, 2018 at 11:56 pm GMT

I had a relatively easy time securing the rights to include it in my collection of controversial HTML Books, and I have now done so, thereby allowing everyone on the Internet to conveniently read the entire text and decide for themselves, while easily checking the multitude of references or searching for particular words or phrases.

Great ! -- thanks, have not read this before.

Sean Sean Sean , June 25, 2018 at 11:59 pm GMT
@Sean

"I really doubt that anyone, even the US vice president or director of the CIA has the authority to order anything like a political assassination of a sitting President."

Authority is not the word you're looking for. The appropriate term, depending on your point of view, is either absolute sovereignty or impunity. A US Secretary of State formally defined sovereignty in absolute life-and-death terms repudiated two millenia ago by the Germanic tribes of pre-modern Europe. The entire world has negated this viewpoint by acclamation, so the USA's a throwback.

In universally-acknowledged law, sovereignty is responsibility. But the US government thinks state responsibility is bullshit, and always did do. The US government has been assiduously undermining it ever since WWII. The US fights tooth and nail to make sure its citizens have no recourse to actions of the state, lawful or not.

Congress wrote absolute sovereignty into municipal law in the Central Intelligence Agency Act, various bureaucratic loopholes, and secret confidential legal pretexts. They gave it to CIA. The CIA command structure exercises not authority, but something akin to the divine right of kings, concealed for appearances' sake as state secrets . So you misunderstand, or misrepresent, the government bureaucracy when you imagine that there's that someone CIA would be scared to kill. They do what they want. And you do what they tell you to, or else.

lysias , June 26, 2018 at 12:01 am GMT
Almost certainly what gave the conspirators control over what was said in the U.S. media was Operation Mockingbird. That was (is?) a CIA operation.
utu , June 26, 2018 at 12:01 am GMT
Here is a commenter at Mondoweiss who brings up many assassinations linked to Israel.

http://mondoweiss.net/2015/07/president-inspections-facility/
July 28, 2015, 3:40 am

What we have in the case of the Zionist movement and Israel is a pattern of a serial perpetrator of murder, mass murder and terror. This is a well established fact. That pattern started well before the creation of Israel, see eg the murder of Jacob Israël de Haan on 30/6/1924 or the King David Hotel bombing on 22/7/1946. That murderous pattern continued after the creation of Israel, see for the early days for example the murder of Folke Bernadotte on 17/9/1948 and then read "Israel's sacred terrorism" based on Moshe Sharett's Personal Diary:

https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/essays/rokach.html

Since the early days of Zionism there are so many proven Zionist and Israeli state sponsored murders that it is hard to keep tracking them all. The murderous pattern of Israeli behaviour continues to the very recent time, think for example of the attampted assassination of Khaled Mashal on 25/9/1997, the car bomb killing Imad Mughniyah on 12/2/2008, the murder of Brig Gen Mohammed Suleiman on 1/8/2008 (which was just recently proven by US documents to be an Israeli job), the assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh on 19/1/2010 or the recent serial murder of Iranian scientists.

The murder of Jacob Israël de Haan proves that the Zionist movement targeted also jews. It was not a single case. Naeim Giladi wrote in detail about his role as a Zionist in attacking Iraqi jews on behalf of Israel in his book: Ben-Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews. We also know from things like Operation Susannah and the attempt to sink the USS Liberty that Israel also has already attacked US targets in the past.

Generally I'ld say Israeli murders and terrors fit in two motive categories: either Israel committed state sponsored murders to get rid of anactual or perceived enemy like Khaled Mashal or Imad Mughniyah or someone deemed otherwise harmful to Israeli interests like Folke Bernadotte, or Israel committed acts of terror and murder with the intention of blaming the crime on someone else, ie perpetraiting "false flag operations", like it was the case with attacking Iraqi jews or Operation Susannah. One regular motivation for Israeli false flag ops was to enlist the US in fighting Israel's real or perceived enemies, ie starting US-led wars of aggression in the service of Israel. AIPAC/WINEP operatives publicly talk about using such "options" in the service of starting wars Israel wanted to get started:

A typical Israeli method to ensure false blame was faking signal intelligence. Victor Ostrovsky wrote about how the Mossad did falsely blame Libya of terror in his time with radio signal boxes placed by the Mossad in Libya for that purpose. In the case of the Ghouta chemical false flag terror attack, Israel simply provided the US with faked signal intelligence, essentially saying to Obama: now you must go to war, because we proved hereby that Syria crossed your chemical red lines.

So, now comes the funny thing. Despite this whole record of serial Israeli murder, terror and false flag terror targeting likewise enemies and friends, terrorists and innocents, Arabs and Westerners, Muslims, Christians and Jews, Syrians and Americans, and clear motives for Israel to perpetrate the crimes, there still exists a big taboo of talking about and investigating a possible Israeli sponsorship of the JFK murder and 9/11. It's even deemed anti-semitic to speak about this.

redmudhooch , June 26, 2018 at 12:05 am GMT
@utu

What exactly did the editor of Atlanta Jewish Time who called for Obama assassination say? I could not find the original but here is the quote in The Atlantic

This is the original article:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/284979-ajt.html

redmudhooch , June 26, 2018 at 12:22 am GMT
@Carlton Meyer

I think the "neocons" tried to get their wars started under Clinton with the USS Cole attack October 12 2000, while it was being refueled in Yemen's Aden harbor, that they also blamed on Al-Qaeda.
Sounds very similar to USS Liberty eh? Same people again, same story .
I guess Clinton refused to go along even after ((((Lewinsky))) sex blackmail, and false flag attack on USS Cole. So they knew they had to get a Republican into office, thats why there was such a fuss about that election, should also tell you where the Supreme Court stands
9/11, WTC planning, demolition rigging, probably started soon after USS Cole false flag.
It all adds up when you start thinking about it.
and I don't doubt Johnson played a huge role, he obviously did, I also believe some in CIA played a role as well as in Military/MIC, and probably even Wall St/Banking, Big Oil, that is what makes it a CONSPIRACY!
But I think the head honcho is Israel/Zionist intrests, and their plan of world domination.

JFK – The Speech That Killed Him

prusmc , Website June 26, 2018 at 12:33 am GMT
@nickels

I thought JFK was President when Diem was killed?

Ron Unz , June 26, 2018 at 1:33 am GMT
One important aspect of Piper's book is that his overwhelming focus on Israel and the Mossad provides a very helpful corrective to the CIA-centricism that I've noticed among so many "conspiracy people," who seem to believe that the CIA is some sort of all-powerful controlling force.

For example, in Appendix Six, Piper suggests that Mossad may have assassinated former CIA Director William Colby, as well as John Paisley, another former high-ranking CIA official:

http://www.unz.com/book/michael_collins_piper__final-judgment/#appendix-six-retribution

I certainly don't know enough about these cases to comment, but the NSA is supposedly also a pretty powerful intelligence organization, and lots of NSA people were killed or wounded during the Liberty attack, with absolutely no apparent consequences. And if top CIA people could also occasionally be killed with relative impunity, maybe that organization also isn't really so all-powerful.

Furthermore, one of Piper's major arguments is that long-time CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton had effectively become a Mossad intelligence asset at least by the 1960s, and he seems to provide a great deal of circumstantial evidence in favor of this notion. Therefore, he points toward Angleton as the likely CIA figure who spearheaded the CIA involvement in the JFK assassination.

One nice thing about my HTML Book software is that it allows full text searches of the books in question, controlled by the little Search icon next to the Email button. Or you can use this link:

http://www.unz.com/book/michael_collins_piper__final-judgment/?search=angleton+and+mossad

Iris , Next New Comment June 26, 2018 at 2:08 am GMT
@Ron Unz

"..CIA-centricism that I've noticed among so many "conspiracy people," who seem to believe that the CIA is some sort of all-powerful controlling force."

The CIA was also the "easy" and "obvious" culprit after 9/11. It came under an incredible amount of criticism from the "courageous" media, and George Tenet, its director at the time, was almost forced to resign.

It turned out later that the CIA had previously warned G. Bush about the increased risks of terror attack, and that their warnings were dismissed by Rumsfeld and the NeoCons, who a contrario were never blamed for anything.

This really shows who is higher up the food chain.

Achilles , Next New Comment June 26, 2018 at 2:35 am GMT

Jack Ruby was running guns and ammunition from Galveston Bay to Fidel Castro's guerrillas in Cuba about 1957, a former poker-playing partner of the Dallas nightclub owner told The News Thursday.

James E. Beaird said he waited until 1966, almost three years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and "nothing had come out so I called them (FBI) just to find out why I was curious. However, they didn't see fit to even mention it to me again, so I never heard of anything they ever opened up on it."

Beaird said the FBI finally "sent a man out in 1976. I don't know why they did it then."

The FBI agent who interviewed Beaird in 1976 didn't mention in his report that Beaird had volunteered information about Ruby's gunrunning to the bureau in 1966. The report stated that since the 1963 assassination, "there had been so·much speculation as to possible foreign connections and he (Beaird) thought it better not to mention his knowledge of Jack Ruby in Kemah (southeast of Houston on Galveston Bay)."

The Warren Commission in 1964 investigated numerous allegations of gunrunning by Ruby but concluded that no factual information existed.

Beaird told the FBI that he "personally saw many boxes of new guns, including atltomatic rifles and handguns," stored in a 2-story house near the channel at Kemah and loaded on what looked like a 50-foot surplus military boat.

"He stated each time that the boat left with guns and ammunition, Jack Ruby was on the boat," the FBI report said.

Beaird, who was an automobile dealer in Houston from 1955 to 1957, said Ruby "was in it for the money. It wouldn't matter what side, just one that would pay him the most I don't even know who the ship belonged to. But he was in command of it. He went out every time it went. It was meeting a connection down there (in Cuba), that's all I ever heard."

Ruby would show up in Kemah, generally on weekends, to play poker and "just killing time until the boat was loaded," Beaird said, and usually was there not more than one or two hours.

"They loaded up at least twice while I was down there," be said. "Pickup trucks would carry it from the house over to this boat."

By 1959, Castro had taken control of Cuba and Ruby was beginning to switch sides as Castro threatened to force Mafia-backed professional gamblers out of the casinos in Havana.

Dallas Morning News, 18 Aug 1978

What was Ruby's connection to the splinter groups of left-over Cubans in Dallas? Was he selling them guns? Was he hiring them for odd jobs? Did he hear of the crazy violent commie anglo Oswald through his connections to these Cubans?

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What were these Israeli goats doing in Cuba shortly after the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power? It turns out that Castro had taken notice of Israeli goats and was just waiting for the chance to taste their milk following the establishment in 1960 of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

"Fidel thought there were goats in Israel that produced milk like cows," recounted Clarita Malhi, who worked at the Cuban embassy in Israel. "He was really enamored by the technical progress Israel had made in the field of agriculture."

The Cuban ambassador in Israel was a Jewish millionaire revolutionary by the name of Ricardo Wolf (Ricardo Subirana y Lobo in Spanish), who decided to fulfill the dream of his boss who had sent him to Israel. The ambassador went looking for goats that "produced milk like cows" and could be shipped far across the ocean.

Yitzhak Zilber, a Cuban Jew and a member of Kibbutz Gaash, was chosen for the mission. Zilber, 89, sent Haaretz photos in which he is seen with the goats he found, waiting for a plane at the airport and travelling around Cuba.

Ultimately, when the goats for the mission were found, they were brought together at the airport, awaiting the moment when they could be airlifted to Cuba. An El Al plane landed in Israel from Cuba with new immigrants from the Cuban Jewish community who had decided to flee Castro's revolution. They came as part of an agreement under which Cuba effectively exchanged the immigrants for the goats.

The Haaretz archives contain a piece of information that might buttress the story about Castro and his Israeli goats. In an article in July 1961, it was reported that the Israeli Agriculture Ministry had sent an expert to Cuba to help the Cubans improve goat breeding.

Wolf, who was born in Germany, emigrated to Cuba in the 1920s and became a close associate of Castro. As a wealthy industrialist, he gave a large sum of money to finance the revolution. He later politely declined the offer of a cabinet position, but asked Castro to appoint him ambassador to Israel. Castro assented and Wolf arrived in the country in 1960 as Cuba's first – and only – ambassador. The trade involving the goats and the new immigrants was funded by Wolf personally.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-jews-for-goats-castro-s-secret-deal-with-israel-1.5475376

'Twas not ever thus. Not only did Cuba establish ties with nascent Israel in 1949, but Castro dispatched a key supporter, Ricardo Wolf, as his ambassador to Israel in 1960.

Dworin says Wolf, who made his fortune as a pioneer in the metal industry, helped finance the purchase of the yacht Granma, the cabin-cruiser built for 12 that ferried the Castro brothers, Che and 80 other revolutionaries from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 -- on the voyage that would culminate in the overthrow of Batista.

"What can I do to repay you?" Castro, once installed in power, asked Wolf, in Dworin's telling. "I want to be ambassador to Israel," he replied.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/when-our-woman-in-havana-asked-fidel-castro-to-the-synagogue-hanukkah-party/

Was Ricardo Subirana Y Lobo (Ricardo Wolf), a Cuban Jew and supporter of Castro, the bridge between Castro and Mossad? Castro originally offered Wolf the post of Minister of Finance in the communist government, but Wolf preferred to be Ambassador to Israel.

Kiza , Next New Comment June 26, 2018 at 3:08 am GMT
@Ron Unz

Hello Ron, I found your comment about growing up with the belief in the lone gunman official story interesting. I grew up in a communist country which was not part of the USSR block and I grew up with a belief in the official story that CIA was the main culprit in the JFK assassination although without a direct mention of LBJ. I would be interested to learn also what the official story inside the Eastern block was.

Even to this day, I have to admit that this official story was actually very close to the truth. So many years later and even after reading your high quality article I tend to believe that LBJ was heavily involved but at arms length distance, that CIA has done all of the ground work, that Mossad probably assisted and that Oswald did not even shoot let alone kill anyone.

Why is a local belief relevant? Well because whoever killed Kennedy tried to point blame at communists, those of USSR and Cuba. What I was lead to believe in this instance proves the old saying audi alteram partem – do not form any belief before you hear both sides. This applies to practically all strange events of history. Historical, geographical and ideological distance make quite a difference in the beliefs that we grow up with.

Next, the culprits would probably be mirrored in the case of 911, where the Israelis have done most of the ground work, whilst the dual citizens and the US agencies they control played the supporting and enabling role.

Obviously, the logistics of 911 dwarfs the logistics of the Kennedy assassinations, but it would be the same team, different era and with a different emphasis. The acts becoming more self-confident and brazen.

Ron Unz , June 26, 2018 at 3:12 am GMT
@Wizard of Oz

The account you are responding to has Macnamara ordering back nuclear armed planes which obviously had nothing to do with seeing off Israeli fighters and gunboats.

The more "mainstream" account that has been widely reported is that squadrons of U.S. jets were twice dispatched to rescue the Liberty, and then twice recalled based on top-level instructions from D.C.

I've sometimes seen another account floating around on the Internet that the Johnson and the Israelis had concocted a plan to have the latter sink the Liberty with all hands, after which Johnson would blame the attack on Egypt and launch a nuclear attack against Cairo in retaliation. Frankly, I find this scenario *extraordinarily* implausible, and until someone provides a credible source, I would just dismiss it. And by a "credible source" I mean something more than some random guy making the claim somewhere in some book.

[Jun 26, 2018] Was CIA and LBJ worked in tandem in the JFK assassination?

Jun 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

Center for Study of the Obvious , June 25, 2018 at 2:17 pm GMT

The 'bad-apples' disinformation relies on the idea that compartmentation and plausible deniability are incompatible with strict hierarchy. CIA lets a thousand flowers bloom when it makes a directive, but its assets are always strictly controlled with inducements, coercion, and compromise. The multiple JFK plots show CIA's telltale M.O. for important programs, not hordes of sneaky bad apples.

All the mafia-did-it disinformation relies on a sharp distinction between CIA and organized crime. Anywhere CIA is, they farm crime for agents and cutouts. Robert Kennedy Jr. makes this point in his book American Values (and that is why it sank without a ripple.)

And of course Johnson had foreknowledge. He was at Clint Murchison's party, in the little closed-door conclave where CIA green-lighted the coup. So was Rockefeller henchman John McCloy. CIA arranged to implicate lots of influential people.

The key point here is CIA impunity. CIA did it because CIA can get away with it. That makes Johnson a figurehead, not a potential threat.

Here's what we all have to face. All of us grew up under an autocratic CIA regime that hires and fires presidents, legislators, and judges. Kills them, too. They still kill or torture anyone they want. Ask Gina.

Heymrguda , June 25, 2018 at 2:50 pm GMT
I too have read Stone's book and, while he did not in any way "prove" that LBJ had JFK shot, he certainly laid out a plausible case for his involvement. Any one who has read Caro's series of books on LBJ will come away with the realization that he (Johnson) was capable of having him assassinated as well as having the means and the motivation. The man had no principles or scruples whatsoever.

I can't comment on any Israeli involvement, but praise for Ron Unz for adding his voice to those who believe LBJ almost had to have played a role in that event. Like others here, I was not a JFK fan either. But johnson's elevation to the presidency was an unparalleled disaster for the USA.

TonyVodvarka , June 25, 2018 at 2:51 pm GMT
The late Col. Fletcher Prouty was assigned to the Pentagon in charge of Air Force support of CIA operations in the years leading up to the assassination. His boss there was Gen. Edward Lansdale, nominally Air Force but actually undercover CIA, father of Special Forces and the engineer of the coup in the Philippines in the mid-fifties. Those familiar with the JFK treachery will recall the clear press photos of "the three tramps", men arrested in the railroad yard behind the grassy knoll, who were led away and never seen again. Two of those men were Howard Hunt (CIA) and Charles Harrelson (Texas mafia assassin). One of these photos shows a suited man passing by casually, seeming to reassure the three men. Col. Prouty, who worked closely with Lansdale for years, positively identified him and this was affirmed by Gen. "Brute" Krulak, who was at the time commander of MAAG in South Vietnam. The distinctive shape of his head and his West Point ring are clearly visible. Go to the website dedicated to Col. Prouty's works at http://www.prouty.org for this and much else directly from the horse's mouth. By the way, toward the end of the nineties, the only fingerprint on the sixth floor of the book depository that was not identified after the assassination was matched to Malcolm Wallace, Lindon Johnson's hitman, reportedly executing at least three murders for him.
TonyVodvarka , June 25, 2018 at 3:15 pm GMT
@Buzz Mohawk

Viewing the Zapruder film carefully, one can see that, during the six seconds of shooting, the limousine's brake lights are on and it almost comes to a halt. The chauffeur is looking back all this time and does not speed off until he sees JFK's head explode. There is a film clip that shows that, as the cortege begins to leave Love Field, the SS agents that attempted to ride in the normal protective position on the back bumper were called away by the chief of the detail. The two men protested strongly but were ordered back to a car. There were no motorcycle outriders, a standard security procedure. The 1112th Military Intelligence group, which normally would have secured the parade route was ordered to stand down and there was no additional security to replace them. Make of it what you will.

CanSpeccy , Website June 25, 2018 at 3:27 pm GMT

the passage of a half-century and the deaths, natural or otherwise, of nearly all the contemporary witnesses drastically reduces any hope of coming to a firm conclusion. At best, we can evaluate possibilities and plausibilities rather than high likelihoods let alone near certainties. And given the total absence of any hard evidence, our exploration of the origins of the assassination must necessarily rely upon cautious speculation.

What pathetic bollocks. You should write for CNN.

If the doctors attending on Kennedy at the Parklands Hospital, men experienced with gunshot wounds, all agreed, as they did, that Kennedy was killed by a bullet to the front of his head, then he was not killed by bullets from the Texas School Book Depository window where Oswald is alleged to have been. Therefore, the Warren Commission Report is based on lies. In particular, a phony autopsy report and a rewriting of the autopsy report findings by none other than President-to-be, Gerald Ford. That's not a matter of plausibilities or possibilities, liklihoods or non-certainties. It's as hard evidence as you ever likely to get in a court of law.

But Israel didn't do it! LOL. Who said Israel did do it? Only some of the nutters that comment freely here.

What would be interesting, if anyone would take the trouble to do it, is to delve more deeply into the political connections of the people in the CIA who organized the crime. If LBJ was the greatest beneficiary, it is nevertheless likely that there were Republicans on side with the killing, otherwise the CIA would surely not have acted. That E. Howard Hunt, Mexico City CIA station chief at the time of the assassination appears to have been connected with the event through (a) Oswald's visit to the Mexico City CIA office, and (b) Hunt's alleged presence in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, suggests that Hunt's role in the Watergate burglary was to see what information the Democratic Party may have had relating to the assassination that could have been used to damage Richard Nixon in his run for re-election.

exiled off mainstreet , June 25, 2018 at 3:33 pm GMT
All of this seems pretty interesting and completes my suppositions as to what happened to JFK and RFK and who was responsible and, perhaps even more importantly, who benefited "cui bono" a usual criterion in determined who instigated a murder.
SunBakedSuburb , June 25, 2018 at 4:03 pm GMT
" Johnson may indeed have been a passive supporter or even an accomplice."

Lyndon Johnson's long-standing friendship/strategic partnership with J. Edgar Hoover points to the "passive supporter" role. Act of Treason (1991), by Mark North, documents Hoover's knowledge of, but not active participation in, the JFK hit. Hoover's job was to provide bureaucratic support of the coup d'état and to ease his friend Lyndon into the White House.

The prime mover in the assassination was the Allen Dulles cabal at CIA: The presence of Lee Harvey Oswald speaks of James Angleton's involvement. But the details of the network that took the operational role still seems to be in question. There was that group of U.S. intelligence officers and Mafia figures that began during the second world war. And now the new research that suggests an Israeli role on one hand, and Fourth Reich elements on the other. (Fourth Reich elements being the Otto Skorzeny network known as Die Spinne or Odessa that had ties with MacArthur's WW2 intelligence chief Charles Willoughby.)

So the mystery continues. But however the network that assumed the operational role in the JFK hit was configured, Allen Dulles was the godfather.

Anonymous [336] Disclaimer , June 25, 2018 at 4:10 pm GMT
Jackie Kennedy thought Johnson was behind it. I believe Bobby Kennedy did too.

https://www.irishcentral.com/news/jackie-kennedy-lyndon-b-johnson-jfk-murder

jdf , June 25, 2018 at 4:33 pm GMT
Nice summary of the salient points of the assassinations. A couple of things that did not get mentioned:
The "wink" as LBJ was being sworn in. It clinches it.
Marion Brown's statement that LBJ, her lover, told her well in advance that JFK was going to be killed.
Peter Dale Scott stated: The door to the assassination is through Jack Ruby.
Ruby's phone calls were looked at by the FBI and Justice Dept., and catalogued. Almost all were to Jewish mafia figures–not Italians. When the House Assassinations Committee asked for these transcripts, they were told they no longer existed! But old copies were eventually found. Someone in DOJ tried to scrub them from the records.
One of the best books on the assassination IMHO is Gaeton Fonzi's "The Last Investigation."
Piper's book is essential reading, but he focuses only on Israel and the Jewish connections. Because of its lack of "balance", it should not be read as a stand-alone treatise on the JFK assassination.
Among my top ten books are–admittedly a list long out of date:
On the Trail of the Assassins
The Last Investigation
Deep Politics and the Death of JFK
JFK and the Unspeakable
Final Judgment (with above reservations)

Probably more important would be a list of books absolutely NOT to be read–among them Gerald Posner's "Case Closed."

As a general rule, you can consider ANYONE arguing that Unz is full of s$#t and Oswald did it as a crazed lone assassin, is a paid TROLL. The assassinations are grounded in solid research that has been going on since the 1970s, when I attended a four-hour lecture by David Lifton at SUNY Stony Brook–an event that literally toppled my world. It has never recovered.

Jinks , June 25, 2018 at 4:44 pm GMT
You might want to find a copy of Dr. Mary's Monkey. I think it is a really good read about a side story to the JFK assassination about the goings on in New Orleans and the CIA.
jinks , June 25, 2018 at 4:56 pm GMT
@Bardon Kaldian

It matters only because the truth always matters, and until it is satisfied it will always be a pebble in the shoe. The past is only past because it has happened, but in its own strange way its always with us. Events that occurred 200 years ago affect today, as well as those events from 500 years ago. And sometimes things need to be covered up for very good reasons.

As for our "kulcher", I personally believe it's just part of a nations life cycle. None of us age younger, neither does a nation, it can also die.

Ron Unz , June 25, 2018 at 5:24 pm GMT
@JohnnyWalker123

You mention here that you think our alternative media have been dishonest in analyzing LBJ's likely role in the assassination. Why? Was it because the media feared LBJ might have them killed?

I very much doubt that. Johnson died at the beginning of 1973, a very widely despised and hated figure, and surely few people feared any retaliation much after that, let alone Talbot and Douglass writing forty years later.

I suspect there were several factors, mostly the ones I outlined in my discussion.

First, most JFK researchers were strong liberals or otherwise admired "Camelot," and it surely would have been very difficult for them to psychologically accept that most of JFK's top people were perfectly willing to continue working for LBJ, if the latter had murdered the former.

Also, "LBJ Killed JFK" might sound like such a ultra "crazy conspiracy theory" to publishers and editors who overwhelmingly may still believe that a "lone gunman" killed JFK. So writers who considered making such a claim might fear having their careers totally ruined. I think fear of humiliation, reputation-loss, and the resulting financial damage is a far greater factor than fear of physical harm.

Here's another factor. Having a vice president come to power by assassinating his predecessor is the sort of thing that just doesn't happen in developed First World countries. Offhand, I can't think of even a single case in any major country over the last couple of hundred years. It would probably be pretty embarrassing for even a Third World banana-republic. What respectable American historian would want to admit that the politics of our own country at the height of its international prestige during the early 1960s may have actually made Guatemala look like a shining example of orderly, constitutional government?

Dillon Sweeny , June 25, 2018 at 5:30 pm GMT
@jinks

As for our "kulcher", I personally believe it's just part of a nations life cycle. None of us age younger, neither does a nation, it can also die.

"Culture" is not a subset of "nation". The American culture has changed -- all culture changes in accordance with external influences. America, as a nation founded under a set of Enlightenment principles, has ended. There remains a huge morass/aggregation of conflicting cultures, overseen and manipulated by a horrificly corrupt government.

Anon [257] Disclaimer , June 25, 2018 at 7:32 pm GMT
Blood Money & Power by Barr McClennan

Murder From Within by Fred Newcomb

Both books claim Johnson killed Kennedy.

McClennan is the son of one of Johnson's attorneys

I read them both along with Piper's book.

They make a lot more sense that the right wing atmosphere of hate Dallas PD including officer Tippett another of Oswald's Victims and president bush & cia fbi secret service army navy Air Force departments of agriculture and every other government department and of course the man directing the military ambush by 15 shooters, umbrella man.

Have fun with your myths legends and fairy tales, naive credulous gullible idiots.

CanSpeccy , Website June 25, 2018 at 7:37 pm GMT

Nixon knew what happened to JFK who resisted.

The Warren Commission Report was a cover up. The evidence for that is clear for the reasons I have stated here .

And if the Warren Commission Report was a cover up, what had they to cover up? Government complicity in the assassination of JFK, obviously. So who, in particular, was involved. Well obviously that branch of government that does assassinations, the CIA. But that does not mean that the CIA went rogue.

The CIA serves the powers that be, so whatever the antagonism of some individuals within the Agency, the CIA would not have acted on the assassination of JFK without bipartisan political support.

LBJ, the obvious beneficiary, had every reason to give the CIA the nod, but someone on the other side of the aisle had to be complicit too. Who?

Well Nixon had been the Republican Presidential candidate in the previous election, so he was the effective head of the party and thus the man to go to.

As I argue here , Nixon's guilty knowledge of the assassination may have been the real cause of his downfall. Nixon's Vice President, Gerald R. Ford had been appointed to the Warren Commission by LBJ and it was he who made a critical falsification of that report, therby casting responsibility for the killing on Lee Harvey Oswald.

It is likely, therefore, that Ford had the goods on Nixon and blackmailed him into resignation over the Watergate inquiry.

utu , June 25, 2018 at 7:40 pm GMT
What exactly did the editor of Atlanta Jewish Time who called for Obama assassination say? I could not find the original but here is the quote in The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/01/what-earth-would-prompt-newspaper-editor-call-obamas-assassination/332854/

Three, give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place , and forcefully dictate that the United States' policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.

Yes, you read "three" correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel's existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don't you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel's most inner circles ?

Where from did Mr. Andrew Adler, who was forced to resign later, get the idea of killing a president so he would be replaced with Israel friendly VP? Did Mr. Adler study JFK assassination and LBJ policy with respect to Israel? Or is it a common knowledge and common Jewish modus operandi: kill whoever does not like Israel? Do Jews think and talk about assassinating of American presidents who are unfriendly to Israel? Do Jews believe that the Deep Sate in Israel considers assassinations and act on it when necessary?

[Jun 26, 2018] The opposition media is created to nominally represent alternative views but in reality to silence of the issues you want silenced.

Jun 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

j2 , June 25, 2018 at 9:44 am GMT

@JohnnyWalker123

"You mention here that you think our alternative media have been dishonest in analyzing LBJ's likely role in the assassination. Why? Was it because the media feared LBJ might have them killed? Was it perhaps because some in our media were on the payroll and being used to distract from the "mastermind" assassin?"

You have the reason already in Maurice Joly's Dialogues. The opposition media is created to nominally represent alternative views but in reality to silence of the issues you want silenced. Even the opposition, which always picks up on everything, agrees with this issue, so it accepted by all. Much of the alternative media has nothing to fear as it is not alternative media in anything but appearance. But with the Internet it is getting harder to do this. Finally they fail.

j2 , June 25, 2018 at 10:00 am GMT
@The Alarmist

"As for the Israelis well, they're the Israelis. If they saw a shot to capture effective control of our government by offing a guy more likely to keep them in check for a venal type who probably didn't give a rat's behind for the Israelis, but salivated over destabilising the middle east, because destabilizing the middle east actually made Texas oil and other oil assets around the world controlled by or lifted by Texans in the oil industry far more valuable, then who can blame them for joining the cabal and taking the shot?"

So, LBJ just wanted to promote Texas oil and to become the President, no special Israel connection? And the Israelis just joined the cabal and who can blame them?
I found it very interesting that young LBJ was helping in the Galveston project. Galveston somehow reminded me of Jacob Schiff. And I also found it fascinating that young Allan Dulles was the guy who produced the very copy of Joly's Dialogues from which Ohrana plagiarized the Protocols. Both were working for the dark side from their youth.

[Jun 26, 2018] Why lymo, which as acrime scene artifact was repaired so quickly

Jun 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

Carlton Meyer , Website June 25, 2018 at 5:56 pm GMT

I recently learned of another smoking gun. After JFKs Limo arrived at Parkland hospital, many people looked it over and took photos. There was a bullet hole through the front windshield. It entered from the front, yet was never discussed afterwards by anyone. The Limo was hauled away to Washington within hours and secretly repaired. There are lots of links about this, such as:

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2012/06/douglas-p-horne/photographic-evidence-of-bullet-hole-in-jfk-limousine-windshield-hiding-in-plain-sight/

[Jun 26, 2018] See Col. L. Fletcher Prouty on why CIA hated JFK

Jun 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

MrTruth , June 25, 2018 at 9:06 am GMT

See Col. L. Fletcher Prouty videos and books on the deep background for why the CIA hated JFK.

http://www.prouty.org/

Prouty was the source for Mr. X in Oliver Stone's movie JFK. Prouty was an air force pilot in WWII. He flew missions around the world and witnessed history as it happened. After WWII, he worked in the pentagon as a liaison officer between the military and the CIA. He saw the original documents authorizing military support of CIA operations around the world.

As Prouty explains it, throughout human history war was a means of killing the other guy and taking his stuff. The preparation for war and the prosecution of war provided an organizing principle for human society that gave people the motivation to develop their own societies, lest the other guy become more powerful than you and kill you.

As he describes it, with the detonation of atomic weapons at the end of WWII, conventional war was instantly understood to be obsolete. In any future conventional war, if one side was about to win a decisive victory, the potentially losing side would simply go nuclear, and everyone would lose.

With the end of conventional war, and the impossibility of nuclear war, the global power elite invented the proxy war as the new means for the continuation of war as an organizing principle of society. In the U.S., the CIA was the tool for starting and prosecuting proxy wars.

Prouty describes how, at the end of WWII, he was flying supply missions to Okinawa for the staging of the invasion of Japan. The military bases in Okinawa were overflowing with every conceivable type of materiel necessary to support more than a million man invasion.

After the atomic bombs were dropped and Japan had surrendered, Prouty claims that he asked a supply officer if they were just going to send all the supplies back to the states.

The officer said no. He said that all the materiel was going to be divided in half, and that half was going to Seoul, Korea, and that the other half was going to Hanoi, Vietnam. Prouty believes that by 1945 Korea and Vietnam had already been decided to be the sites of the first proxy wars, and that the CIA was already involved in planning the wars.

Kennedy was planning to dismantle the CIA, and Prouty recounts in his books, lectures, and videos how the JFK assassination reversed the course of history.

The JFK assassination is an endless rabbit hole of history. If you jump in, you won't come out the same way.

[Jun 26, 2018] Was Osvald a CIA agent?

Jun 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

Carlton Meyer , Website June 25, 2018 at 4:31 am GMT

This article is a nice overview that explains the problem. There were many powerful groups who wanted Kennedy killed, and probably several plots were underway. Allow me to suggest "The Secret Team" by Col. Prouty to your reading list.

Your last post resulted in too many posts to read, but one pointed to an outstanding video of Lee Oswald's life, showing facts that make it clear he was a CIA operative. Note that after he returned from Russia after openly committing treason, he was never arrested, and granted a spousal visa for his Russian wife. That undeniable fact itself is proof he was a CIA plant. Oswald hoped to become an official CIA officer and federal employee, but remained a low-level paid operative until his death. Oswald expressed concern in New Orleans that operatives were considered disposable.

Anyway, I highly recommend this great video:

JohnnyWalker123 , June 25, 2018 at 8:30 am GMT
Here's a picture that proves that Oswald and David Ferrie knew each other through the Civil Air Patrol.

https://isgp-studies.com/DL_1967_02_22_David_Ferrie_death

It also appears that Oswald may have known Clay Shaw. See quote below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Clay_Shaw#Later_findings,_and_CIA_revelations

In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations stated in its Final Report that the Committee was "inclined to believe that Oswald was in Clinton (Louisiana) in late August, early September 1963, and that he was in the company of David Ferrie, if not Clay Shaw,"[64] and that witnesses in Clinton, Louisiana "established an association of an undetermined nature between Ferrie, Shaw and Oswald less than three months before the assassination".[65]

The CIA also admitted that Clay Shaw had worked for them in some capacity. See quote below.

During a 1979 libel suit involving the book Coup D'Etat In America, Richard Helms, former director of the CIA, testified under oath that Shaw had been a part-time contact of the Domestic Contact Service of the CIA, where Shaw volunteered information from his travels abroad, mostly to Latin America.[70] Like Shaw, 150,000 Americans (businessmen, and journalists, etc.) had provided such information to the DCS by the mid-1970s.[70] [nb 1] In February 2003, the CIA released documents pertaining to an earlier inquiry from the Assassination Records Review Board about QKENCHANT, a CIA project used to provide security approvals on non-CIA personnel, that indicated Shaw had obtained a "five Agency" clearance in March 1949.[72]

More interesting information below.

New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews testified to the Warren Commission that while he was hospitalized for pneumonia, he received a call from "Clay Bertrand" the day after the assassination, asking him to fly to Dallas to represent Lee Harvey Oswald.[28][29] According to FBI reports, Andrews told them that this phone call from "Clay Bertrand" was a figment of his imagination.[30]

In his book, On the Trail of the Assassins, Garrison says that after a long search of the New Orleans French Quarter, his staff was informed by the bartender at the tavern "Cosimo's" that "Clay Bertrand" was the alias that Clay Shaw used. According to Garrison, the bartender felt it was no big secret and "my men began encountering one person after another in the French Quarter who confirmed that it was common knowledge that 'Clay Bertrand' was the name Clay Shaw went by."[\

So it appears likely that Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw knew each other. Which is sort of strange.

Then there's George de Mohrenschildt, a very complex and interesting character. I wonder if anyone here could tell me more about the nature of his relationship with Oswald.

JohnnyWalker123 , June 25, 2018 at 8:32 am GMT
@Carlton Meyer

I really liked Dark Journalist's analysis of Oswald. I think I posted this video in the other thread.

Oswald was certainly a CIA asset, much like the late Osama Bin Laden.

Milton , June 25, 2018 at 12:00 pm GMT
I believe the Zionists in Israel placed the order and Freemasons in the American Deep State executed the order. It's also quite possible that Zionist terrorists did the actual shooting as they had the experience in killing Western high profile targets (Moyne, Bernadotte, King David Hotel bombing, etc) but more likely that elements of the Deep State in America who hated JFK did the actual shooting. In either case, Oswald was not lone-nut and the case is certainly not closed. We know this because Trump recently reclassified the sealed JFK assassination records which were mandated to be released in October, 2017. He stated that he did so to protect "national security" (aka protect the Deep State and Israel) and to protect the "names and addresses" of individuals still alive. Trump, far from being an opponent of the Deep State, is actually working hand-in-hand with them (the Mueller "investigation" is actually smoke and mirrors to distract the Sheeple from the fact that Trump is actually part of the Deep State).
gsjackson , June 25, 2018 at 12:30 pm GMT
I've heard Stone talk about Nixon's reaction to seeing Ruby shoot Oswald, but this surely wasn't an eyewitness account, as Stone was in 6th grade at the time. His career as a political operative goes back about 45 years to volunteering for CREEP as a college student in 1972, somewhat less as an influential one.

Apparently Johnson's mistress said he told her in so many words that the assassination was going to happen. I think there's little doubt that he was aware and acquiescent, perhaps an active participant. Ruby probably was his man, and he and Ruby both likely were Israel's men. A few years later Johnson was blood in the water for the mainstream media shark tank over Vietnam and civil disorder. If he were the prime mover of the JFK assassination, I doubt that the media would uniformly have laid off the subject. Only Israel, it would seem, could have orchestrated such a massive and continuous cover up.

[Jun 26, 2018] Here's a good History Channel special on how LBJ may have been involved with the JFK assassination. I personally think it makes a pretty good case.

Jun 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

JohnnyWalker123 , June 25, 2018 at 8:19 am GMT

Another well-reasoned and highly-detailed article. I agree that we'll probably never know many of the important details of how the assassination was planned and who was involved, given almost all the participants and witnesses are long since dead. However, we can almost certainly conclude that there was a conspiracy that involved many important individuals from the establishment, including President LBJ.

What are your thoughts on Seymour Hersh and his book "The Dark Side of Camelot"? I recall his book received very negative coverage by the MSM, but I can't really judge how credible his claims happen to be. It's a very shocking book though.

You mention here that you think our alternative media have been dishonest in analyzing LBJ's likely role in the assassination. Why? Was it because the media feared LBJ might have them killed? Was it perhaps because some in our media were on the payroll and being used to distract from the "mastermind" assassin?

So the clear dishonesty of the mainstream media in avoiding any recognition of a conspiracy seems matched by a second layer of dishonesty in the alternative media, which has done its best to avoid recognizing the most likely perpetrator.

Here's a good History Channel special on how LBJ may have been involved with the JFK assassination. I personally think it makes a pretty good case.

[Jun 26, 2018] Buzz Mohawk

Jun 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

says: June 25, 2018 at 8:09 am GMT 100 Words For anyone who hasn't seen it, here is a stabilized, panoramic version of the Zapruder film. With this, you can get a clearer idea of the scene and what really happened. For me at least, it removes a lot of the mystery, revealing that the physical event itself was not that remarkable, no matter who did it.

Read More Replies: @JohnnyWalker123 Dan Rather lied about the event to the public.

Which was remarkable.

Watch Rather lie here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXFwbIx2mbc , @TonyVodvarka Viewing the Zapruder film carefully, one can see that, during the six seconds of shooting, the limousine's brake lights are on and it almost comes to a halt. The chauffeur is looking back all this time and does not speed off until he sees JFK's head explode. There is a film clip that shows that, as the cortege begins to leave Love Field, the SS agents that attempted to ride in the normal protective position on the back bumper were called away by the chief of the detail. The two men protested strongly but were ordered back to a car. There were no motorcycle outriders, a standard security procedure. The 1112th Military Intelligence group, which normally would have secured the parade route was ordered to stand down and there was no additional security to replace them. Make of it what you will. , @Heros Every time I see that Zapruder film I am reminded by the Kinks song "Give the people what they want":


When Oswald shot Kennedy, he was insane
Yet still we watch the re-runs again and again
We all sit glued while killer takes aim.......
Hey Mom there go the pieces of the Presidents Brain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0hWhCOx4U8&t=2m28s

Both Kennedy assassinations were also a massive psyop, and they remain so today. All the talk shows, all the movies, all the images flashing on screen, all the background music. But the scandal, is always used to push the sexualize and destroy the family agenda. Kennedy publicly had so many lovers, including Maralyn Monroe, another psyop herself.

It is the same with Clinton's famous cigar. This obsession with perverse sex is a very strong indicator of where the scandal is emanating. All the dogs not barking that point to this place are evidence too.

[Jun 24, 2018] annamaria

Jun 24, 2018 | www.unz.com

says: May 21, 2017 at 2:30 am GMT 200 Words While the "progressives" badmouth bad-bad russkies for "destroying our democracy," an obscene spectacle of persecution of the most important whistleblower of our times continues.
"Getting Assange: the Untold Story," by JOHN PILGER

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/19/getting-assange-the-untold-story/

"Hillary Clinton, the destroyer of Libya and, as WikiLeaks revealed last year, the secret supporter and personal beneficiary of forces underwriting ISIS, proposed, "Can't we just drone this guy." According to Australian diplomatic cables, Washington's bid to get Assange is "unprecedented in scale and nature." In Alexandria, Virginia, a secret grand jury has sought for almost seven years to contrive a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted. Assange's ability to defend himself in such a Kafkaesque world has been severely limited by the US declaring his case a state secret. In 2015, a federal court in Washington blocked the release of all information about the "national security" investigation against WikiLeaks, because it was "active and ongoing" and would harm the "pending prosecution" of Assange. The judge, Barbara J. Rothstein, said it was necessary to show "appropriate deference to the executive in matters of national security." This is a kangaroo court."

[Jun 23, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis Laura Bush and Michael Hayden, No Fixing Stupid by Publius Tacitus

Jun 23, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jun 21, 2018] Cocaine Cowboys

Jun 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

dan | Jun 21, 2018 3:59:00 PM | 5

Pertaining to your question about evidence of CIA and other deep state forces using cash from illicit drug sales, b, if you have time check out a wiked documentary series called "Cocaine Cowboys".

The first is a glimpse into how things got started in Miami, and is more of entertainment value than anything else. The second, however, describes exactly how the CIA introduced and established a massive crack cocaine market in California. It has a lot to do with the Ollie North "Iran Contra affair", and how the CIA was allowed to circumvent the traditional begathon for money from congress.

In fact back in the day it was public knowledge. Only congress remained blind.

Our joint favorite reporter, who passed away recently, wrote about it extensively. God bless Parry. W. Bush pardoned Ollie North, by the way. I am always blown away by the fact these assholes keep straight faces.

[Jun 18, 2018] American Pravda The JFK Assassination, Part I - What Happened, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... JFK and the Unspeakable ..."
"... Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years ..."
"... If the first two dozen pages of the Talbot book completely overturned my understanding of the JFK assassination, I found the closing section almost equally shocking. With the Vietnam War as a political millstone about his neck, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection in 1968, opening the door to a last minute entry into the Democratic race by Robert Kennedy, who overcame considerable odds to win some important primaries. Then on June 4, 1968, he carried gigantic winner-take-all California, placing him on an easy path to the nomination and the presidency itself, at which point he would finally be in a position to fully investigate his brother's assassination. But minutes after his victory speech, he was shot and fatally wounded, allegedly by another lone gunman, this time a disoriented Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, supposedly outraged over Kennedy's pro-Israel public positions although these were no different than those expressed by most other political candidates in America. ..."
"... All this was well known to me. However, I had not known that powder burns later proved that the fatal bullet had been fired directly behind Kennedy's head from a distance of three inches or less although Sirhan was standing several feet in front of him ..."
"... With two Kennedy brothers now dead, neither any surviving members of the family nor most of their allies and retainers had any desire to investigate the details of this latest assassination, and in a number of cases they soon moved overseas, abandoning the country entirely. JFK's widow Jackie confided in friends that she was terrified for the lives of her children, and quickly married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek billionaire, whom she felt would be able to protect them. ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Sunday Book Review ..."
"... the latest of many intelligent critics who have set out to demolish the tottering credibility of the Warren Commission and draw attention to evidence of a broad and terrible conspiracy that lay behind the assassination of John Kennedy -- and perhaps the murder of Robert Kennedy as well. ..."
"... Summarizing a half-century of conspiracy research, the Talbot and Douglass books together provide a wealth of persuasive evidence that elements of organized crime, individuals with CIA connections, and anti-Castro Cubans were probably participants in the assassination plot. Oswald seems to have been working with various anti-Communist groups and also had significant connections to U.S. intelligence, while his purported Marxism was merely a very thin disguise. With regard to the assassination itself, he was exactly the "patsy" he publicly claimed to be, and very likely never fired a single shot. Meanwhile, Jack Ruby had a long history of ties to organized crime, and surely killed Oswald to shut his mouth. ..."
"... Many others may have suffered a similar fate. Conspirators daring enough to strike at the president of the United States would hardly balk at using lethal means to protect themselves from the consequences of their action, and over the years a considerable number of individuals associated with the case in one way or another came to untimely ends. ..."
"... Less than a year after the assassination, JFK mistress Mary Meyer, the ex-wife of high-ranking CIA official Cord Meyer, was found shot to death in a Washington DC street-killing with no indications of attempted robbery or rape, and the case was never solved. Immediately afterwards, CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angelton was caught breaking into her home in search of her personal diary, which he later claimed to have destroyed. ..."
"... Dorothy Kilgallen was a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and television personality, and she managed to wrangle an exclusive interview with Jack Ruby, later boasting to her friends that she would break the JFK assassination case wide open in her new book, producing the biggest scoop of her career. Instead, she was found dead in her Upper East Side townhouse, having apparently succumbed to an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills, with both the draft text and the notes to her Jack Ruby chapter missing. ..."
"... From childhood, it's always been obvious to me that the MSM is completely dishonest about certain things and over the last dozen years I've become extremely suspicious about a whole range of other issues. But if you'd asked me a couple of years ago whether JFK was killed by a conspiracy, I would have said "well, anything's possible, but I'm 99% sure there's absolutely no substantial evidence pointing in that direction since the MSM would surely have headlined it a million times over." ..."
"... The National Guardian ..."
"... Rush to Judgment ..."
"... A Citizens Dissent ..."
"... , The New York Times ..."
"... Conspiracy Theory in America ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... President John F. Kennedy was indeed killed by a conspiracy, and we are sorry we spent more than a half century suppressing that truth and ridiculing those who uncovered it. ..."
Jun 18, 2018 | www.unz.com

Among other things, occasional references reminded me that I'd previously seen my newspapers discuss a couple of newly released JFK books in rather respectful terms, which had surprised me a bit at the time. One of them, still generating discussion, was JFK and the Unspeakable published in 2008 by James W. Douglass, whose name meant nothing to me. And the other, which I hadn't originally realized trafficked in any assassination conspiracies, was David Talbot's 2007 Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years , focused on the relationship between John F. Kennedy and his younger brother Robert. Talbot's name was also somewhat familiar to me as the founder of Salon.com and a well-regarded if liberal-leaning journalist.

None of us have expertise in all areas, so sensible people must regularly delegate their judgment to credible third-parties, relying upon others to distinguish sense from nonsense. Since my knowledge of the JFK assassination was nil, I decided that two recent books attracting newspaper coverage might be a good place to start. So perhaps a couple of years after watching that Oliver Stone film, I cleared some time in my schedule, and spent a few days carefully reading the combined thousand pages of text.

I was stunned at what I immediately discovered. Not only was the evidence of a "conspiracy" absolutely overwhelming, but whereas I'd always assumed that only kooks doubted the official story, I instead discovered that a long list of the most powerful people near the top of the American government and in the best position to know had been privately convinced of such a "conspiracy," in many cases from almost the very beginning.

The Talbot book especially impressed me, being based on over 150 personal interviews and released by The Free Press , a highly reputable publisher. Although he applied a considerable hagiographic gloss to the Kennedys, his narrative was compellingly written, with numerous gripping scenes. But while such packaging surely helped to explain some of the favorable treatment from reviewers and how he had managed to produce a national bestseller in a seemingly long-depleted field, for me the packaging was much less important than the product itself.

To the extent that notions of a JFK conspiracy had ever crossed my mind, I'd considered the argument from silence absolutely conclusive. Surely if there had been the slightest doubt of the "lone gunman" conclusion endorsed by the Warren Commission, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy would have launched a full investigation to avenge his slain brother.

But as Talbot so effectively demonstrates, the reality of the political situation was entirely different. Robert Kennedy may have begun that fatal morning widely regarded as the second most powerful man in the country, but the moment his brother was dead and his bitter personal enemy Lyndon Johnson sworn in as the new president, his governmental authority almost immediately ebbed away. Longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been his hostile subordinate, probably scheduled for removal in JFK's second term, immediately became contemptuous and unresponsive to his requests. Having lost all his control over the levels of power, Robert Kennedy lacked any ability to conduct a serious investigation.

According to numerous personal interviews, he had almost immediately concluded that his brother had been struck down at the hands of an organized group, very likely including elements from within the U.S. government itself, but he could do nothing about the situation. As he regularly confided to close associates, his hope at the age of 38 was to reach the White House himself at some future date, and with his hands once again upon the levels of power then uncover his brother's killers and bring them to justice. But until that day, he could do nothing, and any unsubstantiated accusations he made would be totally disastrous both for national unity and for his own personal credibility. So for years, he was forced to nod his head and publicly acquiesce to the official story of his brother's inexplicable assassination at the hands of a lone nut, a fairy tale publicly endorsed by nearly the entire political establishment, and this situation deeply gnawed at him. Moreover, his own seeming acceptance of that story was often interpreted by others, not least in the media, as his wholehearted endorsement.

Although discovering Robert Kennedy's true beliefs was a crucial revelation in the Talbot book, there were many others. At most three shots had allegedly come from Oswald's rifle, but Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service agent in the passenger seat of JFK's limousine, was sure there had been more than that, and to the end of his life always believed there had been additional shooters. Gov. Connolly, seated next to JFK and severely wounded in the attack, had exactly the same opinion. CIA Director John McCone was equally convinced that there had been multiple shooters. Across the pages of Talbot's book, I learned that dozens of prominent, well-connected individuals privately expressed extreme skepticism towards the official "lone gunman theory" of the Warren Commission, although such doubts were very rarely made in public or on the record.

For a variety of complex reasons, the leading national media organs -- the commanding heights of "Our American Pravda" -- almost immediately endorsed the "lone gunman theory" and with some exceptions generally maintained that stance throughout the next half-century. With few prominent critics willing to publicly dispute that idea and a strong media tendency to ignore or minimize those exceptions, casual observers such as myself had generally received a severely distorted view of the situation.

If the first two dozen pages of the Talbot book completely overturned my understanding of the JFK assassination, I found the closing section almost equally shocking. With the Vietnam War as a political millstone about his neck, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection in 1968, opening the door to a last minute entry into the Democratic race by Robert Kennedy, who overcame considerable odds to win some important primaries. Then on June 4, 1968, he carried gigantic winner-take-all California, placing him on an easy path to the nomination and the presidency itself, at which point he would finally be in a position to fully investigate his brother's assassination. But minutes after his victory speech, he was shot and fatally wounded, allegedly by another lone gunman, this time a disoriented Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, supposedly outraged over Kennedy's pro-Israel public positions although these were no different than those expressed by most other political candidates in America.

All this was well known to me. However, I had not known that powder burns later proved that the fatal bullet had been fired directly behind Kennedy's head from a distance of three inches or less although Sirhan was standing several feet in front of him . Furthermore, eyewitness testimony and acoustic evidence indicated that at least twelve bullets were fired although Sirhan's revolver could hold only eight, and a combination of these factors led longtime LA Coroner Dr. Thomas Naguchi, who conducted the autopsy, to claim in his 1983 memoir that there was likely a second gunman. Meanwhile, eyewitnesses also reported seeing a security guard with his gun drawn standing right behind Kennedy during the attack, and that individual happened to have a deep political hatred of the Kennedys. The police investigators seemed uninterested in these highly suspicious elements, none of which came to light during the trial. With two Kennedy brothers now dead, neither any surviving members of the family nor most of their allies and retainers had any desire to investigate the details of this latest assassination, and in a number of cases they soon moved overseas, abandoning the country entirely. JFK's widow Jackie confided in friends that she was terrified for the lives of her children, and quickly married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek billionaire, whom she felt would be able to protect them.

Talbot also devotes a chapter to the late 1960s prosecution efforts of New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, which had been the central plot of the JFK film, and I was stunned to discover that the script was almost entirely based on real life events rather than Hollywood fantasy. This even extended to its bizarre cast of assassination conspiracy suspects, mostly fanatically anti-Communist Kennedy-haters with CIA and organized crime ties, some of whom were indeed prominent members of the New Orleans gay demimonde. Sometimes real life is far stranger than fiction.

Taken as a whole, I found Talbot's narrative quite convincing, at least with respect to demonstrating the existence of a substantial conspiracy behind the fatal event.

Others certainly had the same reaction, with the august pages of The New York Times Sunday Book Review carrying the strongly favorable reaction of presidential historian Alan Brinkley. As the Allan Nevins Professor of History and Provost of Columbia University, Brinkley is as mainstream and respectable an academic scholar as might be imagined and he characterized Talbot as

the latest of many intelligent critics who have set out to demolish the tottering credibility of the Warren Commission and draw attention to evidence of a broad and terrible conspiracy that lay behind the assassination of John Kennedy -- and perhaps the murder of Robert Kennedy as well.

The other book by Douglass, released a year later, covered much the same ground and came to roughly similar conclusions, with substantial overlap but also including major additional elements drawn from the enormous volume of extremely suspicious material unearthed over the decades by diligent JFK researchers. Once again, the often bitter Cold War era conflict between JFK and various much harder-line elements of his government over Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam is sketched out as the likely explanation for his death.

Summarizing a half-century of conspiracy research, the Talbot and Douglass books together provide a wealth of persuasive evidence that elements of organized crime, individuals with CIA connections, and anti-Castro Cubans were probably participants in the assassination plot. Oswald seems to have been working with various anti-Communist groups and also had significant connections to U.S. intelligence, while his purported Marxism was merely a very thin disguise. With regard to the assassination itself, he was exactly the "patsy" he publicly claimed to be, and very likely never fired a single shot. Meanwhile, Jack Ruby had a long history of ties to organized crime, and surely killed Oswald to shut his mouth.

Many others may have suffered a similar fate. Conspirators daring enough to strike at the president of the United States would hardly balk at using lethal means to protect themselves from the consequences of their action, and over the years a considerable number of individuals associated with the case in one way or another came to untimely ends.

Less than a year after the assassination, JFK mistress Mary Meyer, the ex-wife of high-ranking CIA official Cord Meyer, was found shot to death in a Washington DC street-killing with no indications of attempted robbery or rape, and the case was never solved. Immediately afterwards, CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angelton was caught breaking into her home in search of her personal diary, which he later claimed to have destroyed.

Dorothy Kilgallen was a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and television personality, and she managed to wrangle an exclusive interview with Jack Ruby, later boasting to her friends that she would break the JFK assassination case wide open in her new book, producing the biggest scoop of her career. Instead, she was found dead in her Upper East Side townhouse, having apparently succumbed to an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills, with both the draft text and the notes to her Jack Ruby chapter missing.

Shortly before Jim Garrison filed his assassination charges, his top suspect David Ferrie was found dead at age 48, possibly of natural causes, though the DA suspected foul play.

During the mid-1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations held a series of high-profile hearings to reopen and investigate the case, and two of the witnesses called were high-ranking mafia figures Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli, widely suspected of having been connected with the assassination. The former was shot to death in the basement of his home one week before he was scheduled to testify, and the body of the latter was found in an oil-drum floating in the waters off Miami after he had been subpoenaed for an additional appearance.

These were merely a few of the highest-profile individuals with a connection to the Dallas assassination whose lives were cut short in the years that followed, and although the deaths may have been purely coincidental, the full list is rather a long one.

Having read a couple of books that completely upended my settled beliefs about a central event of twentieth century America, I simply didn't know what to think. Over the years, my own writings had put me on friendly terms with a well-connected individual whom I considered a member of the elite establishment, and whose intelligence and judgment had always seemed extremely solid. So I decided to very gingerly raise the subject with him, and see whether he had ever doubted the "lone gunman" orthodoxy. To my total astonishment, he explained that as far back as the early 1990s, he'd become absolutely convinced in the reality of a "JFK conspiracy" and over the years had quietly devoured a huge number of the books in that field, but had never breathed a word in public lest his credibility be ruined and his political effectiveness destroyed.

A second friend, a veteran journalist known for his remarkably courageous stands on certain controversial topics, provided almost exactly the same response to my inquiry. For decades, he'd been almost 100% sure that JFK had died in a conspiracy, but once again had never written a word on the topic for fear that his influence would immediately collapse.

If these two individuals were even remotely representative, I began to wonder whether a considerable fraction, perhaps even a majority, of the respectable establishment had long harbored private beliefs about the JFK assassination that were absolutely contrary to the seemingly uniform verdict presented in the media. But with every such respectable voice keeping so silent, I had never once suspected a thing.

Few other revelations in recent years have so totally overturned my understanding of the framework of reality. Even a year or two later, I still found it very difficult to wrap my head around the concept, as I described in another note to that well-connected friend of mine:

BTW, I hate to keep harping on it, but every time I consider the implications of the JFK matter I'm just more and more astonished.

The president of the US. The heir to one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in America. His brother the top law enforcement officer in the country. Ben Bradlee, one of his closest friends, the fearless crusading editor of one of the nation's most influential media outlets. As America's first Catholic president, the sacred icon of many millions of Irish, Italian, and Hispanic families. Greatly beloved by top Hollywood people and many leading intellectuals.

His assassination ranks as one of the most shocking and dramatic events of the 20th century, inspiring hundreds of books and tens of thousands of news stories and articles, examining every conceivable detail. The argument from MSM silence always seemed absolutely conclusive to me.

From childhood, it's always been obvious to me that the MSM is completely dishonest about certain things and over the last dozen years I've become extremely suspicious about a whole range of other issues. But if you'd asked me a couple of years ago whether JFK was killed by a conspiracy, I would have said "well, anything's possible, but I'm 99% sure there's absolutely no substantial evidence pointing in that direction since the MSM would surely have headlined it a million times over."

Was there really a First World War? Well, I've always assumed there was, but who really knows? .

Our reality is shaped by the media, but what the media presents is often determined by complex forces rather than by the factual evidence in front of their eyes. And the lessons of the JFK assassination may provide some important insights into this situation.

A president was dead and soon afterward his supposed lone assassin suffered the same fate, producing a tidy story with a convenient endpoint. Raising doubts or focusing on contrary evidence might open doors better kept shut, perhaps endangering national unity or even risking nuclear war if the trail seemed to lead overseas. The highest law enforcement officer in the country was the slain president's own brother, and since he seemed to fully accept that simple framework, what responsible journalist or editor would be willing to go against it? What American center of power or influence had any strong interest in opposing that official narrative?

Certainly there was immediate and total skepticism overseas, with few foreign leaders ever believing the story, and figures such as Nikita Khrushchev, Charles DeGaulle, and Fidel Castro all immediately concluded that a political plot had been responsible for Kennedy's elimination. Mainstream media outlets in France and the rest of Western Europe were equally skeptical of the "lone gunman theory," and some of the most important early criticism of U.S. government claims was produced by Thomas Burnett, an expatriate American writing for one of the largest French newsweeklies. But in pre-Internet days, only the tiniest sliver of the American public had regular access to such foreign publications, and their impact upon domestic opinion would have been nil.

Perhaps instead of asking ourselves why the "lone gunman" story was accepted, we should instead be asking why it was ever vigorously challenged, during an era when media control was extremely centralized in establishmentarian hands.

Oddly enough, the answer may lie in the determination of a single individual named Mark Lane, a left-liberal New York City attorney and Democratic Party activist. Although JFK assassination books eventually numbered in the thousands and the resulting conspiracy theories roiled American public life throughout the 1960s and 1970s, without his initial involvement matters might have followed a drastically different trajectory.

From the very first, Lane had been skeptical of the official story, and less than a month after the killing, The National Guardian , a small left-wing national newspaper, published his 10,000 word critique, highlighting major flaws in the "lone gunman theory." Although his piece had been rejected by every other national periodical, the public interest was enormous, and once the entire edition sold out, thousands of extra copies were printed in pamphlet form. Lane even rented a theater in New York City, and for several months gave public lectures to packed audiences.

After the Warren Commission issued its completely contrary official verdict, he began working on a manuscript, and although he faced enormous obstacles in finding an American publisher, once Rush to Judgment appeared, it spent a remarkable two years on the national bestseller lists, easily reaching the #1 spot. Such tremendous economic success naturally persuaded a host of other authors to follow suit, and an entire genre was soon established. Lane later published A Citizens Dissent recounting his early struggles to break the total American "media blackout" against anyone contradicting the official conclusion. Against all odds, he had succeeded in sparking a massive popular uprising sharply challenging the narrative of the establishment.

According to Talbot, "By late 1966, it was becoming impossible for the establishment media to stick with the official story" and the November 25, 1966 edition of Life Magazine , then at the absolute height of its national influence, carried the remarkable cover story "Did Oswald Act Alone?" with the conclusion that he probably did not. The next month , The New York Times announced it was forming a special task force to investigate the assassination. These elements were to merge with the media furor soon surrounding the Garrison investigation that began the following year, an investigation that enlisted Lane as an active participant. However, behind the scenes a powerful media counterattack was also being launched at this same time.

In 2013 Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, past president of the Florida Political Science Association, published Conspiracy Theory in America , a fascinating exploration of the history of the concept and the likely origins of the term itself. He noted that during 1966 the CIA had become alarmed at the growing national skepticism of the Warren Commission findings, especially once the public began turning its suspicious eyes toward the intelligence agency itself. Therefore, in January 1967 top CIA officials distributed a memo to all their local stations, directing them to employ their media assets and elite contacts to refute such criticism by various arguments, notably including an emphasis on Robert Kennedy's supposed endorsement of the "lone gunman" conclusion.

This memo, obtained by a later FOIA request, repeatedly used the term "conspiracy" in a highly negative sense, suggesting that "conspiracy theories" and "conspiracy theorists" be portrayed as irresponsible and irrational. And as I wrote in 2016,

Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continuing right down to the present day.

This possible cause-and-effect relationship is supported by other evidence. Shortly after leaving The Washington Post in 1977, famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein published a 25,000 word Rolling Stone cover story entitled "The CIA and the Media" revealing that during the previous quarter century over 400 American journalists had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA according to documents on file at the headquarters of that organization. This influence project, known as "Operation Mockingbird," had allegedly been launched near the end of the 1940s by high-ranking CIA official Frank Wisner, and included editors and publishers situated at the very top of the mainstream media hierarchy.

For whatever reason, by the time I came of age and began following the national media in the late 1970s, the JFK story had become very old news, and all the newspapers and magazines I read provided the very strong impression that the "conspiracy theories" surrounding the assassination were total nonsense, long since debunked, and only of interest to kooks on the ideological fringe. I was certainly aware of the enormous profusion of popular conspiracy books, but I never had the slightest interest in looking at any of them. America's political establishment and its close media allies had outlasted the popular rebellion, and the name "Mark Lane" meant almost nothing to me, except vaguely as some sort of fringe-nut, who very occasionally rated a mention in my mainstream newspapers, receiving the sort of treatment accorded to Scientologists or UFO activists.

Oddly enough, Talbot's treatment of Lane was also rather dismissive, recognizing his crucial early role in preventing the official narrative from quickly hardening into concrete, but also emphasizing his abrasive personality, and almost entirely ignoring his important later work on the issue, perhaps because so much of it had been conducted on the political fringe. Robert Kennedy and his close allies had similarly boycotted Lane's work from the very first, regarding him as a meddlesome gadfly, but perhaps also ashamed that he was asking the questions and doing the work that they themselves were so unwilling to undertake at the time. Douglass's 500 page book scarcely even mentions Lane.

Reading a couple of Lane's books, I was quite impressed by the enormous role he had seemingly played in the JFK assassination story, but I also wondered how much of my impression may have been due to the exaggerations of a possible self-promoter. Then, on May 13, 2016 I opened my New York Times and found nearly a full page obituary devoted to Lane's death at age 89, the sort of treatment these days reserved for only the highest-ranking U.S. Senators or major rap stars. And the 1,500 words were absolutely glowing, portraying Lane as a solitary, heroic figure struggling for decades to reveal the truth of the JFK assassination conspiracy against an entire political and media establishment seeking to suppress it.

I read this as a deep apology by America's national newspaper of record. President John F. Kennedy was indeed killed by a conspiracy, and we are sorry we spent more than a half century suppressing that truth and ridiculing those who uncovered it.

Related Reading:

American Pravda: How the CIA Invented "Conspiracy Theories" American Pravda: Was General Patton Assassinated? Our American Pravda

[Jun 18, 2018] In criminal investigations the first question always is 'who benefits'. The weird thing in political suspicious deaths is that this question is seldom asked

Counting the shooting of JFK in 1963, and the shooting-wouding of Ronald Reagan in 1981 by a guy whose father was working for George Bush's brother (!), plus the two arguably-staged 'impeachments' of Richard Nixon (ending 1974) and Bill Clinton (ending 1999), you have a 40% removal-programme hit rate on the previous 10 US Presidents.
Notable quotes:
"... Counting the shooting of JFK in 1963, and the shooting-wouding of Ronald Reagan in 1981 by a guy whose father was working for George Bush's brother (!), plus the two arguably-staged 'impeachments' of Richard Nixon (ending 1974) and Bill Clinton (ending 1999), you have a 40% removal-programme hit rate on the previous 10 US Presidents. ..."
"... Ron's suspicions may be correct. However, I am bothered by two things left out of his article: the identity of the conspirators and their motivation. What was President Kennedy doing that had to be stopped? ..."
Jun 18, 2018 | www.unz.com

Not Raul , June 18, 2018 at 5:41 am GMT
One of the main reasons why "conspiracy theory" is used in the pejorative sense:

After JFK was killed, there were many articles and books written claiming a conspiracy. And then nothing happened.

At some level, most Americans are still convinced that the police and prosecutors are looking out for them: If it really were proved that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, of course the conspirators would be prosecuted, right?

The same is true of the "suicide" of Gary Webb, the man who uncovered Iran Contra. He was found with an alleged suicide note, and two gunshot wounds to the back of the head. The coroner ruled his death a suicide. Case closed.

Technomad , June 18, 2018 at 6:11 am GMT
The thing is, the kind of high-level people who're generally accused of wanting to murder poor, poor, innocent JFK both knew that at worst, he'd be gone by January 21, 1969, and knew more than enough about him to come up with a much better plan. Getting "Dr. Feelgood," with or without his conscious cooperation, to give JFK a "hot shot" would do the trick just fine, as would sending in a "bimbo" with a cyanide injector in her beehive hairdo. First rule of this as in many other things -- KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!)

The kinds of scenarios I've seen from conspiracy believers are so complicated and iffy that they make Jimmy Carter's "Operation Eagle Claw" look like a sure-fire, can't-lose winner. Having Oswald be the only shooter makes sense, and comports with what we know of Oswald's personality. The men who've murdered other presidents were generally attention sponges with an exaggerated view of their importance in the scheme of things. Oswald thought he was rightfully a world-shaking hero, instead of the twerp he was, but compared to Charles Guiteau (who shot James Garfield) Oswald was a shrinking violet.

jilles dykstra , June 18, 2018 at 6:46 am GMT
In criminal investigations the first question always is 'who benefits'. The weird thing in political suspicious deaths is that this question is seldom asked.
This is the case with, to name a few, Sikorsky, Kennedy, Palme, Anna Lyndh, Hammarskjöld, Diana, Hess, Pearl Harbour, Sept 11, MH17, MH370, Bernadotte, Barschel, there must be more.

In the Kennedy case, he was killed some two weeks after he had threatened Israel not to sell weapons any more, if they continued building the atomic bomb.

utu , June 18, 2018 at 6:48 am GMT
Both patsies Harvey Lee Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were selected with respect to the legends, real or synthetic, that could be used in the post assassination story spin off. In both cases the legends were to deflect the attention form the actual conspirators. In the case of Oswald it was his defection to the USSR. Involvement of Soviets in the assassination was an option that was not played in the media in the end but it could have been if the lone nut assassin narrative for some reason could not gain the traction. In the case of Sirham his legend as a disgruntled Palestinian who was upset with RFK's alleged support for Israel was played to the full extent. It was done for two reasons: (1) to decouple JFK assassination from RFK assassination; crazy lone nut Texan American and crazy lone nut Arab Palestinian had only one thing in common: being a crazy lone nut, and (2) paint RFK as a martyr for his pro Israel views. The second spin off was risky because it brought Israel into the story, nevertheless the conspirators thought it was important and took the risk so the could make out of RFK the first (and the only one so far afaik) American politician who died for his pro Israel position. This certainly pushed away any suspicions that Israel might have been involved or could have benefited from his assassination. Sirhan Sirhan legend was also used to foreshadow Palestinian terrorism that began to grow in the wake of the Six Day War of 1967.
Anon [138] Disclaimer , June 18, 2018 at 6:48 am GMT
Try taking a look at 'Prayer Man', most likely the image of Lee Harvey Oswald on the front steps of the TSBD building shortly after the shooting. A good introduction can be found at http://22november1963.org.uk/prayer-man-jfk-assassination
utu , June 18, 2018 at 7:07 am GMT
The 1991 Oliver Stone movie unblocked many Americans to think about and consider the conspiracy behind the assassination. Still four years earlier Stanley Kubrick was reinforcing the meme of Lee Harvey Oswald in Full Metal Jacket:
JohnnyWalker123 , June 18, 2018 at 7:09 am GMT
Excellent article, Ron. Thankyou for writing this.

On his deathbed, CIA Agent E. Howard Hunt confessed to being involved in the JFK assassination. He implicated other intelligence agents and Vice-President LBJ. Watch this short video here in which he confesses.

If anyone wants to understand the JFK assassination in more detail, I highly recommend watching Oliver Stone's movie JFK. Here's a very good part of the movie that explains how Oswald couldn't have shot JFK, as Oswald was behind JFK and JFK's head snaps back and to the left. So the true assassin must've been in the front (his shot knocked JFK's head back) – and couldn't have been Oswald. Watch the video below. "Back and to the left."

Here's an interesting video on how many JFK assassination witnesses died mysterious deaths. Start watching this video from 1:50. Particularly interesting is that on the day when the House tried to get George De Mohrenschildt (a close friend of Oswald and a very prominent socialite in Dallas) to testify, he was found death. The death was ruled a suicide.

Jack Ruby (the Dallas club owner who assasinated Oswald) claimed that LBJ had JFK assassinated. See video below.

He also claimed a conspiracy was keeping him from speaking. See video below.

When JFK was assassinated, there was a man with an umbrella who was right next to the president. It was an extremely sunny day in Dallas on that day. Why was the man holding the umbrella? Reporter Bill O'Reilly reports evidence that the "Umbrella Man" may have used the umbrella to fire a dart into JFK. Interestingly, the CIA had developed a dart weapon before that date. See this video below. Starts at 40 seconds.

Dr. Charles Crenshaw (who treated JFK's bullet wound and went on to become ) claimed that the entry points of 2 of the wounds he observed were in the front of JFK's throat. Therefore, the assassin must've been in the front and couldn't have been Oswald. He also claimed that the wound was tampered with to make it seem the bullet came from behind.

"Dark Journalist" has a very good video on the JFK assassination.

Here's an interesting video of Dan Rather lying about the JFK assassination. This news clip was made shortly after the assassination. Dan Rather told the American viewing public that JFK's head went forward after he was shot. Later, it would be revealed that Dan Rather had lied that day.

By the way, you always hear the Warren Commission found that there was no conspiracy and that Oswald was the "lone gunman." However, in 1976, the House of Representatives investigated the matter and concluded that there was a conspiracy behind the JFK assassination. The assasination involved multiple gunmen. The media never reports this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Committee_on_Assassinations

The United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The HSCA completed its investigation in 1978 and issued its final report the following year, concluding that Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. In addition to acoustic analysis of a police channel dictabelt recording,[1] the HSCA also commissioned numerous other scientific studies of assassination-related evidence that corroborate the Warren Commission's findings.[2]

JohnnyWalker123 , June 18, 2018 at 7:35 am GMT
LBJ wanted JFK dead sooner than that.

Here's a very persuasive History Channel video on how LBJ had JFK killed.

Also, the military-industrial complex wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam.

By the way, it's sort of interesting how the mysterious Gulf of Tonkin incident led to a huge war in Vietnam.

This video demonstrates how wildly implausible it was that Oswald pulled the trigger. The FBI couldn't replicate Oswald's supposed shooting with their best shooters.

FBI didn't find a palm print on Oswald's rifle. Then, a week later, a Dallas policeman found a palm print on the rifle.

"We're through the looking glass people. White is black – and black is white."

Biff , June 18, 2018 at 7:53 am GMT
@Technomad

One trip to Dealy Plaza, and the Oswald story crumbles. Keep trying though.

LondonBob , June 18, 2018 at 8:00 am GMT
Of course the highly reputable confessions by Chauncey Holt and E Howard Hunt have been studiously ignored.
Brabantian , Website June 18, 2018 at 8:42 am GMT
Nice account of 'getting woke' from Ron Unz quite appreciate the tidbits such as the mention of the once-very-famous Dorothy Kilgallen of the 'What's My Line?' TV show (1950-67)

Counting the shooting of JFK in 1963, and the shooting-wouding of Ronald Reagan in 1981 by a guy whose father was working for George Bush's brother (!), plus the two arguably-staged 'impeachments' of Richard Nixon (ending 1974) and Bill Clinton (ending 1999), you have a 40% removal-programme hit rate on the previous 10 US Presidents.

Maybe even more hidden from public knowledge, is the truth of the Watergate 'Silent Coup' (Colodny / Gettlin book). Bob Woodward was a US Navy intelligence agent under Admiral Maurer, and when Maurer became head of the US Joint Chiefs and thus the entire US military, Woodward was planted at the CIA's Washington Post to be the fake 'brave reporter' for the coup d'état of 'Watergate', entirely a US Joint Chiefs – CIA operation. Bob Woodward was apparently such an idiot re journalism at first he needed lots of remedial coaching to meet minimal standards.

'Deep Throat' was fiction, the CIA had all the info, the CIA fake 'leaker' is another big distraction game getting repeated (Daniel Ellsberg; Deep Throat; Wikileaks Assange who was admitted by both Brzezinski and Netanyahu to be fake, seems he isn't even really 'living' at the London Ecuador Embassy, faker Edward Snowden , first 'leaking' to the CIA's Washington Post, ha!, with Glenn Greenwald posing as the latest Jewish 'brave journalist'; Mossad-historian-supervised 'Panama Papers', etc.)

Another 'impeachment' farce was the Deep State 'Monica Lewinsky' nonsense against Bill Clinton, fired up when Bill balked in nausea, at the thought of ordering the war-crime bombing of Serbia that would kill thousands. For Clinton-Lewinsky, another Jewish figure, Matt Drudge, was propped up to play the Woodward role of 'great investigative reporter' When Clinton consented to approve the war as his way to stay alive, he was 'acquitted' – the bombings of Serbia began shortly afterwards. Clearly, the Deep State cannot even trust its highly pre-vetted White House occupants.

Now that the Unz site is on board with collusion in US President removals, we still have to get Unz site writers woke on the laughably fake 9 'trips to the moon' with 6 alleged 'moon landings' of 1968-72 regarding which director Stanley Kubrick even admitted before in March 1999 before he died, that he faked the 'moon landing' NASA videos (CIA movie studios, Laurel Canyon, California) 50th anniversary of the 'trips to the moon' starts this December a good time for Unz debunking

Laurent Guyénot , June 18, 2018 at 9:07 am GMT
Follow the Jack Ruby trail: If Oswald was "just a patsy," the first thing to do is to investigate on the man who silenced Oswald, thereby preventing any doubts being raised in a court case. Strangely enough, no one (not even Ruby's biographer Seth Kantor) seem to care that Jack Ruby's real name was Jacob Leon Rubenstein.

Allow me to quote from my earlier article, and add a few details: Ruby, the son of Jewish Polish immigrants, was a member of the Jewish underworld. He was a friend of Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen, whom he had known and admired since 1946. Cohen was the successor of the famed Benjamin Siegelbaum, aka Bugsy Siegel, one of the bosses of Murder Incorporated.

Cohen was infatuated with the Zionist cause, as he explained in his memoirs: "Now I got so engrossed with Israel that I actually pushed aside a lot of my activities and done nothing but what was involved with this Irgun war". Mickey Cohen was in contact with Menachem Begin, the former Irgun chief, with whom he even "spent a lot of time," according to Gary Wean, former detective sergeant for the Los Angeles Police Department. So there is a direct line connecting Jack Ruby, via Mickey Cohen, to the Israeli terrorist ring, and in particular to Menachem Begin, a specialist in false flag terror. We also know that Ruby phoned Al Gruber, a Mickey Cohen associate, just after Oswald's arrest; no doubt he received then "an offer he couldn't refuse," as they say in the underworld. Ruby's defense lawyer William Kunstler wrote in his memoirs that Ruby told him he had killed Oswald "for the Jews," and Ruby's rabbi Hillel Silverman received the same confession when visiting Ruby in jail.

Probably as a cryptic message to Johnson, whom he expected to pardon him, Ruby made the following odd statements to the Warren Commission: "There will be a certain tragic occurrence happening if you don't take my testimony and somehow vindicate me so my people don't suffer because of what I have done." He said that feared that his act would be used "to create some falsehood about some of the Jewish faith."

According to a declassified US State Department document, Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir reacted to the news that Ruby had just killed Oswald with this sentence: "Ruby is alive, Oy vaaboy if we get caught!" (quoted in Alan Hart, Zionism , vol. 2, p. 279).

Laurent Guyénot , June 18, 2018 at 9:27 am GMT
Make it three assassinated Kennedys, with JFK Jr. Hell, make it four, counting his unborn child : On July 20, 1999, the New York Daily News published a piece by Joel Siegel titled: "JFK Jr. Mulled Run for Senate in 2000". The page seems to have just been deleted, but I had saved it, so I reproduce the first lines : "A private poll in 1997 found that John F. Kennedy Jr. was by far the state's most popular Democrat, and two friends said yesterday they believed he would have run for office some day. Earlier this year, in one of the best-kept secret in state politics, Kennedy considered seeking the seat of retiring Sen. Daniel Moynihan " Moynihan was a former Kennedy associate, so it is likely that he would have supported JFK Jr.'s bid. And recall that the same seat had once been held by RFK. So JFK Jr. was walking on his father's and his uncle's footsteps. They saw him coming, and decided to eliminate him before his ambitions even became public. Guess who won the seat, after JFK Jr. died in a mysterious plane crash: Hillary Clinton.

What would JFK Jr. have done next if he had been allowed to walk this path? Well, if you want to know what was on his mind, check some of the covers of his magazine George on https://www.vfiles.com/vfiles/16372 You will see that he was obsessed with "conspiracy theories":

In a special "Conspiracy Issue", October 1998, George published a piece by Oliver Stone, director of the film JFK, titled "Paranoid and Proud of it". Earlier in December 1996, the cover announces an article on "TWA Conspiracy Theories" (about TWA 800). And in March 1997, another conspiracy theory under the title "Who was behind the killing of Yitzhak Rabin?". And so on.

Considering that JFK Jr.'s unborn child also died with him, and if we follow the logic of Ronald Kessler, author of The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded (1996) (a message to JFK Jr.?), then three generations of Kennedys were punished for "the sins of the father". That fulfills Exodus 20:5: "I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous god and I punish a parent's fault in the children, the grandchildren, and the great-grandchildren among those who hate me."

Chase , June 18, 2018 at 10:03 am GMT
@Not Raul

People conspire all the time. A board of directors gathering for their annual meeting is literally a conspiracy: they are conspiring to plan the company's trajectory over some period of time.

Do people ever conspire nefariously? Well, what is the first thing investigators will do when looking into a company like Enron? That's right, they will subpoena email records, because despite the negative connotation surrounding the term "conspiracy theory," people implicitly sense and really know that *this is exactly the kind of shit that happens all the time*.

For example, the Seth Rich murder, as its official story goes is literally a conspiracy. Two MS-13 members conspired to rob Mr. Rich while he was walking home from a bar. Why is it that people will believe that two people will conspire over a few hundred bucks, but refuse to believe powerful people will conspire over tens or hundreds of billions? Only because of media programming.

Once you unplug from the Matrix, so much that never made sense comes into clarity. Thanks, Mr. Unz for your tireless work and financial contributions to the American Pravda series. I've learned so much and it has been integral to my eyes being opened over the last four years.

kikl , June 18, 2018 at 10:08 am GMT
I think we all know the JFK-assassination was a conspiracy. Oswald was the patsy. But, we do not know for sure who participated in the conspiracy.

The report by the Warren commission was a cover up. CIA Director McCone was "complicit" in a Central Intelligence Agency "benign cover-up" by withholding information from the Warren Commission, according to a report by the CIA Chief Historian David Robarge released to the public in 2014.[24] According to this CIA report, CIA officers had been instructed to give only "passive, reactive, and selective" assistance to the commission, in order to keep the commission focused on "what the Agency believed at the time was the 'best truth' -- that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy."

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/jfk-assassination-john-mccone-warren-commission-cia-213197

Witholding evidence in order to cover up a crime is usually done because of involvement in the crime. Thus, it is most likely that the CIA was involved in the Kennedy Assassination.

bj , June 18, 2018 at 10:16 am GMT
What evil consumes the innocents? What witch stages these mind control spectacles? I add one bread crumb to the Ron Unz Trail, through the deep dark forest of the fairy tale of our lives.

No matter who you are, we have a vector for you!

"Lane, it should be noted, was in U.S. Army intelligence in post-war Germany in 1945-47. This is the branch that became the C.I.A. after the war. Lane was paid some $5 million in legal fees by the Liberty Lobby, according to a veteran of the lobby. None of this is widely known among the people who read and support American Free Press. It is important because it shows how a Zionist Jew from the C.I.A. can actually control a movement that purports to be working for the American patriot audience. "

http://www.bollyn.com/the-liberty-lobbys-mark-lane-and-the-jonestown-massacre/

Anonymouse , June 18, 2018 at 11:01 am GMT
Ron's suspicions may be correct. However, I am bothered by two things left out of his article: the identity of the conspirators and their motivation. What was President Kennedy doing that had to be stopped? Fifty-five years have passed without any conspirator's deathbed confession. Gerald Posner's Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of J. F. K. seemed convincing to me when I read it many years ago. One fact that struck me as specially persuasive was that the kindly Quaker woman who was sheltering Marina Oswald and baby saw an ad in the paper for a job at the Book Depository building and pointed it out to Oswald who applied for the job and got it sometime before the route of the Kennedy drive past the building was chosen and published. Perhaps Mr. Unz might share his opinion of Posner's book with us.
Iris , June 18, 2018 at 11:06 am GMT
@syonredux

Take the pain to read actual eyewitness testimonies from medical personnel who attended President Kennedy when taken to Parkland hospital after being shot.

That may stop you from embarrassing yourself defending the ludicrous lone gunman theory.

justagoon , June 18, 2018 at 11:16 am GMT
Hmmm at this rate you'll question whether 19 Arabs with box cutters crashed planes into buildings by about 2049. /sarc

Well better late than never I guess.

jilles dykstra , June 18, 2018 at 11:22 am GMT
Wonder if anyone read the Warren Report. Reading it I got the same feeling as, in the seventies, when I still believed mainstream history, reading Churchill's memoirs: too good to be true. Harold Weisberg, 'Whitewash – the report on the Warren Report', 1965, 1966, New York tears Warren to shreds.
Bardon Kaldian , June 18, 2018 at 11:28 am GMT
It is a sad comment on mental pliability of US public that someone as perspicacious as Ron Unz could have for so long subscribed to "single gunman" (alright, he was not single, Oswald was married) "theory".

Whatever one may think of Stone's JFK, he is doubtless mostly correct in this short interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unpZuynt4Gw

Tyrion 2 , Website June 18, 2018 at 11:38 am GMT
I came of age much more recently and my encounters with JFK and RFK's assassinations were all about supposed conspiracies. If anything, there seems to be a conspiracy to make you think there's a conspiracy.

Furthermore, it is pretty easy to kill someone so, if there was a conspiracy to kill those two, goodness knows why the conspirators would not just use more subtle methods

All of these types of theories always seem to end up with their hypothesiser pointing out inconsistencies in the historical account of incredibly complex events while, at best, only proposing a much more inconsistent alternative.

Conspirator super genius: how shall we kill him?

Conspirator normal: we could give him an aneurysm so he dies in his sleep in the middle of the night. It would be utterly untraceable and medically unsuspicious. Indeed, if we do it when he has one of his girls round, then that will stop further questions.

Conspirator super genius: no, we should stage an assasination in the open. With bullets that might miss, a patsy who might blab or get away and our target could easily survive and take revenge. It will also make everyone suspicious and will need endless effort to keep quiet.

Conspirator B: wtf

CF , June 18, 2018 at 11:43 am GMT
If you examine the first page of JFK's death certificate, (easily done on your search engine) you will see that the President died of "gunshot wounds to the head and neck." and that he was killed by a "High Velocity Rifle". At that time a High Velocity Rifle had a muzzle velocity speed of 2500/600 feet per second, now I believe it is up to 3000 feet per second.

The only weapon associated with Lee Harvey Oswald on the day of the assassination was a Manlicher Carcano 6.5mm as agreed by the Warren Commission, Pozner (Case Closed) and Bugliosi. This rifle is not only notoriously inaccurate but has a muzzle velocity of 2000 feet per second and therefore could not have inflicted the wounds to JFK's head and neck that killed him.

Oswald may have tried to kill the President (personally I doubt it) from the sixth floor of the Book Depository overlooking Dealy Plaza but he didn't because JFK was killed by a High Velocity weapon and Oswald didn't have one.

Case Closed.

[Jun 15, 2018] Lies and contradictions pile up on Ukraine's faked murder of Babchenko

By Clara Weiss 4 June 2018
Notable quotes:
"... Financial Times ..."
"... the Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Their criticism of Babchenko and the Ukrainian government's media hoax has nothing to do with concern for journalistic integrity or "truth." Quite the contrary: it is motivated by a well justified fear that the crudity of this fraudulent propaganda operation will further discredit the anti-Russia campaign of the imperialist powers, in which the bulk of Western journalists and major bourgeois newspapers and media outlets are fully complicit. ..."
Jun 15, 2018 | www.wsws.org

Six days after the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) revealed that it had staged the supposed murder of the anti-Kremlin journalist Arkady Babchenko, the Ukrainian government continues to seek to exploit the case for the anti-Russia campaign even as contradictions and lies concerning the state operation pile up. (See: " The New York Times and the murder that wasn't ")

Last Tuesday, the Ukrainian and Western press was filled with media reports about the killing of Babchenko in Kiev. The journalist, who supported the US-backed far-right coup in Kiev in early 2014 and the war of the Kiev regime in eastern Ukraine against pro-Russian separatists, had fled Russia in early 2017 after receiving death threats.

Ukrainian officials and Western media outlets, including the New York Times , immediately rushed to blame the killing of Babchenko on Russia. Yet in a stunning turn of events on Wednesday, Babchenko and the head of the Ukrainian Secret Service held a press conference to announce that the murder had been staged in a "special operation" allegedly designed to disclose a murderous plot against Babchenko by the Russian secret service, the FSB.

At the press conference, Babchenko described how he had faked his fall, put on a T-shirt that had been shot through to show bullet wounds, and was then covered in pig's blood. His wife found him lying on the floor and called the ambulance. He was pronounced dead in the ambulance and brought to a morgue where he started to watch news coverage of his alleged murder.

The story since presented by the SBU to justify the faked murder and describe the alleged Russian plot to kill Babchenko resembles a poorly written spy novel, filled with glaring inconsistencies and blatant lies.

Only two suspects have been identified by the SBU. Boris German is allegedly the man tasked by the Russian FSB to kill Babchenko. He is the executive director of the Ukrainian-German weapon manufacturer Schmeisser. There have been reports, but no official confirmation, that he was in fact working for Ukrainian counterintelligence.

The hit man allegedly hired by German is Oleksiy Tsimbalyuk, who had previously fought in the civil war in eastern Ukraine for the fascist Right Sector on the side of the Kiev regime. No explanation has been offered for why Tsimbalyuk, by all appearance an ardent Ukrainian nationalist and opponent of Russia who has described the killing of Russian soldiers as "an act of mercy," decided to change sides to kill Babchenko.

The Ukrainian general prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, said that the staging of the murder led to the disclosure by the suspect of a list of 30 names of journalists whom Russia planned to kill in Ukraine. This number has since been revised upward, to 47. German was supposedly also tasked to stockpile secret weapons caches throughout Ukraine. How all of these plots were connected and how they were to be executed by a handful of people has not been explained.

The SBU also published as proof of Russian involvement the "dossier" the Russian FSB had allegedly compiled on Babchenko for his "killer." Yet, as the journal meduza has pointed out, almost the entire biography of Babchenko in the dossier was copied from Babchenko's Wikipedia article, while all other information had been published by Babchenko himself on various social media platforms.

The dossier included no information about Babchenko's phone number or address in Kiev, both of which would have been important for the "killer" and easy for any secret service to obtain. The only private information in the dossier was Babchenko's registered Moscow address and his Russian identification and passport numbers, all of which could have been (and in all likelihood were) revealed by Babchenko to the SBU, but appear to be of no immediate use to a hired killer in Ukraine.

These contradictions are in addition to more minor lies in the Ukrainian government's account. For instance, Babchenko, in a very dramatic gesture, apologized to his wife at the press conference last Wednesday for having made her believe that he was dead. Yet on Thursday it was revealed that his wife had been in on the plot.

The Ukrainian government has not revealed whether it was aware that the killing had been faked when it declared that Russia was to blame for Babchenko's "murder."

Babchenko and the Ukrainian government have staunchly defended the media hoax and continue to seek to use it to whip up the campaign against Russia.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko hailed the staged murder as a "brilliant operation" and said on Ukraine television, "The whole world saw the real face of our enemy It is not Ukraine you should condemn, but Russia."

He promised that Babchenko and his family would receive around-the-clock protection, arguing that "Moscow would hardly calm down" and that the Ukrainian secret services were growing stronger in "fighting Russian aggression."

The advisor to the Interior Ministry Anton Gerashchenko wrote on Facebook: "Even Sherlock Holmes successfully used the method of faking his own death to effectively investigate difficult and complicated crimes, however painful that may have been for his relatives and for Dr. Watson."

Babchenko, who worked for the Russian army in both Chechen wars in the 1990s, posted a series of vulgar and aggressive comments on Facebook to denounce his critics. In one post, he pledged "to die at 96 while dancing on Putin's grave."

Responding to criticism in the British press, he wrote: "Dear British press, will you please go fuck yourselves. If you want to do something useful, you can give me a British passport and British sanctuary. Then you will have earned the right to lecture me on how I should save myself and my family. Fucking smart arses!"

He also wrote: "I wish all these moralisers could be in the same situation -- let them show their adherence to the principles of their high morals and die proudly holding their heads high without misleading the media."

Babchenko's boss at the Crimean Tatar television network ATR, Ayder Muzhdabayev, described the journalist's critics to Al Jazeera as "vermin." Muzhdabayev had been the first to report on Babchenko's alleged death last Tuesday.

Several pro-Western Russian journalists who are close to the liberal opposition have published op-eds defending Babchenko. However, a few voices also raised concerns.

An editorial by Pavel Kanygin in the pro-liberal Novaya Gazeta argued that Babchenko had "died as a journalist by breaking professional ethics and engaging in an unprecedented collaboration with secret services." Another op-ed in the same newspaper ridiculed the operation as a "parody" on Soviet spy novels and films.

The Russian business daily Vedomosti , which is associated with the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal , wrote in an editorial that the Babchenko operation had "blurred the border between truth and fiction" and would lead to more distrust in the media.

Similarly, numerous opinion pieces in Western outlets such as the Guardian and the German Spiegel , which have been heavily involved in the anti-Russia and anti-Putin campaign, raised concerns about the Babchenko operation and its consequences for the credibility of the media. The Guardian noted that "by faking Babchenko's murder, Ukraine has smeared itself," and that it had "handed Russia a massive propaganda victory."

The New York Times ran an article on Sunday as an exercise in damage control that was headlined "Faked Killing of a Putin Critic Can't Get Much Murkier. And Yet It Does."

Numerous Western politicians, including German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, have also criticized how the Ukrainian government handled the case.

Their criticism of Babchenko and the Ukrainian government's media hoax has nothing to do with concern for journalistic integrity or "truth." Quite the contrary: it is motivated by a well justified fear that the crudity of this fraudulent propaganda operation will further discredit the anti-Russia campaign of the imperialist powers, in which the bulk of Western journalists and major bourgeois newspapers and media outlets are fully complicit.

[Jun 13, 2018] How False Flag Operations Are Carried Out Today by Philip M. GIRALDI

Highly recommended!
When the media is controlled by people responsible for false flag operation chances to use investigation to discredit this false flag operation, no matter how many evidence they have is close to zero
In other word false flag operation is perfect weapon for the "sole superpower" and due to this status entail very little risks.
Notable quotes:
"... Today's false flag operations are generally carried out by intelligence agencies and non-government actors including terrorist groups, but they are only considered successful if the true attribution of an action remains secret. ..."
"... False flags can be involved in other sorts of activity as well. The past year's two major alleged chemical attacks carried out against Syrian civilians that resulted in President Donald Trump and associates launching 160 cruise missiles are pretty clearly false flag operations carried out by the rebels and terrorist groups that controlled the affected areas at the time. ..."
"... Because the rebels succeeded in convincing much of the world that the Syrian government had carried out the attacks, one might consider their false flag efforts to have been extremely successful. ..."
"... The remedy against false flag operations such as the recent one in Syria is, of course, to avoid taking the bait and instead waiting until a thorough and objective inspection of the evidence has taken place. The United States, Britain and France did not do that, preferring instead to respond to hysterical press reports by "doing something." If the U.N. investigation of the alleged attack turns up nothing, a distinct possibility, it is unlikely that they will apologize for having committed a war crime. ..."
"... The other major false flag that has recently surfaced is the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury England on March 4 th . Russia had no credible motive to carry out the attack and had, in fact, good reasons not to do so. ..."
"... Unfortunately, May proved wrong and the debate ignited over her actions, which included the expulsion of twenty-three Russian diplomats, has done her severe damage. Few now believe that Russia actually carried out the poisoning and there is a growing body of opinion suggesting that it was actually a false flag executed by the British government or even by the CIA. ..."
"... The lesson that should be learned from Syria and Skripal is that if "an incident" looks like it has no obvious motive behind it, there is a high probability that it is a false flag. ..."
Apr 26, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

False Flag is a concept that goes back centuries. It was considered to be a legitimate ploy by the Greeks and Romans, where a military force would pretend to be friendly to get close to an enemy before dropping the pretense and raising its banners to reveal its own affiliation just before launching an attack. In the sea battles of the eighteenth century among Spain, France and Britain hoisting an enemy flag instead of one's own to confuse the opponent was considered to be a legitimate ruse de guerre , but it was only "honorable" if one reverted to one's own flag before engaging in combat.

Today's false flag operations are generally carried out by intelligence agencies and non-government actors including terrorist groups, but they are only considered successful if the true attribution of an action remains secret. There is nothing honorable about them as their intention is to blame an innocent party for something that it did not do. There has been a lot of such activity lately and it was interesting to learn by way of a leak that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has developed a capability to mimic the internet fingerprints of other foreign intelligence services. That means that when the media is trumpeting news reports that the Russians or Chinese hacked into U.S. government websites or the sites of major corporations, it could actually have been the CIA carrying out the intrusion and making it look like it originated in Moscow or Beijing. Given that capability, there has been considerable speculation in the alternative media that it was actually the CIA that interfered in the 2016 national elections in the United States.

False flags can be involved in other sorts of activity as well. The past year's two major alleged chemical attacks carried out against Syrian civilians that resulted in President Donald Trump and associates launching 160 cruise missiles are pretty clearly false flag operations carried out by the rebels and terrorist groups that controlled the affected areas at the time. The most recent reported attack on April 7th might not have occurred at all according to doctors and other witnesses who were actually in Douma. Because the rebels succeeded in convincing much of the world that the Syrian government had carried out the attacks, one might consider their false flag efforts to have been extremely successful.

The remedy against false flag operations such as the recent one in Syria is, of course, to avoid taking the bait and instead waiting until a thorough and objective inspection of the evidence has taken place. The United States, Britain and France did not do that, preferring instead to respond to hysterical press reports by "doing something." If the U.N. investigation of the alleged attack turns up nothing, a distinct possibility, it is unlikely that they will apologize for having committed a war crime.

The other major false flag that has recently surfaced is the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury England on March 4th. Russia had no credible motive to carry out the attack and had, in fact, good reasons not to do so. The allegations made by British Prime Minister Theresa May about the claimed nerve agent being "very likely" Russian in origin have been debunked, in part through examination by the U.K.'s own chemical weapons lab. May, under attack even within her own party, needed a good story and a powerful enemy to solidify her own hold on power so false flagging something to Russia probably appeared to be just the ticket as Moscow would hardly be able to deny the "facts" being invented in London. Unfortunately, May proved wrong and the debate ignited over her actions, which included the expulsion of twenty-three Russian diplomats, has done her severe damage. Few now believe that Russia actually carried out the poisoning and there is a growing body of opinion suggesting that it was actually a false flag executed by the British government or even by the CIA.

The lesson that should be learned from Syria and Skripal is that if "an incident" looks like it has no obvious motive behind it, there is a high probability that it is a false flag. A bit of caution in assigning blame is appropriate given that the alternative would be a precipitate and likely disproportionate response that could easily escalate into a shooting war.

Tags: CIA

[Jun 11, 2018] Maltese Professor Who Lured Papadopoulos Tied To Soros' Open Society Foundation

Notable quotes:
"... Soros and his band of colluding commodities fund managers have done more damage in the world than any communist, socialist, or American exceptionalist. These soulless pathological misers' need to accumulate endless wealth leads to their trampling the rules and laws of free nations, bought off by their ownership of the regulatory apparatus. ..."
"... I speak from first hand knowledge. This is no fantasy. What IS a fantasy is that it is any religion or group ("the Rothschilds," "the Joos") who are behind this clique. It is the heads of the largest funds and money managers who work together like sharks on the body politic. Some are Jews, but far more are not. Greed knows no religion, no country, no creed or color. ..."
"... Bill and Hillary are at the vanguard of this group. Bill's administration did more to abet the metastatisis of this group than any other. Hillary tried to cash the IOU but failed because of her transparent venality, and Trump's appeal. ..."
Jun 11, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Maltese Professor Who Lured Papadopoulos Tied To Soros' Open Society Foundation

by Tyler Durden Mon, 06/11/2018 - 19:55 88 SHARES

Submitted by Disobedient Media

In the latest revelation concerning the "mysterious Maltese Professor," Joseph Mifsud, and his involvement in the "Russiagate" saga, Disobedient Media can additionally reveal that Mifsud interacted on a number of occasions with individuals tied to think tanks known for engaging in "pay to play" behavior for the purposes of pushing specific policies on behalf of donors. The involvement of these institutes, which include the Atlantic Council, Brookings Institute and Open Society Foundation raises questions about whether or not certain private parties were involved with efforts to target Donald Trump's presidential campaign for their own political benefit.

Disobedient Media broke coverage of Joseph Mifsud's connections to UK intelligence and was also the first outlet to report on the findings of UK political analyst Chris Blackburn, who recounted evidence that included reference to Mifsud's close relationship with Italian Senator Gianni Pittella. Pittella has been deemed in leaked documents to be a " reliable ally " of George Soros' Open Society Foundation.

Mifsud's Interaction With Think Tank Members

Joseph Mifsud has routinely and consistently interacted with various members of think tanks and institutions that as a general rule support internationalist policies. In the aftermath of the 2016 US Presidential Election, these interactions intensified as both think tanks and establishment media outlets began to increase their coverage of alleged "Russian collusion" narratives in an effort to justify ongoing investigations to the public.

On June 21st and 22nd, 2009, Mifsud was listed as a participant in the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs-hosted " G8 and Beyond " convened with the Brookings Institution, Aspen, Club de Madrid and LINK Campus. The event was also attended by Strobe Talbott, the President of the Brookings Institution. Disobedient Media has previously highlighted research by Chris Blackburn, tying members of cyber-security firm Crowdstrike to the LINK Campus in Rome. Crowdstrike founder Dmitri Alperovitch acts as a Senior Fellow for the Atlantic Council .

Mifsud has routinely aligned himself with pro-European Union parties and attended multiple events where members of the Atlantic Council and Open Society Foundation were also involved within the last several years. On June 28, 2016, Mifsud was listed as a signatory to a statement released by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) in response to the UK's Brexit vote. Other signatories included David Koranyi , Director of the Atlantic Council's Eurasian Energy Future Initiative, Jordi Vaquer , Director of the Open Society Initiative for Europe, Goran Buldioski , Director of the Open Society Initiative For Europe and George Soros. Since March 2018, the ECFR has removed Mifsud from their List of Members in an apparent attempt to distance themselves from this troubling affiliation.

On May 7th through May 9th, 2017, Mifsud was a participant in a panel discussion as part of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation-sponsored " G7 International Forum " at the LINK Campus in Rome along with Andrea Montanino , a Chief Economist at the Atlantic Council.

On May 21st, 2017, Mifsud spoke at the Riyadh Forum On Countering Extremism And Fighting Terrorism hosted by the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies and the Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition. The event also featured multiple speakers from the Atlantic Council, including Nonresident Senior Fellow Elisabeth Kendall and Ashton B. Carter , who is listed as an Honorary Director at the Atlantic Council.

On the 26th and 27th of June 2017 Mifsud attended the 10th annual council meeting of the European Council on Foreign Relations . Also present at the event was David Koranyi , the Director of the Atlantic Council's Energy Diplomacy Initiative. George Soros also appeared at the meeting along with his son, Alex Soros.

The Involvement Of Think Tanks In "Pay For Play" Propaganda Peddling

The Atlantic Council is a NATO-supported think tank that is known for pushing pro European Union, anti-Russia narratives, including " black propaganda " claiming that Russia was likely involved with attempts to "hack" the 2016 US Presidential Elections and that Wikileaks is a pawn of the Russian government. However, Disobedient Media has previously reported that the Atlantic Council and other think tanks have a troubling history of taking money from foreign special interest groups and government agencies in return for pushing propaganda to support various initiatives around the globe.

The New York Times has named the Atlantic Council along with the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies as being think tanks which have made undisclosed "agreements" with foreign governments. The article denounced the Atlantic Council for having "opened a whole new window into an aspect of the influence-buying in Washington that has not previously been exposed." Multiple legal experts cited by the New York Times said that these relationships with foreign powers may constitute a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act .

In May 2016, a report by the Associated Press identified the Atlantic Council as one of a number of think tanks which had received funding from the Ploughshares Fund. The Ploughshares Fund is financed by George Soros' Open Society Foundation . A May 5, 2016 article by the New York Times revealed that the Ploughshares Fund was a major player in efforts to sell the Iranian nuclear deal to the American public. The deal has been generally criticized as a foreign policy failure which resulted in the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars to Iran without any concessions in return and has failed to prevent Iran from continuing to illegally test long range ICBM missiles in violation of both the deal and international sanctions.

The Atlantic Council has released a number of glowing reviews of Soros' "philanthropic" work and proudly lists a jaw-dropping number of various special interest groups, government agencies, foreign governments and well connected, wealthy individual patrons among its donors. Highlights include the foundation of Ukranian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, The Open Society Foundation, the United Arab Emirates, Bahaa Hariri, the billionaire brother of Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc., NATO, the United States Department of State, and Lockheed Martin Corporation. A donor list from 2015 also names the Turkish Ministry of Energy & National Resources, whose head Berat Albayrak was the subject of leaks released by publishing giant Wikileaks exposing increasing political oppression in Turkey and the involvement of the Ministry in providing material support to the terror group ISIS.

The Brookings Institution's Contributor List also mentions many of the same donors who fund the Atlantic Council. Common supporters include Victor Pinchuk, The Open Society Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, Lockheed Martin Corporation and The Boeing Company. Brookings has also played a central role in helping to stoke the flames of the "Russiagate" story. Its staff includes Benjamin Wittes , a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution who admitted to leaking information given to him by James Comey about President Donald Trump to the New York Times .

The heavy emphasis placed on narrative pushing by the Atlantic Council and Brookings Institution is hardly surprising and has only intensified in 2018. In May 2018, a panel convened by the Council on Foreign Relations openly endorsed the use of propaganda on Western populations to combat what they claim to be "disinformation and fake news."

Consistent Interactions Create Concerns About Claims Of Collusion

The consistent interactions and connections between Mifsud and individuals tied to think tanks with a vested interest in pushing specific policy narratives leads to skepticism about claims that Russia systemically interfered with American elections. The damage that has been done not only to the reputation of hardworking intelligence professionals but to the very ideals of Western democracy internationally will take some time to fully repair.

While much attention has been given to the identities of the intelligence and government officials involved with the "Spygate" scandal, very little has been said about the private parties who may have used them for their own benefit. There is a plethora of international groups such as the Open Society Foundation, NATO and other individuals and organizations around the world which support these think tanks that have a proven history of pushing propaganda on behalf of their beneficiaries. Mifsud's ties to such groups that support an internationalist political agenda which has been disrupted by political events over the past several years raise serious questions about the identities of the actual parties who interfered with democratic processes and institutions in the United States.


AtATrESICI Mon, 06/11/2018 - 19:57 Permalink

Shocking...Yet another color revolution attempt by the usual suspects.

ted41776 -> AtATrESICI Mon, 06/11/2018 - 19:59 Permalink

Soros lived just long enough to see his life's work go to shit. best gift i could ever ask for

"Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong" ~ György Schwartz

can't take all that wealth with you György. hope it was worth it

johngaltfla -> Oliver Klozoff Mon, 06/11/2018 - 20:03 Permalink

Soros? CIA? Rigging elections? Whouldathunkit, now where did I put my shocked face.

TBT or not TBT -> johngaltfla Mon, 06/11/2018 - 20:06 Permalink

This is Brennan's A game . Imagine the damage team Obama could have inflicted if they had been competent .

LaugherNYC -> Bastiat • Mon, 06/11/2018 - 20:11 Permalink

Soros and his band of colluding commodities fund managers have done more damage in the world than any communist, socialist, or American exceptionalist. These soulless pathological misers' need to accumulate endless wealth leads to their trampling the rules and laws of free nations, bought off by their ownership of the regulatory apparatus.

I speak from first hand knowledge. This is no fantasy. What IS a fantasy is that it is any religion or group ("the Rothschilds," "the Joos") who are behind this clique. It is the heads of the largest funds and money managers who work together like sharks on the body politic. Some are Jews, but far more are not. Greed knows no religion, no country, no creed or color.

Bill and Hillary are at the vanguard of this group. Bill's administration did more to abet the metastatisis of this group than any other. Hillary tried to cash the IOU but failed because of her transparent venality, and Trump's appeal.

But, Trump isn't a pimple on their ass. He will come and go, and they will still be with us. They co-opt useful idiots like Comey and McCabe, and will laugh as their heads, most deservedly roll. But until the corrupt financial complex is brought to justice, nothing will change.

[Jun 11, 2018] John F. Kennedy and the Question of World Peace

Jun 11, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

I don't normally write about historical anniversaries. They're usually well covered by a plethora of writers much better than I. But today's date marks an event which intersects a project I began working several months ago on the history of nuclear weapons and related policies. Fifty five years ago, today, June 10, President John F. Kennedy delivered a commencement address at American University in Washington, D.C. on what he considered to be the most important matter of his time, indeed for all time: world peace. I read through it a couple of months ago and found it to be well worth remembering, not only for its particular content, but for the direction that Kennedy indicated in those remarks of where he wanted the world to go in.

To begin with, Kennedy clearly rejected the kind of "peace" that the geopoliticians have been taking us towards in recent years. "What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek?" he asked rhetorically. "Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not a peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I'm talking about genuine peace – the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living – the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely in our time but peace for all time."

Remember, this was about eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy was very acutely aware of the danger that nuclear weapons represented. Weapons of such power made no sense, he said, and the accumulation of weapons that could never be used except to keep the peace couldn't possibly be the only way, much less the most efficient way, to keep the peace. "I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men," he said.

Kennedy called on his audience to not only look at the leadership of the then-Soviet Union, but also to look inward at our own attitudes "as individuals and as a nation – for our attitudes are as essential as theirs." He rejected the notion that peace was impossible. "By defining our goal more clearly – by making is seem more manageable and less remote – we can help all peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly towards it."

Secondly, Kennedy rejected demonization of the Soviet Union. While he found Communism repugnant, he said "we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements – in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage." He also made a number of points which are even more relevant today. "Almost unique among the major world powers we have never been at war with each other," he said. "And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including nearly two-thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland – a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago."

Today, Kennedy went on, it is the US and the Soviet Union that are in the most danger of devastation. "All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours," he said. "So, let us not be blind to our differences," Kennedy advised, "but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which these differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

The remainder of Kennedy's remarks dealt with the arms control efforts of his administration which culminated in his declaration that the US would no longer conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere. "Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty – but I hope it will help us achieve one."

Glenn Seaborg, who was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission at the time, reports in his 1981 book "Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban," that the genesis of the speech came from a discussion that Kennedy had with the journalist Norman Cousins. Cousins had been engaged in a series of candid discussions with Khrushchev and had related the content of these discussions to the White House. "I advocated making a breathtaking offer to the Russians and the President said he would think about it..." Cousins recalled.

[Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... the Obama administration intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block " Siberian candidate " Trump. ..."
"... The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove , Halper's friend and business partner. Sitting in winged chairs in London's venerable Garrick Club, according to The Washington Post , Dearlove told fellow MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous "golden showers" opposition research dossier, that Trump "reminded him of a predicament he had faced years earlier, when he was chief of station for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US authorities to British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in communication with the Kremlin." ..."
"... Apparently, one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question step down. When that didn't work with Trump, Dearlove and his colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make him see the light. A major scandal was thus born – or, rather, a very questionable scandal. Besides Dearlove, Steele, and Halper, a bon-vivant known as "The Walrus" for his impressive girth , other participants include: Robert Hannigan, former director Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, UK equivalent of the NSA. Alexander Downer, top Australian diplomat. Andrew Wood, ex-British ambassador to Moscow. Joseph Mifsud, Maltese academic. James Clapper, ex-US Director of National Intelligence. John Brennan, former CIA Director (and now NBC News analyst). ..."
"... Dearlove and Halper are now partners in a private venture calling itself "The Cambridge Security Initiative." Both are connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt & Co. Halper is also connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt representative Jonathan Clarke and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another MI6 vet. Alexander Downer served a half-dozen years on Hakluyt's international advisory board, while Andrew Wood is linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the private research firm that Steele helped found, and which produced the anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an unpaid advisor . ..."
"... Everyone, in short, seems to know everyone else. But another thing that stands out about this group is its incompetence. Dearlove and Halper appear to be old-school paranoids for whom every Russian is a Boris Badenov or a Natasha Fatale . In February 2014, Halper notified US intelligence that Mike Flynn, Trump's future national security adviser, had grown overly chummy with an Anglo-Russian scholar named Svetlana Lokhova whom Halper suspected of being a spy – suspicions that Lokhova convincingly argues are absurd. ..."
"... As head of Britain's foreign Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known, Dearlove played a major role in drumming up support for the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq even while confessing at a secret Downing Street meeting that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [regime-change] policy." When the search for weapons of mass destruction turned up dry, Clapper, as then head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, argued that the Iraqi military must have smuggled them into neighboring Syria, a charge with absolutely no basis in fact but which helped pave the way for US regime-change efforts in that country too. ..."
"... Brennan was meanwhile a high-level CIA official when the agency was fabricating evidence against Saddam Hussein and covering up Saudi Arabia's role in 9/11. Wood not only continues to defend the Iraqi invasion, but dismisses fears of a rising fascist tide in the Ukraine as nothing more than "a crude political insult" hurled by Vladimir Putin for his own political benefit. Such views now seem distressingly misguided in view of the alt-right torchlight parades and spiraling anti-Semitism that are now a regular feature of life in the Ukraine. ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... describes Mifsud as "an enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia" and "a regular at meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, that Mr. Putin attends," which tried to suggest that he is a Kremlin agent of some sort. ..."
"... But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later tweeted photos of Mifsud with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and a high-ranking British intelligence official named Claire Smith at a training session for Italian security agents in Rome. Since it's unlikely that British intelligence would rely on a Russian agent in such circumstances, Mifsud's intelligence ties are more likely with the UK. ..."
"... Stefan Halper then infiltrated the Trump campaign on behalf of the FBI as an informant in early July, weeks before the FBI launched its investigation. Halper had 36 years earlier infiltrated the Carter re-election campaign in 1980 using CIA agents to turn information over to the Reagan campaign. Now Halper began to court both Page and Papadopoulous, independently of each other. ..."
"... The rightwing Federalist website speculates that Halper was working with Steele to flesh out a Sept. 14 memo claiming that "Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and [are] considering disseminating it." Clovis believes that Halper was trying "to create an audit trail back to those [Clinton] emails from someone in the campaign so they could develop a stronger case for probable cause to continue to issue warrants and to further an investigation." Reports that Halper apparently sought a permanent post in the new administration suggest that the effort was meant to continue after inauguration. ..."
"... Notwithstanding Clovis's nutty rightwing politics , his description of what Halper may have been up to makes sense as does his observation that Halper was trying " to build something that did not exist ." Despite countless hyper-ventilating headlines about mysterious Trump Tower meetings and the like, the sad truth is that Russiagate after all these months is shaping up as even more of a "nothing-burger" than Obama administration veteran Van Jones said it was back in mid-2017. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has indicted Papadopoulos and others on procedural grounds, he has indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for corruption, and he has charged a St. Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency with violating US election laws. ..."
"... As The Washington Post noted in an oddly, cool-headed Dec. 2 article , 2, 700 suspected Russian-linked accounts generated just 202,000 tweets in a six-year period ending in August 2017, a drop in a bucket compared to the one billion election-related tweets sent out during the fourteen months leading up to Election Day. ..."
"... Opposition research is intended to mix truths and fiction, to dig up plausible dirt to throw at your opponent, not to produce an intelligence assessment at taxpayer's expense to "protect" the country. And Steele was paid for it by the Democrats, not his government. ..."
"... Although Kramer denies it, The New Yorker ..."
"... But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press." ..."
"... It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree. But that's what the intelligence agencies are for, i.e. to spread fear and propaganda in order to stampede the public into supporting their imperial agenda. In this case, their efforts are so effective that they've gotten lost in a fog of their own making. If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice. ..."
"... "Russiagate" continues to attract mounting blowback at Clinton, Obama and the Dems. Might well be they who end up charged with lawbreaking, though I'd be surprised if anyone in authority is ever really punished. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-02/fbi-spying-trump-started-london-earlier-thought-new-texts-implicate-obama-white ..."
"... I've always thought that the great animus between Obama and Trump stemmed from Trump's persistent birtherist attacks on Obama followed by Obama's public ridicule of Trump at the White House Correspondants' Dinner. Without the latter, Trump probably would not have been motivated to run for the presidency. Without the former, Obama would probably not have gotten into the gutter to defeat and embarrass Trump at all costs. Clinton and Obama probably never recruit British spooks to sabotage and provide a pretense for spying on the campaigns of Jeb, Ted or Little Marco. Since these were all warmongers like Hillary and Obama, the issues would have been different, Russia would not have been a factor, and Putin would have had no alleged "puppet." ..."
"... The irony is that Clinton and Obama wanted Trump as her opponent. They cultivated his candidacy via liberal media bias throughout the primaries. (MSNBC and Rachel Maddow were always cutting away to another full length Trump victory speech and rally, including lots of jibber jabber with the faithful supporters.) Why? Because they thought he was the easiest to beat. The polls actually had Hillary losing against the other GOP candidates. The Dems beat themselves with their own choice of candidate and all the intrigue, false narratives and other questionable practices they employed in both the primaries and the general. That's what really happened. ..."
"... I agree that Hillary wanted Trump as an opponent, thought she could easily win. I've underestimated idiot opponents before, always to my detriment. Why is it that they are always the most formidable? The "insiders" are so used to voters rolling over, taking it on the chin. They gave away their jobs, replaced them with the service industry, killed their sons and daughters in wars abroad, and still the American people cast their ballots in their favor. This time was different. The insiders just did not see the sea change, not like Trump did. ..."
"... Long-time CIA asset named as FBI's spy on Trump campaign By Bill Van Auken https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/05/21/poli-m21.html ..."
"... What the MSM really needed was a bait which they could use to lure more dollars just like a horse race where the track owners needed a fast underdog horse to clean up. I believe the term is to be "hustled". The con men of the media hustlers decided they needed a way to cause all of the candidates to squirm uneasily and to then react to the news that Donald Trump was "in the lead". ..."
"... Those clever media folks. What a gift the Supreme Court handed them. But there was one little (or big) problem. The problem was the result of the scam put Trump in the White House. Something that no conservative republican would ever sign onto. Trump had spent years as a democrat, hobnobbed with the Clinton's and was an avowed agnostic who favored the liberal ideology for the most part. ..."
"... The new guy in the White House with his crazy ideas of making friends with Vladimir Putin horrified a national arms industry funded with hundreds of billions of our tax dollars every year propped up by all the neocons with their paranoid beliefs and plans to make America the hegemon of the World. Our foreign allies who use the USA to fight their perceived enemies and entice our government to sell them weapons and who urge us to orchestrate the overthrow of governments were all alarmed by the "not a real republican" peace-nick occupying the White House. ..."
"... It is probable that the casino and hotel owner in the White House posed an very threatening alternate strategy of forming economic ties with former enemies which scared the hell out of the arms industry which built its economy on scaring all of us and justifying its existence based on foreign enemies. ..."
"... So the MSM and the MIC created a new cold war with their friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post which published endless stories about the new Russian threat we faced. It had nothing to do with the 0.02% Twitter and Facebook "influence" that Russia actually had in the election. It was billed as the crime of the century. The real crime was that they committed the crime of the century that they mightily profited from by putting Trump in the White House in the first place with a plan to grab all the election cash they could grab. ..."
May 31, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

As the role of a well-connected group of British and U.S. intelligence agents begins to emerge, new suspicions are growing about what hand they may have had in weaving the Russia-gate story, as Daniel Lazare explains.

Special to Consortium News

With the news that a Cambridge academic-cum-spy named Stefan Halper infiltrated the Trump campaign, the role of the intelligence agencies in shaping the great Russiagate saga is at last coming into focus.

It's looking more and more massive. The intelligence agencies initiated reports that Donald Trump was colluding with Russia, they nurtured them and helped them grow, and then they spread the word to the press and key government officials. Reportedly, they even tried to use these reports to force Trump to step down prior to his inauguration. Although the corporate press accuses Trump of conspiring with Russia to stop Hillary Clinton, the reverse now seems to be the case: the Obama administration intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block " Siberian candidate " Trump.

The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove , Halper's friend and business partner. Sitting in winged chairs in London's venerable Garrick Club, according to The Washington Post , Dearlove told fellow MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous "golden showers" opposition research dossier, that Trump "reminded him of a predicament he had faced years earlier, when he was chief of station for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US authorities to British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in communication with the Kremlin."

Apparently, one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question step down. When that didn't work with Trump, Dearlove and his colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make him see the light. A major scandal was thus born – or, rather, a very questionable scandal. Besides Dearlove, Steele, and Halper, a bon-vivant known as "The Walrus" for his impressive girth , other participants include: Robert Hannigan, former director Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, UK equivalent of the NSA. Alexander Downer, top Australian diplomat. Andrew Wood, ex-British ambassador to Moscow. Joseph Mifsud, Maltese academic. James Clapper, ex-US Director of National Intelligence. John Brennan, former CIA Director (and now NBC News analyst).

In-Bred

A few things stand out about this august group. One is its in-bred quality. After helping to run an annual confab known as the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, Dearlove and Halper are now partners in a private venture calling itself "The Cambridge Security Initiative." Both are connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt & Co. Halper is also connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt representative Jonathan Clarke and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another MI6 vet. Alexander Downer served a half-dozen years on Hakluyt's international advisory board, while Andrew Wood is linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the private research firm that Steele helped found, and which produced the anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an unpaid advisor .

Everyone, in short, seems to know everyone else. But another thing that stands out about this group is its incompetence. Dearlove and Halper appear to be old-school paranoids for whom every Russian is a Boris Badenov or a Natasha Fatale . In February 2014, Halper notified US intelligence that Mike Flynn, Trump's future national security adviser, had grown overly chummy with an Anglo-Russian scholar named Svetlana Lokhova whom Halper suspected of being a spy – suspicions that Lokhova convincingly argues are absurd.

Halper: Infiltrated Trump campaign

In December 2016, Halper and Dearlove both resigned from the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar because they suspected that a company footing some of the costs was tied up with Russian intelligence – suspicions that Christopher Andrew, former chairman of the Cambridge history department and the seminar's founder, regards as " absurd " as well.

As head of Britain's foreign Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known, Dearlove played a major role in drumming up support for the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq even while confessing at a secret Downing Street meeting that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [regime-change] policy." When the search for weapons of mass destruction turned up dry, Clapper, as then head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, argued that the Iraqi military must have smuggled them into neighboring Syria, a charge with absolutely no basis in fact but which helped pave the way for US regime-change efforts in that country too.

Brennan was meanwhile a high-level CIA official when the agency was fabricating evidence against Saddam Hussein and covering up Saudi Arabia's role in 9/11. Wood not only continues to defend the Iraqi invasion, but dismisses fears of a rising fascist tide in the Ukraine as nothing more than "a crude political insult" hurled by Vladimir Putin for his own political benefit. Such views now seem distressingly misguided in view of the alt-right torchlight parades and spiraling anti-Semitism that are now a regular feature of life in the Ukraine.

The result is a diplo-espionage gang that is very bad at the facts but very good at public manipulation – and which therefore decided to use its skill set out to create a public furor over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

It Started Late 2015

The effort began in late 2015 when GCHQ, along with intelligence agencies in Poland, Estonia, and Germany, began monitoring what they said were " suspicious 'interactions' between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents."

Since Trump was surging ahead in the polls and scaring the pants off the foreign-policy establishment by calling for a rapprochement with Moscow, the agencies figured that Russia was somehow behind it. The pace accelerated in March 2016 when a 30-year-old policy consultant named George Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign as a foreign-policy adviser. Traveling in Italy a week later, he ran into Mifsud, the London-based Maltese academic, who reportedly set about cultivating him after learning of his position with Trump. Mifsud claimed to have "substantial connections with Russian government officials," according to prosecutors. Over breakfast at a London hotel, he told Papadopoulos that he had just returned from Moscow where he had learned that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails."

This was the remark that supposedly triggered an FBI investigation. The New York Times describes Mifsud as "an enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia" and "a regular at meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, that Mr. Putin attends," which tried to suggest that he is a Kremlin agent of some sort.

But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later tweeted photos of Mifsud with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and a high-ranking British intelligence official named Claire Smith at a training session for Italian security agents in Rome. Since it's unlikely that British intelligence would rely on a Russian agent in such circumstances, Mifsud's intelligence ties are more likely with the UK.

After Papadopoulos caused a minor political ruckus by telling a reporter that Prime Minister David Cameron should apologize for criticizing Trump's anti-Muslim pronouncements, a friend in the Israeli embassy put him in touch with a friend in the Australian embassy, who introduced him to Downer, her boss. Over drinks, Downer advised him to be more diplomatic. After Papadopoulos then passed along Misfud's tip about Clinton's emails, Downer informed his government, which, in late July, informed the FBI.

Was Papadopoulos Set Up?

Suspicions are unavoidable but evidence is lacking. Other pieces were meanwhile clicking into place. In late May or early June 2016, Fusion GPS, a private Washington intelligence firm employed by the Democratic National Committee, hired Steele to look into the Russian angle.

On June 20, he turned in the first of eighteen memos that would eventually comprise the Steele dossier , in this instance a three-page document asserting that Putin "has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years" and that Russian intelligence possessed "kompromat" in the form of a video of prostitutes performing a "golden showers" show for his benefit at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. A week or two later, Steele briefed the FBI on his findings. Around the same time, Robert Hannigan flew to Washington to brief CIA Director John Brennan about additional material that had come GCHQ's way, material so sensitive that it could only be handled at "director level."

One player was filling Papadopoulos's head with tales of Russian dirty tricks, another was telling the FBI, while a third was collecting more information and passing it on to the bureau as well.

Page: Took Russia's side.

On July 7, 2016 Carter Page delivered a lecture on U.S.-Russian relations in Moscow in which he complained that " Washington and other western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change." Washington hawks expressed " unease " that someone representing the presumptive Republican nominee would take Russia's side in a growing neo-Cold War.

Stefan Halper then infiltrated the Trump campaign on behalf of the FBI as an informant in early July, weeks before the FBI launched its investigation. Halper had 36 years earlier infiltrated the Carter re-election campaign in 1980 using CIA agents to turn information over to the Reagan campaign. Now Halper began to court both Page and Papadopoulous, independently of each other.

On July 11, Page showed up at a Cambridge symposium at which Halper and Dearlove both spoke. In early September, Halper sent Papadopoulos an email offering $3,000 and a paid trip to London to write a research paper on a disputed gas field in the eastern Mediterranean, his specialty. "George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?" Halper asked when he got there, but Papadopoulos said he knew nothing. Halper also sought out Sam Clovis, Trump's national campaign co-chairman, with whom he chatted about China for an hour or so over coffee in Washington.

The rightwing Federalist website speculates that Halper was working with Steele to flesh out a Sept. 14 memo claiming that "Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and [are] considering disseminating it." Clovis believes that Halper was trying "to create an audit trail back to those [Clinton] emails from someone in the campaign so they could develop a stronger case for probable cause to continue to issue warrants and to further an investigation." Reports that Halper apparently sought a permanent post in the new administration suggest that the effort was meant to continue after inauguration.

Notwithstanding Clovis's nutty rightwing politics , his description of what Halper may have been up to makes sense as does his observation that Halper was trying " to build something that did not exist ." Despite countless hyper-ventilating headlines about mysterious Trump Tower meetings and the like, the sad truth is that Russiagate after all these months is shaping up as even more of a "nothing-burger" than Obama administration veteran Van Jones said it was back in mid-2017. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has indicted Papadopoulos and others on procedural grounds, he has indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for corruption, and he has charged a St. Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency with violating US election laws.

But the corruption charges have nothing to do with Russian collusion and nothing in the indictment against IRA indicates that either the Kremlin or the Trump campaign were involved. Indeed, the activities that got IRA in trouble in the first place are so unimpressive – just $46,000 worth of Facebook ads that it purchased prior to election day, some pro-Trump, some anti, and some with no particular slant at all – that Mueller probably wouldn't even have bothered if he hadn't been under intense pressure to come up with anything at all.

The same goes for the army of bots that Russia supposedly deployed on Twitter. As The Washington Post noted in an oddly, cool-headed Dec. 2 article , 2, 700 suspected Russian-linked accounts generated just 202,000 tweets in a six-year period ending in August 2017, a drop in a bucket compared to the one billion election-related tweets sent out during the fourteen months leading up to Election Day.

The Steele dossier is also underwhelming. It declares on one page that the Kremlin sought to cultivate Trump by throwing "various lucrative real estate development business deals" his way but says on another that Trump's efforts to drum up business were unavailing and that he thus "had to settle for the use of extensive sexual services there from local prostitutes rather than business success."

Why would Trump turn down business offers when he couldn't generate any on his own? The idea that Putin would spot a U.S. reality-TV star somewhere around 2011 and conclude that he was destined for the Oval Office five years later is ludicrous. The fact that the Democratic National Committee funded the dossier via its law firm Perkins Coie renders it less credible still, as does the fact that the world has heard nothing more about the alleged video despite the ongoing deterioration in US-Russian relations. What's the point of making a blackmail tape if you don't use it?

Steele: Paid for political research, not intelligence.

Even Steele is backing off. In a legal paper filed in response to a libel suit last May, he said the document "did not represent (and did not purport to represent) verified facts, but were raw intelligence which had identified a range of allegations that warranted investigation given their potential national security implications." The fact is that the "dossier" was opposition research, not an intelligence report. It was neither vetted by Steele nor anyone in an intelligence agency. Opposition research is intended to mix truths and fiction, to dig up plausible dirt to throw at your opponent, not to produce an intelligence assessment at taxpayer's expense to "protect" the country. And Steele was paid for it by the Democrats, not his government.

Using it Anyway

Nonetheless, the spooks have made the most of such pseudo-evidence. Dearlove and Wood both advised Steele to take his "findings" to the FBI, while, after the election, Wood pulled Sen. John McCain aside at a security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to let him know that the Russians might be blackmailing the president-elect. McCain dispatched long-time aide David J. Kramer to the UK to discuss the dossier with Steele directly.

Although Kramer denies it, The New Yorker found a former national-security official who says he spoke with him at the time and that Kramer's goal was to have McCain confront Trump with the dossier in the hope that he would resign on the spot. When that didn't happen, Clapper and Brennan arranged for FBI Director James Comey to confront Trump instead. Comey later testified that he didn't want Trump to think he was creating "a J. Edgar Hoover-type situation – I didn't want him thinking I was briefing him on this to sort of hang it over him in some way."

But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press."

Since then, the Democrats have touted the dossier at every opportunity, The New Yorker continues to defend it , while Times columnist Michelle Goldberg cites it as well, saying it's a "rather obvious possibility that Trump is being blackmailed." CNN, for its part, suggested not long ago that the dossier may actually be Russian disinformation designed to throw everyone off base, Republicans and Democrats alike.

It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree. But that's what the intelligence agencies are for, i.e. to spread fear and propaganda in order to stampede the public into supporting their imperial agenda. In this case, their efforts are so effective that they've gotten lost in a fog of their own making. If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice.

Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique , and his articles about the Middle East, terrorism, Eastern Europe, and other topics appear regularly on such websites as Jacobin and The American Conservative.


Vivian O'Blivion , June 4, 2018 at 6:36 am

Interesting technical detail.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/04/mueller-russia-troll-case-620653

Mueller is trying to omit the normal burden of legal liability, "wilful intent" in his charges against the St Petersburg, social media operation. In a horrifically complex area such as tax, campaign contributions or lobbying, a foreign entity can be found guilty of breaking a law that they cannot reasonably have been expected to have knowledge of.

But the omission or inclusion of "wilful intent" is applied on a selective basis depending on the advantage to the deep state. From a practical standpoint, omission of "wilful intent" makes it easier for Mueller to get a guilty verdict (in adsentia assuming this is legally valid in America). Once the "guilt" of the St Petersburg staff is established, any communication between an American and them becomes "collusion".

This stinks.

Realist , June 3, 2018 at 4:50 am

"Russiagate" continues to attract mounting blowback at Clinton, Obama and the Dems. Might well be they who end up charged with lawbreaking, though I'd be surprised if anyone in authority is ever really punished. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-02/fbi-spying-trump-started-london-earlier-thought-new-texts-implicate-obama-white

I've always thought that the great animus between Obama and Trump stemmed from Trump's persistent birtherist attacks on Obama followed by Obama's public ridicule of Trump at the White House Correspondants' Dinner. Without the latter, Trump probably would not have been motivated to run for the presidency. Without the former, Obama would probably not have gotten into the gutter to defeat and embarrass Trump at all costs. Clinton and Obama probably never recruit British spooks to sabotage and provide a pretense for spying on the campaigns of Jeb, Ted or Little Marco. Since these were all warmongers like Hillary and Obama, the issues would have been different, Russia would not have been a factor, and Putin would have had no alleged "puppet."

The irony is that Clinton and Obama wanted Trump as her opponent. They cultivated his candidacy via liberal media bias throughout the primaries. (MSNBC and Rachel Maddow were always cutting away to another full length Trump victory speech and rally, including lots of jibber jabber with the faithful supporters.) Why? Because they thought he was the easiest to beat. The polls actually had Hillary losing against the other GOP candidates. The Dems beat themselves with their own choice of candidate and all the intrigue, false narratives and other questionable practices they employed in both the primaries and the general. That's what really happened.

backwardsevolution , June 3, 2018 at 2:50 pm

Realist – good post. I think what you say is true. Trump got too caught up in the birther crap, and Obama retaliated. But I think that Trump had been thinking about the presidency long before Obama came along. He sees the country differently than Obama and Clinton do. Trump would never have built up China to the point where all American technology has been given away for free, with millions of jobs lost and a huge trade deficit, and he would have probably left Russia alone, not ransacked it.

I saw Obama as a somewhat reluctant globalist and Hillary as an eager globalist. They are both insiders. Trump is not. He's interested in what is best for the U.S., whereas the Clinton's and the Bush's were interested in what their corporate masters wanted. The multinationals have been selling the U.S. out, Trump is trying to put a stop to this, and it is going to be a fight to the death. Trump is playing hardball with China (who ARE U.S. multinationals), and it is working. Beginning July 1, 2018, China has agreed to reduce its tariffs:

"Import tariffs for apparel, footwear and headgear, kitchen supplies and fitness products will be more than halved to an average of 7.1 percent from 15.9 percent, with those on washing machines and refrigerators slashed to just 8 percent, from 20.5 percent.

Tariffs will also be cut on processed foods such as aquaculture and fishing products and mineral water, from 15.2 percent to 6.9 percent.

Cosmetics, such as skin and hair products, and some medical and health products, will also benefit from a tariff cut to 2.9 percent from 8.4 percent.

In particular, tariffs on drugs ranging from penicillin, cephalosporin to insulin will be slashed to zero from 6 percent before.

In the meantime, temporary tariff rates on 210 imported products from most favored nations will be scrapped as they are no longer favorable compared with new rates."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-tariffs/china-to-cut-import-tariffs-for-some-consumer-goods-from-most-favored-nations-idUSKCN1IW1PY

Trade with China has been all one way. At least Trump is leveling the playing field. He at least is trying to bring back jobs, something the "insiders" could care less about.

I agree that Hillary wanted Trump as an opponent, thought she could easily win. I've underestimated idiot opponents before, always to my detriment. Why is it that they are always the most formidable? The "insiders" are so used to voters rolling over, taking it on the chin. They gave away their jobs, replaced them with the service industry, killed their sons and daughters in wars abroad, and still the American people cast their ballots in their favor. This time was different. The insiders just did not see the sea change, not like Trump did.

Abe , June 2, 2018 at 2:20 am

"Pentagon documents indicate that the Department of Defense's shadowy intelligence arm, the Office of Net Assessment, paid Halper $282,000 in 2016 and $129,000 in 2017. According to reports, Halper sought to secure Papadopoulos's collaboration by offering him $3,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to London, ostensibly to produce a research paper on energy issues in the eastern Mediterranean.

"The choice of Halper for this spying operation has ominous implications. His deep ties to the US intelligence apparatus date back decades. His father-in-law was Ray Cline, who headed the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence at the height of the Cold War. Halper served as an aide to Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Alexander Haig in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

"In 1980, as the director of policy coordination for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign, Halper oversaw an operation in which CIA officials gave the campaign confidential information on the Carter administration and its foreign policy. This intelligence was in turn utilized to further back-channel negotiations between Reagan's campaign manager and subsequent CIA director William Casey and representatives of Iran to delay the release of the American embassy hostages until after the election, in order to prevent Carter from scoring a foreign policy victory on the eve of the November vote.

"Halper subsequently held posts as deputy assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs and senior adviser to the Pentagon and Justice Department. More recently, Halper has collaborated with Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, the British intelligence service, in directing the Cambridge Security Initiative (CSi), a security think tank that lists the US and UK governments as its principal clients.

"Before the 2016 election, Halper had expressed his view – shared by predominant layers within the intelligence agencies – that Clinton's election would prove 'less disruptive' than Trump's.

"The revelations of the role played by Halper point to an intervention in the 2016 elections by the US intelligence agencies that far eclipsed anything one could even imagine the Kremlin attempting."

Long-time CIA asset named as FBI's spy on Trump campaign By Bill Van Auken https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/05/21/poli-m21.html

CitizenOne , June 1, 2018 at 11:19 pm

Sorry for not commenting on other posts as of yet. But I think I have a different perspective. Russia Gate is not about Hillary Clinton or Putin but it is about Donald Trump. Specifically an effort to get rid of him by the intelligence agencies and the MSM. The fact is the MSM created Trump and were chiefly responsible for his election. Trump is their brainchild starlet used to fleece all the republican campaigns like a huckster fleeces an audience. It all ties to key Supreme Court rulings eliminating campaign finance regulations which ushered in the age of dark money.

When billionaires can donate unlimited amounts of money anonymously to the candidate of their choosing what ends up is a field of fourteen wannabes in a primary race each backed by their own investor(s). The only way these candidates can win is to convince us to vote. The only way they can do that is to spend on advertising.

What the MSM dreamed of in a purely capitalistic way was a way to drain the wallets of every single one of the republican Super PACs. The mission was fraught with potential checkmates. Foe example, there could be an early leader who snatched up the needed delegates for the nomination early on which would have stopped the flow of advertising cash flowing to the MSM. Such possibilities worried the MSM and caused great angst since this might just be the biggest haul they ever took in during a primary season. How would they prevent a premature end of the money river. Like financial vampire bats, ticks and leeches they needed a way to keep the money flowing from the veins of the republican Super PACs until they were sucked dry.

What the MSM really needed was a bait which they could use to lure more dollars just like a horse race where the track owners needed a fast underdog horse to clean up. I believe the term is to be "hustled". The con men of the media hustlers decided they needed a way to cause all of the candidates to squirm uneasily and to then react to the news that Donald Trump was "in the lead".

It was a pure stroke of genius and it worked so well that Carl Rove is looking for a job and Donald Trump is sitting in the White House.

Those clever media folks. What a gift the Supreme Court handed them. But there was one little (or big) problem. The problem was the result of the scam put Trump in the White House. Something that no conservative republican would ever sign onto. Trump had spent years as a democrat, hobnobbed with the Clinton's and was an avowed agnostic who favored the liberal ideology for the most part.

What to do? Trump was now the Commander in Chief and was spouting nonsense that the establishment recoiled at such as Trumps plans to form economic ties with Russia rather than continue to wage a cold war spanning 65 years which the MIC used year after year to spook us all and guarantee their billions annual increase in funding. Trump directly attacked defense projects and called for de-funding major initiatives like F35 etc.

The new guy in the White House with his crazy ideas of making friends with Vladimir Putin horrified a national arms industry funded with hundreds of billions of our tax dollars every year propped up by all the neocons with their paranoid beliefs and plans to make America the hegemon of the World. Our foreign allies who use the USA to fight their perceived enemies and entice our government to sell them weapons and who urge us to orchestrate the overthrow of governments were all alarmed by the "not a real republican" peace-nick occupying the White House.

What to do? There was clearly a need to eliminate this bad guy since his avowed policies were in direct opposition to the game plan that had successfully compromised the former administration. They felt powerless to dissuade the Administration to continue the course and form strategies to eliminate Iran, Syria, North Korea, Libya, Ukraine and other vulnerable targets swaying toward China and Russia. They faced a new threat with the Trump Administration which seemed hell bent to discontinue the wars in these regions robbing them of many dollars.

It is probable that the casino and hotel owner in the White House posed an very threatening alternate strategy of forming economic ties with former enemies which scared the hell out of the arms industry which built its economy on scaring all of us and justifying its existence based on foreign enemies.

So the MSM and the MIC created a new cold war with their friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post which published endless stories about the new Russian threat we faced. It had nothing to do with the 0.02% Twitter and Facebook "influence" that Russia actually had in the election. It was billed as the crime of the century. The real crime was that they committed the crime of the century that they mightily profited from by putting Trump in the White House in the first place with a plan to grab all the election cash they could grab.

In the interim, they also forgot on purpose to tell anyone about the election campaign finance fraud that they were the chief beneficiaries of. They also of course forgot to tell anyone what the fight was about for the Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. Twenty seven million dollars in dark money was donated by dark money donors enabled by the Supreme Court's decisions to eliminate campaign finance regulations which enabled these donors to buy out Congress and elect and confirm a Supreme Court Justice who would uphold the laws which eliminate all the election rules and campaign finance regulations dating back to the Tillman Act of 1907 which was an attempt to eliminate corporate contributions in political campaigns with associated meager fines as penalties. The law was weak then and has now been eliminated.

In an era of dark money in politics protected by revisionist judges laying at the top of our federal judicial branch posing as strict constructionists while being funded by the corporatocracy that viciously fights over control of the highest court by a panicked republican party that seeks to tie up their domination in our Congress by any means including the abdication of the Constitutional authority granted to the citizens of the nation we now face a new internal enemy.

That enemy is not some foreign nation but our own government which conspires to represent the wealthy and the powerful and which exalts them and which enacts laws to defend their control of our nation. Here is a quote:

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

Frederic Bastiat – (1801-1850) in Economic Sophisms

Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:32 am

Different journalist covering much the same ground:

http://www.unz.com/mwhitney/why-is-the-new-york-times-misleading-the-american-people-about-the-paid-informant-who-was-spying-on-the-trump-campaign/

"Russiagate" is strictly a contrivance of the Deep State, American & British Spookery, and the corporate media propagandists. It clearly needs to be genuinely investigated (unlike the mockery being orchestrated by Herr Mueller from the Ministry of Truth), re-christened "Intellgate" (after the real perpetrators of crime), pursued until all the guilty traitors (including Mueller) who really tried to steal our democratic election are tried, convicted and incarcerated (including probably hundreds complicit from the media) and given its own lengthy chapter in all the history books about "The Election They Tried to Steal and Blame on Russia: How America Nearly Lost its Constitution." If not done, America will lose its constitution, or rather the incipient process will become totally irreversible.

Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 6:25 am

Your timing of events is confused.
The deep state didn't try and steal the election because they were overly complacent that their woman would win. Remember, they didn't try to use the dodgy, Steele dossier before the election.
What the deep state has done is reactively try to overcome the election outcome by launching an investigation into Trump. The egregious element of the investigation is giving it the title "investigation into collusion" when they in all probability knew that collusion was unlikely to have taken place. To achieve their aim (removing Trump) they included the line "and matters arising" in the brief to give them an open ended remit which allowed them to investigate Trump's business dealings of a Russian / Ukrainian nature (which may venture uncomfortably close to Semion Mogilevich).
If as you state (and I concur) there was no Russian collusion, then barring fabrication of evidence by Mueller (and there is little evidence of that to date) you have nothing to worry about on the collusion front. Remember, to date, Mueller has stuck (almost exclusively) to meat and potatoes charges like tax evasion and money laundering. If however the investigation leads to credible evidence that Trump broke substantive laws in the past for financial gain, then it is not reasonable to cry foul.

Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:02 am

The Deep State assisted the DNC in knocking out Sanders. THAT was ground zero. Everything since then has been to cover this up and to discredit Trump (using him as the distraction). Consider that the Deep State never bothered to investigate the DNC servers/data; reason being is that they'd (Deep State) be implicated.

Skip Scott , June 1, 2018 at 7:29 am

Very true Seer. That is the real genesis of RussiaGate. It was a diversion tactic to keep people from looking at the DNC's behavior during the primaries. They are the reason Trump is president, not the evil Ruskies.

Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 8:13 am

We all seem agreed that the Russia collusion is an exercise in distraction. I can't say I know enough to comment with authority on whether the DNC would require assistance from the deep state to trash Bernie. From an outsider perspective it looked more like an application of massively disproportionate spending and standard, back room dirty tricks.
There is a saying; don't attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence. In this case, try replacing incompetence with MONEY.

dikcheney , June 2, 2018 at 5:09 pm

Totally agree with you Skip and the Mueller performance is there to keep up the intimidation and distraction by regularly finding turds to throw at Trump. Mueller doesnt need to find anything, he just needs to create vague intimations of 'guilty Trump' and suspicious associates so that no one will look at the DNC or the Clinton corruption or the smashing of the Sanders campaign.

Their actual agenda is to smother analysis and clear thinking. Thankfully there is the forensicator piecing the jigsaw as well as consortium news.

robjira , June 1, 2018 at 11:55 am

Spot on, Seer.

michael , June 1, 2018 at 4:49 pm

Those servers probably had a lot more pay-to-play secrets from the Clinton Foundation and ring-kissing from foreign big donors than what was released by Wikileaks, which mostly was just screwing over Bernie, which the judge ruled was Hillary's prerogative. Some email chains were probably construed as National Security and were discreetly not leaked.
The 30,000 emails Hillary had bit bleached from her private servers are likely in the hands of Russians and every other major country, all biding their time for leverage. This was the carrot the British (who undoubtedly have copies as well) dangled over idiot Popodopolous.

Uncle Bob , June 1, 2018 at 10:33 pm

Seth Rich

anon , June 1, 2018 at 7:42 am

Realist is likely referring to events before the election which involved people with secret agency connections, such as the opposition research (Steele dossier and Skripal affair).

Realist , June 1, 2018 at 9:32 am

Realist responded but is being "moderated" as per usual.

Realist , June 1, 2018 at 9:31 am

Hillary herself was a prime force in cooking up the smear against Trump for being "Putin's puppet." This even before the Democratic convention. Then she used it big time during the debates. It wasn't something merely reactive after she lost. Certainly she and her collaborators inside the deep state and the intelligence agencies never imagined that she would lose and have to distract from what she and her people did by projecting the blame onto Trump. That part was reactive. The rest of the conspiracy was totally proactive on her part and that of the DNC, even during the primaries.

Don't forget, the intel agencies led by Clapper, Brennan and Comey were all working for Obama at the time and were totally acquiescent in spying on the Trump campaign and "unmasking" the identities and actions of his would-be administration, including individuals like General Flynn. The cooked up Steele dossier was paid for by money from the Clinton campaign and used as a pretext for the intel agencies to spy on the Trump campaign. There is no issue on timing. The establishment was fully behind Clinton by hook or crook from the moment Trump had the delegates to win the GOP nomination. (OBTW, I am not a Trump supporter or even a Republican, so I KNOW that I "have nothing to worry about on the collusion front." I'm a registered Dem, though not a Hillary supporter.)

Moreover, if you think that Mueller (and the other intel chiefs) have been on the impartial up-and-up, why did the FBI never seize and examine the DNC servers? Why simply accept the interpretation of events given by the private cybersecurity firm (Crowdstrike) that the Clinton campaign hired to very likely mastermind a cover-up? That is exceptional (nay, unheard of!) "professional courtesy." Why has Mueller to this day not deposed Julian Assange or former British Ambassador Craig Murray, both of whom admit to knowing precisely who provided the leaked (not hacked) Podesta and DNC emails to Wikileaks? Why has Mueller not pursued the potential role of the late Seth Rich in the leaking of said emails? Why has Mueller not pursued the robust theory, based on actual evidence, proposed by VIPS, and supported by computer experts like Bill Binney and John McAfee, that the emails were not, as the Dems and the intel agencies would have you believe on NO EVIDENCE, hacked (by the "Russians" or anyone else) but were downloaded to a flash drive directly from the DNC servers? Why has Mueller not deposed Binney or Ray McGovern who claim to have evidence to bear on this and have discussed it freely in the media (to the miniscule extent that the corporate media will give them an audience)? Is Mueller after the truth, or is this a kangaroo court he is running? Is the media really independent and impartial or are they part of a cover-up, perpetrating numerous sins of both commission and omission in their highly flawed reportage?

I don't see clarity in what has been thus far been propounded by Mueller or any of Trump's other accusers, but I don't think I am the one who is confused here, Vivian. If you want to meet a thoroughly confused individual on what transpired leading up to this moment in American political history, just go read Hillary's book. Absolutely everyone under the sun shares in the blame but her for the fact that she does not presently reside in the White House.

Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 1:48 pm

You have presented your case with a great deal more detail and clarity than the original post that prompted my reply. You are also a great deal more knowledgeable than I on the details. I think we are 98% in agreement and I wouldn't like to say who's correct on the remaining 2%.
For clarity, I didn't follow the debates and wouldn't do so now if they were repeated. Much heat very little light.
The "pretext" that the intel agencies claim launched their actions against Trump was not the Steele dossier, at least that is what the intel agencies say. Either way your assertion that it was the dossier that set things off is just that, an assertion. I think this is a minor point.
On the DNC servers and the FBI we are 100% singing from the same hymn book and it all sticks. Mueller's apparent disinterest in the question of hack or USB drive does rather taint his investigation and thanks for pointing this out, I hadn't thought of that angle. I still think Mueller will stick to tax and money laundering and stay well clear of "collusion", so yes he may be running a kangaroo court investigation but the charges will be real world.
The MSM as a whole are a sick joke which is why we collectively find ourselves at CN, Craig Murray's blog, etc. I wouldn't like to attribute "collaboration" to any individual in the media. It was the reference to hundreds of journalists being sent to jail in your original post that set me off in the first place. When considering the "culpability" of any individual journalist you can have any position on a spectrum from; fully cognisant collaborator with a deep state conspiracy, to; a bit dim and running with the "sexy" story 'cause it's the biggest thing ever, the bosses can't get enough of it and the overtime is great. If American journalists are anything like their UK counterparts, 99% will fall into the latter category.
Don't have any issue with your final point. Hillary on stage and on camera was phoney as rocking horse s**te and everyone outside her extremely highly remunerated team could see it.
Sorry for any inconvenience, but your second post makes your points a hell of a lot clearer than the original.

Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:26 pm

My purpose for the first post in this thread was to direct readers to the article in Unz by Mike Whitney, not to compress a full-blown amateur expose' by myself into a three-sentence paragraph. You would have found much more in the way of facts, analysis and opinion in his article to which my terse comments did not even serve as an abstract.

Quoting his last paragraph may give you the flavor of this piece, which is definitely not a one-off by him or other actual journalists who have delved into the issues:

"Let's see if I got this right: Brennan gets his buddies in the UK to feed fake information on Russia to members of the Trump campaign, after which the FBI uses the suspicious communications about Russia as a pretext to unmask, wiretap, issue FISA warrants, and infiltrate the campaign, after which the incriminating evidence that was collected in the process of entrapping Trump campaign assistants is compiled in a legal case that is used to remove Trump from office. Is that how it's supposed to work?

It certainly looks like it. But don't expect to read about it in the Times."

backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 4:49 pm

Vivian – 90% of all major media is owned by six corporations. There most definitely was and IS collusion between some of them to bring down the outsider, Trump.

As far as individual journalists go, yeah, they're trying to pay their mortgage, I get it, and they're going to spin what their boss bloody well tells them to spin. But there is evidence coming out that "some" journalists did accept money from either Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie (sp) or Christopher Steele to leak information, which they did.

Bill Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that enabled these six media conglomerates to dominate the news. Of course they're political. They need to be split up, like yesterday, into a thousand pieces (ditto for the banks). They have purposely and with intent been feeding lies to the American people. Yes, some SHOULD go to jail.

As Peter Strzok of the FBI said re Trump colluding with Russia, "There was never any there, there." The collusion has come from the intelligence agencies, in cahoots with Hillary Clinton, perhaps even as high as Obama, to prevent Trump being elected. When that failed, they set out to get him impeached on whatever they could find. Of course Mueller is going to stick with tax and money laundering because he already KNOWS there was never any collusion with Russia.

This is the Swamp versus the People.

backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 1:52 pm

Realist – another excellent post. "Is Mueller after the truth, or is this a kangaroo court he is running?" As you rightly point out, Mueller IS being very selective in what he examines and doesn't examine. He's not after the whole truth, just a particular kind of truth, one that gets him a very specific result – to take down or severely cripple the President.

Evidence continues to trickle out. Former and active members of the FBI are now even begging to testify as they are disgusted with what is being purposely omitted from this so-called "impartial" investigation. This whole affair is "kangaroo" all the way.

I'm not so much a fan of Trump as I am a fan of the truth. I don't like to see him – anyone – being railroaded. That bothers me more than anything. But he's right about what he calls "the Swamp". If these people are not uncovered and brought to justice, then the country is truly lost.

Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:38 pm

Precisely. Destroy the man on false pretenses and you destroy our entire system, whether you like him and his questionable policies or not.

Some people would say it's already gone, but we do what we can to get it back or hold onto to what's left of it. Besides, all the transparent lies and skullduggery in the service of politics rather than principles are just making our entire system look as corrupt as hell.

michael , June 1, 2018 at 5:00 pm

When Mueller arrested slimy Manafort for crimes committed in the Ukraine and gave a pass to the Podesta Brothers who worked closely with Manafort, it was clear that Russiagate was a partisan operation.

backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 6:17 pm

Michael – good point!

KiwiAntz , June 1, 2018 at 1:00 am

Its becoming abundantly clear now, that the whole Russiagate charade was had nothibg to do with Russia & is about a elaborate smokescreen & shellgame coverup designed to divert attention away from, firstly the Democratic Party's woeful defeat & its lousy Candidate choice in the corrupt Hillary Clinton? & also the DNC's sabotaging of Bernie Saunders campaign run! But the most henious & treacherous parts was Obama's, weaponising the intelligence agencies to spy (Halper) on the imaginary Mancharian Candidate Trump & to set him up as a Russia stooge? Obama & Hillary Clinton are complicent in this disgraceful & illegal activity to get dirt on Trump withe goal of ensuring Clinton's election win? This is bigger than Watergate & more scandalous? But despite the cheating & stacking of the card deck, she still lost out to the Donald? And this isn't just illegal its treasonous & willful actions deserving of a lengthy jail incarceration? HRC & her crooked Clinton foundation's funding of the fraudulent & discredited "Steele Dosier" was also used to implement Trump & Russia in a made up, pile of fictitious gargage that was pure offal? Obama & HRC along with their FBI & CIA spys need to be rounded up, convicted & thrown in jail? Perhaps if Trump could just shut his damn mouuth for once & get off twitter long enough to be able too get some Justice Dept officials looking into this, without being distracted by this Russiagate shellgame fakery, then perhaps the real criminal's like Halpert, Obama,HRC & these corrupt spooks & spies can be rounded up & held to account for this treasonous behaviour?

Sean Ahern , May 31, 2018 at 7:25 pm

Attention should be paid also to the role of so called progressive media outlets such as Mother Jones which served as an outlets for the disinformation campaign described in Lazare's article.
Here from David Corn's Mother Jones 2016 article:

"And a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump -- and that the FBI requested more information from him."
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gave-fbi-info-alleging-russian-operation-cultivate-donald-trump/

Not only was Corn and Mother Jones selected by the spooks as an outlet, but these so called progressives lauded their 'expose' as a great investigative coup on their part and it paved the way for Corn's elevation on MSNBC for a while as a 'pundit.'

Paul G. , May 31, 2018 at 8:46 pm

In that vein did the spooks influence Rachel Maddow or is her $30,000. a day salary adequate to totally compromise her microscopic journalistic integrity.

dikcheney , June 3, 2018 at 6:57 am

Passing around references to Mother Jones is like passing round used toilet paper for another try. MJ is BS it is entirely controlled fake press.

Abby , May 31, 2018 at 6:23 pm

Stefan Halper was being paid by the Clinton's foundation during the time he was spying on the Trump campaign. This is further evidence that Hillary Clinton's hands are all over getting Russia Gate started. Then there's the role that Obama's justice department played in setting up the spying on people who were working with the Trump campaign. This is worse than Watergate, IMO.

Rumors are that a few ex FBI agents are going to testify to congress in Comey's role in covering up Hillary's crimes when she used her private email server to send classified information to people who did not have clearance to read it. Sydney Bluementhol was working for Hillary's foundation and sending her classified information that he stole from the NSA.

Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills were concerned about Obama knowing that Hillary wasn't using her government email account after he told the press that he only found out about it at the same time they did. He had been sending and receiving emails from her Clintonone email address during her whole tenure as SOS.

Obama was also aware of her using her foundation for pay to play which she was told by both congress and Obama to keep far away from her duties. Why did she use her private email server? So that Chelsea could know where Hillary was doing business so she could send Bill there to give his speeches to the same organizations, foreign governments and people who had just donated to their foundation.

Has any previous Secretary of State in history used their position to enrich their spouses or their foundations? I think not.

The secrets of how the FBI covered for Hillary are coming out. Whether she is charged for her crimes is a different matter.

F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 7:48 pm

If Hillary paid a political operative using Clinton Foundation funds – those are tax exempt charitable contributions – she would be guilty of tax fraud, charity fraud and campaign finance violations. Hillary may be evil, but she's not stupid. The U.S.Government paid Halper, which might be "waste, fraud and abuse", but it doesn't implicate Hillary at all. Not that she's innocent, mind you

Rob , June 1, 2018 at 2:14 am

I need some references to take any of your multitude of claims seriously. With all due respect, this sound like something taken from info wars and stylized in smartened up a little bit.

chris m , May 31, 2018 at 2:52 pm

the idea that Stefan Halper was some sort a of mastermind spy behind the so called "Russiagate" fiasco
seems very implausible considering what he seems to have spent doing for the past 40 years
going back to the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1980 and his efforts then.

i think he must have had a fairly peripheral role as to whatever or not was going on behind the scenes from 2016 election campaign, and the campaign to first stop Trump getting elected, and secondly, when that failed, to bring down his Presidency.

of course, the moment his name was revealed in recent days, would have shocked or surprised those of in the general
public, but not certainly amongst those in Government aka FBI/CIA/Military-industrial circles.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 4:36 pm

chris m – Halper is probably one of those people who hide behind their professor (or other legitimate) jobs, but are there at the ready to serve the Deep State. "I understand. You want me to set up some dupes in order to make it look like there was or could be actual Russian meddling. Gotcha." All you've got to do is make it "look like" something nefarious was going on. This facilitates a "reason" to have a phony investigation, and of course they make it as open-ended an investigation as possible, hoping to get the target on something, anything.

Well, they've no doubt looked long and hard for almost two years now, but zip. However, in their zeal to get rid of their opponent, who they did not think would win the election, they left themselves open, left a trail of crimes. Whoops!

This is the Swamp that Trump talked about during the election. He's probably not squeaky clean either, but he pales in comparison to what these guys have done. They have tried to take down a duly-elected President.

F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 5:09 pm

His role may have been peripheral, but I seem to recall that the Office of Net Assessments paid him roughly a million bucks to play it. That office, run from the Pentagon, is about as deep into the world of "black ops" spookdom as you can get. Hardly "peripheral", I'd say.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:13 pm

F. G. Sanford – yes, a million bucks implies something more than just a peripheral involvement, more like something essential to the plot, like the actual setting up of the plot. Risk of exposure costs money.

ranney , May 31, 2018 at 6:17 pm

Chris, I think the Halper inclusion in this complex tale is simply an example of how these things work in the ultra paranoid style of spy agencies. As Lazare explains, every one knew every one else – at least at the start of this, and it just kind of built from there, and Halper may have been the spark – but the spark landed on a highly combustible pile of paranoia that caught on fire right away. This is how our and the UK agencies function. There is an interesting companion piece to this story today at Common Dreams by Robert Kohler titled The American Way of War. It describes basically the same sort of mind set and action as this story. I'd link it for you if I knew how, but I'm not very adept at the computer. (Maybe another reader knows how?)

We (that is the American people who are paying the salaries of these brain blocked, stiff necked idiots) need to start getting vocal and visible about the destructive path our politicians, banks and generals have rigidly put us on. Does any average working stiff still believe that all this hate, death and destruction is to "protect" us?

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:07 pm

ranney – when you are on the page that you want to link to, take your cursor (the little arrow on your screen) to the top of the page to the address bar (for instance, the address for this article is:
"https://consortiumnews.com/2018/05/31/spooks-spooking ")

Once your cursor is over the address bar, right click on your mouse. A little menu will come up. Then position your cursor down to the word "copy" and then left click on your mouse. This will copy the link.

Then proceed back to the blog (like Consortium) where you want to provide the link in your post. You might say, "Here is the link for the article I just described above." Then at this point you would right click on your mouse again, position your cursor over the word "paste", and then left click on your mouse. Voila, your link magically appears.

If you don't have a mouse and are using a laptop pad, then someone else will have to help you. That's above my pay grade. Good luck, ranney.

irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:13 pm

If you are using a Mac, either laptop w/touch screen or with a mouse, the copy/paste function
works similarly. Use either the mouse (no need to 'right click, left click') or the touch screen
to highlight the address bar once you have the cursor flashing away on the left side of it.
You may need to scroll right to highlight the whole address. Then go up to Edit (there's also
a keyboard command you can use, but I don't) in your tool bar at the top of your screen.
Click on 'copy'. Now your address is in memory. Then do the same as described above to
get back to where you want to paste it. Put your cursor where you want it to be 'pasted'.
Go back to 'edit' and click 'paste'. Voila !

This is a very handy function and can be used to copy text, web addresses, whatever you want.
Explore it a little bit. (Students definitely overuse the 'paste and match style' option, which allows
a person to 'paste' text into for example an essay and 'match the style' so it looks seamless, although
unless carefully edited it usually doesn't read seamlessly !)

Remember that whatever is in 'copy' will remain there until you 'copy' something else. (Or your
computer crashes . . . )

ranney , June 1, 2018 at 3:39 pm

Irina and Backwards Evolution – Thanks guys for the computer advice! I'll try it, but I think I need someone at my shoulder the first time I try it.

backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 8:53 pm

ranney – you're welcome! Snag one of your kids or a friend, and then do it together. Sometimes I see people posting things like: "Testing. I'm trying to provide a link, bear with me." Throw caution to the wind, ranney. I don't worry about embarrassing myself anymore. I do it every day and the world still goes on.

I heard a good bit of advice once, something I remind my kids: when you're young, you think everybody is watching you and so you're afraid to step out of line. When you're middle-aged, you think everybody is watching you, but you don't care. When you're older, you realize nobody is really watching you because they're more concerned about themselves.

Good luck, ranney.

irina , June 2, 2018 at 10:00 pm

I find it helpful to write down the steps (on an old fashioned piece of paper, with old fashioned ink)
when learning to use a new computer tool, because while I think I'll remember, it doesn't usually
'stick' until after using it for quite a while. And yes, definitely recruit a member of the younger set
or someone familiar with computers. My daughter showed me many years ago how to 'cut & paste'
and to her credit she was very gracious about it. Remember that you need a place to 'paste' what-
ever you copied -- either a comment board like this, or a document you are working on, or (this is
handy) an email where you want to send someone a link to something. Lots of other possibilities too!

mike , June 1, 2018 at 7:43 pm

No one is presenting Halper as a mastermind spy. He was a tool of the deep state nothing more.

Gary Weglarz , May 31, 2018 at 1:57 pm

It seems a mistake to frame the "Russiagate" nonsense as a "Democrat vs Republican" affair, except at the most surface level of understanding in terms of our political realities. If one considers that the Bush family has been effectively the Republican Party's face of the CIA/deep state nexus for decades, as the Clinton/Obama's have been the Democratic Party's face for decades now, what comes into focus is Trump as a sort of unknown, unexpected wild card not appropriately tethered to the control structure. Simply noting that the U.S. and Russia need not be enemies is alone enough to require an operation to get Trump into line.
This hardly means this is some sort of "partisan" issue as the involvement of McCain and others demonstrates.

One of the true "you can't make this stuff up" ironies of the Bush/Clinton CIA/deep state nexus history is worth remembering if one still maintains any illusions about how the CIA vets potential presidents since they killed JFK. During Iran/Contra we had Bush, the former CIA director now vice president, running a drugs for arms operation out the White House through Ollie North, WHILE then unknown Arkansas governor Bill Clinton was busy squashing Arkansas State Police investigations into said narcotics trafficking. Clinton obviously proved his bona fides to the CIA/deep state with such service and was appropriately rewarded as an asset who could function as a reliable president. Here in one operation we had two future presidents in Bush and Clinton both engaged in THE SAME CIA drug running operation. You truly can't make this stuff up.

Russiagate seems to be in the end all about keeping deep state policy moving in the "right direction" and "hating Russia" is the only entree on the menu at this time for the whole cadre of CIA/deep state, MIC, neocons, Zionists, and all their minions in the MSM. The Obama White House would have gladly supported Vlad the Impaler as the Republican candidate that beat Hillary if Vlad were to have the appropriate foaming at the mouth "hate-Russia" vibe going on.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:18 pm

Gary – great post.

irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:18 pm

Roger that. I would really like to see an inquiry re-opened into the
teenage boys who died 'on the train tracks' in Arkansas during the
early years of the Clinton-Bush trafficking. Many questions are still
unanswered. Speculation is that they saw something they weren't
supposed to see.

Mark Thomason , May 31, 2018 at 1:12 pm

This all grows out of the failure to clean up the mess revealed by the Iraq fiasco. Instead, those who did that remained, got away with it, and are doing more of the same.

Babyl-on , May 31, 2018 at 12:46 pm

So, here is my question – Who, ultimately does the permanent/bureaucratic/deep/Imperial* state finally answer to? Who's interests are they serving? How do they know what those interests are?

It could be, and increasingly it looks as if, the answer is – no one in particular – but the Saud family, the Zionist cabal of billionaires, the German industrialist dynasties, the Japanese oligarchy and never forget the arms dealers, all of them once part of the Empire now fighting for themselves so we end up with the high level apparatchiks not knowing what to do or who to follow so they lie outright to Congress and go on TV and babble more lies for money.

It's a great contradiction that the greatest armed force ever assembled with cutting edge robotics and AI yet at the same time so weak and pathetic it can not exercise hegemony over the Middle East as it seems to desire more than anything. Being defeated by forces with less than 20% of the US spend.

Abby , May 31, 2018 at 6:36 pm

You're right. They answer to no one because they are not just working in this country, but they think that the whole world is theirs.

To these people there are no borders. They meet at places like the G20, Davos and wherever the Bilderberg group decides to meet every year. No leader of any country gets to be one unless they are acceptable to the Deep State. The council of foreign relations is one of the groups that run the world. How we take them down is a good question.

Abe , May 31, 2018 at 12:43 pm

Following the pattern of mainstream media, Daniel Lazare assiduously avoids mentioning Israel and pro-Israel Lobby interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the Israel-gate reality underlying all the Russia-gate fictions.

For example, George Papadopoulos is directly connected to the pro-Israel Lobby, right wing Israeli political interests, and Israeli government efforts to control regional energy resources.

Lazare mentions that Papadapoulos had "a friend in the Israeli embassy".

But Lazare conspicuously neglects to mention numerous Israeli and pro-Israel Lobby players interested in "filling Papadopoulos's head" with "tales of Russian dirty tricks".

Papadopoulos' LinkedIn page lists his association with the right wing Hudson Institute. The Washington, D.C.-based think tank part of pro-Israel Lobby web of militaristic security policy institutes that promote Israel-centric U.S. foreign policy.

https://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/hudson_institute/

The Hudson Institute confirmed that Papadopoulos was an intern who left the pro-Israel neoconservative think tank in 2014.

In 2014, Papadopoulos authored op-ed pieces in Israeli publications.

In an op-ed published in Arutz Sheva, media organ of the right wing Religionist Zionist movement embraced by the Israeli "settler" movement, Papadopoulos argued that the U.S. should focus on its "stalwart allies" Israel, Greece, and Cyprus to "contain the newly emergent Russian fleet".

In another op-ed published in Ha'aretz, Papadopoulos contended that Israel should exploit its natural gas resources in partnership with Cyprus and Greece rather than Turkey.

In November 2015, Papadapalous participated in a conference in Tel Aviv, discussing the export of natural gas from Israel with a panel of current and past Israeli government officials including Ron Adam, a representative of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Eran Lerman, a former Israeli Deputy National Security Adviser.

Among Israel's numerous violations of United Nations Resolution 242 was its annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights in 1981. Recent Israeli threatened military threats against Lebanon and Syria have a lot to do with control of natural gas resources, both offshore from Gaza and on land in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights region.

Israeli plans to develop energy resources and expand territorial holdings in the Syrian Golan are threatened by the Russian military presence in Syria. Russian diplomatic efforts, and the Russian military intervention that began in September 2015 after an official request by the Syrian government, have interfered with the Israeli-Saudi-U.S. Axis "dirty war" in Syria.

Israeli activities and Israel-gate realities are predictably ignored by the mainstream media, which continues to salivate at every moldy scrap of Russia-gate fiction.

Lazare need no be so circumspect, unless he has somehow been spooked.

Herman , May 31, 2018 at 4:13 pm

"Among Israel's numerous violations of United Nations Resolution 242 was its annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights in 1981. Recent Israeli threatened military threats against Lebanon and Syria have a lot to do with control of natural gas resources, both offshore from Gaza and on land in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights region."

And water. Rating energy and water, what's at the top for Israel. Israel would probably say both but Israel shielded by the US will take what it wants. That is already true with the Palestinians.. The last figure I heard is that the Palestinians are allocated one fifth per capita what is allocated to Israel's

mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:59 am

A large swamp is actually an ancient and highly organized ecosystem. Only humans could create a lawless madness like Washington DC.

irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:24 pm

Yes that is a good description of a swamp. BUT, if it loses what sustains it --
water, in the case of a 'real' swamp and money in the case of this swamp --
it changes character very quickly and becomes first a bog, then a meadow.

I am definitely ready for more meadowland ! But the only way to create it
is to voluntarily redirect federal taxes into escrow accounts which stipulate
that the funds are to be used for (fill in the blank) Public Services at the
Local and Regional levels. Much more efficient than filtering them through
the federal bureaucracy !

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:21 pm

But how would one avoid prosecution for nonpayment of taxes?
That seems a very quiet way to be rendered ineffective as a resister.

irina , June 1, 2018 at 2:30 am

The thing is, you don't 'nonpay' them. The way it used to work, through the
Con$cience and Military Tax Campaign Escrow Account, was that you filed
your taxes as usual. (This does require having less withholding than you owe).
BUT instead of paying what is due to the IRS, you send it to the Escrow Account.
You attach a letter to your tax return, explaining where the money is and why it
is there. That is, you want it to be spent on _________________(fill in the blank)
worthy public social service. Then you send your return to the IRS.

When I used to do this, I stated that I wanted my tax dollars to be spent to develop
public health clinics at neighborhood schools. Said clinics would be staffed by nurse
practitioners, would be open 24-7 and nurses would be equipped with vans to make
House Calls. Security would be provided.

So you're not 'nonpaying' your taxes, you are (attempting) to redirect them. Eventually,
after several rounds of letters back and forth, the IRS would seize the monies from the
escrow account, which would only release them to the IRS upon being told to by the
tax re-director. Unfortunately, not enough people participated to make it a going concern.
But the potential is still there, and the template has been made and used. It's very scale-
able, from local to international. And it would not take that many 're-directors' to shift the
focus of tax liability from the collector to the payor. Because ultimately we are liable for
how our funds are used !

Bill , June 2, 2018 at 3:19 pm

this was done a lot during the Vietnam conflict, especially by Quakers. the first thing, if you are a wage earner, is to re-file a W2 with maximum withholdings-that has two effects: 1) it means you owe all your taxes in April. 2) it means the feds are deprived of the hidden tax in which they use or invest your withholding throughout the year before it's actually due(and un-owed taxes if you over over-withhold). Pretty sure that if a large number of people deprive the government of that hidden tax by under-withholding, they will begin to take notice.

Abe , May 31, 2018 at 11:54 am

Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence agency of the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom.

In 2013, GCHQ received considerable media attention when the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency was in the process of collecting all online and telephone data in the UK. Snowden's revelations began a spate of ongoing disclosures of global surveillance and manipulation.

For example, NSA files from the Snowden archive published by Glenn Greenwald reveal details about GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) unit, which uses "dirty trick" tactics to covertly manipulate and control online communities.

JTRIG document: "The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations"
https://edwardsnowden.com/docs/doc/the-art-of-deception-training-for-a-new.pdf

In 2017, officials from the UK and Israel made an unprecedented confirmation of the close relationship between the GCHQ and Israeli intelligence services.

Robert Hannigan, outgoing Director-General of the GCHQ, revealed for the first time that his organization has a "strong partnership with our Israeli counterparts in signals intelligence." He claimed the relationship "is protecting people from terrorism not only in the UK and Israel but in many other countries."

Mark Regev, Israeli ambassador to the UK, commented on the close relationship between British and Israeli intelligence agencies. During remarks at a Conservative Friends of Israel reception, Regev opined: "I have no doubt the cooperation between our two democracies is saving British lives."

Hannigan added that GCHQ was "building on an excellent cyber relationship with a range of Israeli bodies and the remarkable cyber industry in Be'er Sheva."

The IDF's most important signal intelligence–gathering installation is the Urim SIGINT Base, a part of Unit 8200, located in the Negev desert approximately 30 km from Be'er Sheva.

Snowden revealed how Unit 8200 receives raw, unfiltered data of U.S. citizens, as part of a secret agreement with the U.S. National Security Agency.

After his departure from GCHQ, Hannigan joined BlueteamGlobal, a cybersecurity services firm, later re-named BlueVoyant.

BlueVoyant's board of directors includes Nadav Zafrir, former Commander of the Israel Defense Forces' Unit 8200. The senior leadership team at BlueVoyant includes Ron Feler, formerly Deputy Commander of the IDF's Unit 8200, and Gad Goldstein, who served as a division head in the Israel Security Agency, Shin Bet, in the rank equivalent to Major General.

In addition to their purported cybersecurity activities, Israeli. American, and British private companies have enormous access and potential to promote government and military deception operations.

mike k , May 31, 2018 at 12:23 pm

Thanks Abe. Sounds like a manual for slave owners and con men. What a tangled wed the rich bastards weave. The simple truth is their sworn enemy.

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:19 pm

Interesting that a foreign power would be given all US communications data, which implies that the US has seized it all without a warrant and revealed it all in violation of the Constitution. If extensive, this use of information power amounts to information warfare against the US by its own secret agencies in collusion with a foreign power, an act of treason.

Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:18 am

This has been going on for a LONG time, it's nothing new. I seem to recall 60 Minutes covering it way back in the 70s(?). UK was allowed to do the snooping in the US (and, likely, vice versa) and then providing info to the US. This way the US govt could claim that it didn't spy/snoop on its citizens. Without a doubt Israel has been extensively intercepting communications in the US..

Secrecy kills.

Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 8:23 am

Yes, but the act of allowing unregulated foreign agencies unwarranted access to US telecoms is federal crime, and it is treason when it goes so far as to allow them full access, and even direct US bulk traffic to their spy agencies. If this is so, these people should be prosecuted for treason.

F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 11:36 am

To listen to the media coverage of these events, it is tempting to believe that two entirely different planets are being discussed. Fox comes out and says Mueller was "owned" by Trump. Then, CNN comes out and says Trump was "owned" by Clapper. Clapper claims the evidence is "staggering", while video clips of his testimony reveal irrefutable perjury. Some of President Trump's policies are understandably abhorrent to Democrats, while Clinton's email server and charity frauds are indisputably violations of Federal statutes. Democrats are attempting to claim that a "spy" in the Trump campaign was perfectly reasonable to protect "national security", but evidence seems to indicate that the spy was placed BEFORE there was a legitimate national security concern. Some analysts note that, while Mueller's team appears to be Democratic partisan hacks, their native "skill set" is actually expertise in money laundering investigations. They claim that although Mr. Trump may not be compromised by the Russian government, he is involved with nefarious Russian organized crime figures. It follows, according to them, that given time, Mueller will reveal these illicit connections, and prosecution will become inevitable.

Let's assume, for argument, that both sides are right. That means that our entire government is irretrievably corrupt. Republicans claim that it could " go all the way to Obama". Democrats, of course, play the "moral high ground" card, insinuating that the current administration is so base and immoral that somehow, the "ends justify the means". No matter how you slice it, the Clinton campaign has a lot more liability on its hands. The problem is, if prosecutions begin, people will "talk" to save their own skins. The puppet masters can't really afford that.

"All the way to Obama", you say? I think it could go higher than that. Personally, I think it could go all the way to Dick Cheney, and the 'powers that be' are in no mood to let that happen.

Vivian O'Blivion , May 31, 2018 at 12:19 pm

The issue as I see it is that from the start everyone was calling the Mueller probe an investigation into collusion and not really grasping the catch all nature of his brief.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Counsel_investigation_(2017–present)

It's the "any matters arising " that is the real kicker. So any dodgy dealing / possible criminal activity in the past is fair game. And this is exactly what in happening with Manafort.
Morally you can apply the Nucky Johnson defence and state that everyone knew Trump was a crook when they voted for him, but legally this has no value.
There is an unpleasant whiff of deep state interference with the will of the people (electoral college). Perhaps if most bodies hadn't written Trump's chances off in such an off hand manner, proper due diligence of his background would have uncovered any liabilities before the election.
If there is actionable dirt, can't say I am overly sympathetic to Trump. Big prizes sometimes come with big risks.

David G , May 31, 2018 at 5:14 pm

My own feeling from the start has been that Mueller was never going to track down any "collusion" or "meddling" (at least not to any significant degree) because the whole, sprawling Russia-gate narrative – to the extent one can be discerned – is obviously phony.

But at the same time, there's no way the completely lawless, unethical Trump, along with his scummy associates, would be able to escape that kind of scrutiny without criminal conduct being exposed.

So far, on both scores, that still seems to me to be a likely outcome, and for my part I'm fine with it.

Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 5:29 am

My thoughts exactly. Collusion was never a viable proposition because the Russians aren't that stupid. Regardless of any personal opinion regarding the intelligence and mental stability of Donald Snr., the people he surrounds himself with are weapons grade stupid. I don't see the Russians touching the Trump campaign with a proverbial barge pole.

Bill , June 2, 2018 at 3:26 pm

it just happens that Trump appears to have been involved (wittingly or not), with the laundering a whole lot of Russian money and so many of his friends seem to be connected with wealthy Russian oligarchs as well plus they are so stupid, they keep appearing to (and probably are) obstructing justice. The Cohen thing doesn't get much attention here, but it's significant that they have all this stuff on a guy who is clearly Trump's bagman.

Steve Naidamast , May 31, 2018 at 3:15 pm

There is also quite an indication that the entire Mueller investigation is a complete smoke screen to be used as cannon fodder in the mainstream media.

On the one hand, Mueller and his hacks have found nothing of import to link Trump to anything close to collusion with members of the Russian government. And I am by no means a Trump supporter by any stretch of the imagination, except as a foil to Clinton. However, even my minimalist expectations for Trump have not worked out either.

In addition. the Mueller investigation has been spending what appears to be a majority of its time on ancillary matters that were not within the supposed scope and mandate of this investigation. Further, a number of indictments have come down against people involved with such ancillary matters.

The result is that if Mueller is going beyond the scope of his investigatory mandate, this may come in as a technicality that will allow indicted persons to escape prosecution on appeal.

Such a mandate, I would think, is the same thing as a police warrant, which can find only admissible evidence covered by the warrant. Anything else found to be criminally liable must be found to be as a result of a completely different investigation that has nothing to do with the original warrant.

In other words, it appears that the Mueller investigation was allowed to commence under a Republican controlled Congress for the very reason that its intent is simply to go in circles long enough for Republicans to get their agendas through, which does not appear to be working all too well as a result of their high levels of internecine party conflicts.

This entire affair is coming to show just how dysfunctional, corrupt, and incompetent the entirety of the US federal government has become. And to the chagrin of all sincere activists, no amount of organized protesting and political action will ever rid the country of this grotesque political quagmire that now engulfs the entirety of our political infrastructure.

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:48 pm

Very true that the US federal government is now "dysfunctional, corrupt, and incompetent."
What are your thoughts on forms of action to rid us this political quagmire?
(other than ineffective "organized protesting and political action")
Have you considered new forms of public debate and public information?

Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:34 am

All of this is blackmail to hold Trump's feet to the fire of the Israel firsters (such actions pull in all the dark swampy things). By creating the Russia blackmail story they've effectively redirected away from themselves. The moment Trump balks the Deep State will reel in some more, airing innuendos to overwhelm Trump. Better believe that Trump has been fully "briefed" on all of this. John Bolton was able to push out a former OPCW head with threats (knew where his, the OPCW head's children were). And now John Bolton is sitting right next to Trump (whispering in his ear that he knows ways in which to oust Trump).

What actual "ideas" were in Trump's head going in to all of this (POTUS run) is hard to say. But, anything that can be considered a threat to the Deep State has been effectively nullified now.

Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 8:22 am

Possible, but Manafort already tried to get his charges thrown out as being the outcome of investigations beyond the remit He failed.

Brendan , May 31, 2018 at 10:26 am

There's no doubt at all that Joseph Mifsud was closely connected with western intelligence, and with MI6 in particular. His contacts with Russia are insignificant compared with his long career working amongst the elite of western officials.
Lee Smith of RealClearInvestigations lists some of the places where Mifsud worked, including two universities:

"he taught at Link Campus University in Rome, ( ) whose lecturers and professors include senior Western diplomats and intelligence officials from a number of NATO countries, especially Italy and the United Kingdom.

Mifsud also taught at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and the London Academy of Diplomacy, which trained diplomats and government officials, some of them sponsored by the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the British Council, or by their own governments."

Two former colleagues of Mifsud's, Roh and Pastor, recently interviewed him for a book they have written. Those authors could very well be biased, but one of them makes a valid point, similar to one that Daniel Lazare makes above:
"Given the affiliations of Link's faculty and staff, as well as Mifsud's pedigree, Roh thinks it's impossible that the man he hired as a business development consultant is a Russian agent."

Politically, Mifsud identifies with the Clintons more than anyone else, and claims to belong to the Clinton Foundation, which has often been accused of being just a way of funneling money into Hillary Clinton's campaign.

As Lee Smith says, if Mifsud really is a Russian spy, "Western intelligence services are looking at one of the largest and most embarrassing breaches in a generation. But none of the governments or intelligence agencies potentially compromised is acting like there's anything wrong."

From all that we know about Joseph Mifsud, it's safe to say that he was never a Russian spy. If not, then what was he doing when he was allegedly feeding stories to George Papadopoulos about Russians having 'dirt' on Clinton?

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/05/26/the_maltese_phantom_of_russiagate_.html

David G , May 31, 2018 at 4:25 pm

I read somewhere that Mifsud had disappeared. Was that true? If so, is he back, or still missing?

Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 6:21 pm

Here are some excerpts that will answer your question from an article by Lee Smith at Realclearinvestigations, "The Maltese Phantom of Russiagate".

A new book by former colleagues of Mifsud's – Stephan Roh, a 50-year-old Swiss-German lawyer, and Thierry Pastor, a 35-year-old French political analyst – reports that he is alive and well. Their account includes a recent interview with him.

Their self-published book, "The Faking of Russia-gate: The Papadopoulos Case, an Investigative Analysis," includes a recent interview with Mifsud in which he denies saying anything about Clinton emails to Papadopoulos. Mifsud, they write, stated "vehemently that he never told anything like this to George Papadopoulos." Mifsud asked rhetorically: "From where should I have this [information]?"

Mifsud's account seems to be supported by Alexander Downer, the Australian diplomat who alerted authorities about Papadopoulos. As reported in the Daily Caller, Downer said Papadopoulos never mentioned emails; he spoke, instead, about the Russians possessing material that could be damaging to Clinton. This new detail raises the possibility that Mifsud, Papadopoulos' alleged source for the information, never said anything about Clinton-related emails either.

In interviews with RealClearInvestigations, Roh and Pastor said Mifsud is anything but a Russian spy. Rather, he is more likely a Western intelligence asset.

According to the two authors, it was a former Italian intelligence official, Vincenzo Scotti, a colleague of Mifsud's and onetime interior minister, who told the professor to go into hiding. "I don't know who was hiding him," said Roh, "but I'm sure it was organized by someone. And I am sure it will be difficult to get to the bottom of it."

Toby McCrossin , June 1, 2018 at 1:54 am

" The Papadopoulos Case, an Investigative Analysis," includes a recent interview with Mifsud in which he denies saying anything about Clinton emails to Papadopoulos. Mifsud, they write, stated "vehemently that he never told anything like this to George Papadopoulos.""

Thank you for providing that explosive piece of information. If true, and I suspect it is, that's one more nail in the Russiagate narrative. Who, then, is making the claim that Misfud mentioned emails? The only source for the statement I can find is "court documents".

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 9:20 am

The election scams serve only to distract from the Israel-gate scandal and the oligarchy destruction of our former democracy. Mr. Lazare neglects to tell us about that. All of Hillary's top ten campaign bribers were zionists, and Trump let Goldman-Sachs take over the economy. KSA and big business also bribed heavily.

We must restrict funding of elections and mass media to limited individual donations, for democracy is lost.

We must eliminate zionist fascism from our political parties, federal government, and foreign policy. Obviously that has nothing to do with any ethnic or religious preference.

Otherwise the United States is lost, and our lives have no historical meaning beyond slavery to oligarchy.

Joe Tedesky , May 31, 2018 at 9:51 am

You are right Sam. Israel does work the fence under the guise of the Breaking News. Joe

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:18 pm

My response was that Israel massacres at the fence, ignored by the zionist US mass media.

mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:48 am

The extreme wealth and privileges of oligarchy depend on the poverty and slavery of others. Inequality of income is the root cause of most of our ills. Try to imagine what a world of economic equals would be like. No striving for more and more wealth at the expense of others. No wars. What would there be to fight over – everyone would be content with what they already had.

If you automatically think such a world would be impossible, try to state why. You might discover that the only obstacle to such a world is the greedy bastards who are sitting on top of everybody, and will do anything to maintain their advantages.

mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:52 am

How do the oligarchs ensure your slavery? With the little green tickets they have hoarded that the rest of us need just to eat and have a roof over our heads. The people sleeping in the streets tell us the penalty for not being good slaves.

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 12:50 pm

Very true, Mike. Those who say that equality or fairness of income implies breaking the productivity incentive system are wrong. No matter how much or how little wage incentive we offer for making an effort in work, we need not have great disparities of income. Those who can work should have work, and we should all make an effort to do well in our work, but none of us need the fanciest cars or grand monuments to live in, just to do our best.

Getting rid of oligarchy, and getting money out of mass media and elections, would be the greatest achievement of our times.

Joe Tedesky , May 31, 2018 at 5:30 pm

An old socialist friend of my dad's generation who claimed to have read the biography of Andrew Carnegie had told me over a few beers that Carnegie said, "that at a time when he was paying his workers $5 a week he 'could' have been paying them $50 a day, but then he could not figure out what kind of life they would lead with all that money". Think about it mike, if his workers would have had that kind of money it would not be long before Carnegie's workers became his competition and opened up next door to him the worst case scenario would be his former workers would sell their steel at a cheaper price, kind of, well no exactly like what Rockefeller did with oil, or as Carnegie did with steel innovation. How's that saying go, keep them down on the farm . well. Remember Carnegie was a low level stooge for the railroads at one time, and rose to the top .mike. Great point to make mike, because there could be more to go around. Joe

Steve Naidamast , May 31, 2018 at 3:16 pm

"We must restrict funding of elections and mass media to limited individual donations, for democracy is lost.

We must eliminate zionist fascism from our political parties, federal government, and foreign policy. Obviously that has nothing to do with any ethnic or religious preference."

Good luck with that!!!

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:19 pm

Well, you are welcome to make suggestions on how to save the republic.

john wilson , May 31, 2018 at 9:10 am

The depths of the deep state has no limits, but as a UK citizen, I fail to see why the American "spooks" need any help from we Brits when it comes state criminal activity. Sure, we are masters at underhand dirty tricks, but the US has a basket full of tricks that 'Trump' (lol) anything we've got. It was the Russians wot done mantra has been going on for many decades and is ever good for another turn around the political mulberry tree of corruption and underhand dealings. Whether the Democrats or the Republicans win its all the same to the deep state as they are in control whoever is in the White House. Trump was an outsider and there for election colour and the "ho ho ho" look what a great democracy we are, anyone can be president. He is in fact the very essence of the 'wild card' and when he actually won there was total confusion, panic, disbelief and probably terror in the caves and dungeons of the deep state.

Realist , May 31, 2018 at 9:33 am

I'm sure the result was so unexpected that the shadowy fixers, the IT mavens who could have "adjusted" the numbers, were totally caught off guard and unable to do "cleanly." Not that they didn't try to re-jigger the results in the four state recounts that were ordered, but it was simply too late to effectively cheat at that point, as there were already massive overvotes detected in key urban precincts. Such a thing will never happen again, I am sure.

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 9:36 am

It appears that UK has long had a supply of anti-Russia fearmongers, presumably backed by its anti-socialist oligarchy as in the US. Perhaps the US oligarchy is the dumbest salesman, who believes that all customers are even dumber, so that UK can sell Russophobia here thirty years after the USSR.

Bob Van Noy , May 31, 2018 at 8:49 am

"But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press."

Perfect.
Recently, while trying to justify my arguement that a new investigation into the RFK Killing was necessary, I was asked why I thought that, and my response was "Modus operandi," exactly what Robert Parry learned by experience, and that is the fundamental similarity to all of the institutionalized crime that takes place by the IC. Once one realizes the literary approach to disinformation that was fundamental to Alan Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, even Ian Fleming, one can easily see the Themes being applied. I suppose that the very feature of believability offered by propaganda, once recognized, becomes its undoing. That could be our current reality; the old Lines simply are beginning to appear to be ridiculous

Thank you Daniel Lazar.

Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 8:39 am

The recognition of themes of propaganda as literary themes and modus operandi is helping to discredit propaganda. The similarities of the CW false-flag operations (Iraq, Syria, and UK), and the fake assassinations (Skripal and Babchenko) by the anti-Russia crowd help reveal and persuade on the falsehood of the Iraq WMD, Syria CW, and MH-17 propaganda ops. Just as the similarities of the JFK/MLK/RFK assassinations persuade us that commonalities exist long before we see evidence.

Bob Van Noy , June 1, 2018 at 1:11 pm

Many thanks Sam F for recognizing that. As we begin to achieve a resolution of the 60's Kllings, we can begin to see the general and specific themes utilized to direct the programs of Assassination. The other aspect is that real investigation Never followed; and that took Real Power.

In a truly insightful book by author Sally Denton entitled "The Profiteers" she puts together a very cogent theory that it isn't the Mafia, it's the Syndicate, which means (for me at least) real, criminal power with somewhat divergent interests ok with one another, to the extent that they can maintain their Own Turf. I think that's a profound insight

Too, in a similar vain, the Grand Deceptions of American Foreign Policy, "scenarios" are simply and only that, not a Real possible solution. Always resulting in failure

Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 9:23 pm

Yes, it is difficult to determine the structure of a subculture of gangsterism in power, which can have many specialized factions in loose cooperation, agreeing on some general policy points, like benefits for the rich, hatred of socialism, institutionalized bribery of politicians and judges, militarized policing, destruction of welfare and social security, deregulation of everything, essentially the neocon/neolib line of the DemReps. The party line of oligarchy in any form.

Indeed the foreign policy of such gangsters is designed to "fail" because destruction of cultures, waste, and fragmentation most efficiently exploits the bribery structure available, and serves the anti-socialist oligarchy. Failure of the declared foreign policy is success, because that is only propaganda to cover the corruption.

SocraticGadfly , May 31, 2018 at 8:48 am

You know, not only Gay Trowdy but even Dracula Napolitano think people like Lazare , McGovern, etc. are overblown on this issue.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 1:47 pm

SocraticGadfly – Trey Gowdy hasn't even seen the documents yet, so he's hardly in a position to say anything. The House Intelligence Committee, under Chairman Nunes, are being stymied by the FBI and the Department of Justice who are refusing to hand over documents. Refusing! Refusing to disclose documents to the very people who, by law, have oversight. Nunes is threatening to hit them with Contempt of Congress.

Let's see the documents. Then Trey Gowdy can open his mouth.

Herman , May 31, 2018 at 8:32 am

What I take from this head spinning article is the paragraph about Carter Page.

"On July 7, 2016 Carter Page delivered a lecture on U.S.-Russian relations in Moscow in which he complained that "Washington and other western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change." Washington hawks expressed "unease" that someone representing the presumptive Republican nominee would take Russia's side in a growing neo-Cold War

Mr. Page hit the nail on the head. There is no greater sin to entrenched power than to spell out what is going on with Russia. It helps us understand why terms like dupe and naïve were stuck on Carter Page's back.. Truth to power is not always good for your health.

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:07 am

The tyrant accuses of disloyalty, all who question the reality of his foreign monsters.
And so do his monster-fighting agencies, whose budgets depend upon the fiction.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:25 am

Daniel Lazare – good report. "It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree." This wasn't a case of paranoia. This was a blatant attempt to bring down a rival opponent and, failing that, the President of the United States. This was intentional and required collusion between top officials of the government. They fabricated the phony Steele dossier (paid for by the Clinton campaign), exonerated Hillary Clinton, and then went to town on bringing down Trump.

"Was George Popodopolous set up?" Of course he was. Set up a patsy in order to give you reason to carry out a phony investigation.

"If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice." They're not befogged; they're following orders (the major television and newspaper outfits). Without their 24/7 spin and lies, Russiagate would never have been kept alive.

These guys got the biggest surprise of their life when Hillary Clinton lost the election. None of this would have come out had she won. During the campaign, as Trump gained in the polls, she was heard to say, "If they ever find out what we've done, we'll all hang."

I hope they see jail time for what they've done.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:38 am

Apparently what has come out so far is just the tip of the iceberg. Some are saying this could lead all the way up to Obama. I hope not, but they have certainly done all they can to ruin the Trump Presidency.

JohnM , May 31, 2018 at 9:58 am

I'm adjusting my tinfoil hat right now. I'm wondering if Skripal had something to do with the Steel dossier. The iceberg may be even bigger than thought.

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:18 am

It is known that Skripal's close friend living nearby was an employee of Steele's firm Orbis.

Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 2:58 pm

Exactly, his name is Pablo Miller and he is the MI6 agent who initially recruited Sergei Skripal. Miller worked for Orbis, Steele's company and listed that in his resume on LinkedIn but later deleted it. But once it's on the internet it can always be found and it was and it was published.

robjira , May 31, 2018 at 2:13 pm

John, both Moon Of Alabama and OffGuardian have had excellent coverage of the Skripal affair. Informed opinions wonder if Sergei Skripal was one of Steele's "Russian sources," and that he may have been poisoned for the purpose of either a) bolstering the whole "Russia = evil" narrative, or b) a warning not to ask for more than what he may have conceivably received for any contribution he may or may not have made to the "dossiere."

mike k , May 31, 2018 at 7:20 am

Interesting details in this article, but we have known this whole Russiagate affair was a scam from the get go. It all started the day after Trump's unexpected electoral win over Hillary. The chagrined dems came together and concocted their sore loser alibi – the Russians did it. They scooped up a lot of pre-election dirt, rolled it into a ball and directed it at Trump. It is a testament to the media's determination to stick with their story, that in spite of not a single scrap of real evidence after over a year of digging by a huge team of democratic hit men and women, this ridiculous story still has supporters.

David G , May 31, 2018 at 10:31 am

"It all started the day after Trump's unexpected electoral win over Hillary."

Not so.

Daniel Lazare's first link in the above piece is to Paul Krugman's July 22, 2016 NY Times op-ed, "Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate". (Note how that headline doesn't even bother to employ a question mark.)

I appreciate that that Krugman column gets pride of place here since I distinctly remember reading it in my copy of the Times that day, months before the election, and my immediate reaction to it: nonplussed that such a risible thesis was being aired so prominently, along with a deep realization that this was only the first shot in what would be a co-ordinated media disinformation campaign, à la Saddam's WMDs.

Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 3:37 pm

Actually, I think the intelligence agencies' (CIA/FBI/DNI) plan started shortly after Trump gave the names of Page and Papadopoulos to the Washington Post (CIA annex) in a meeting on March 21, 2016 outlining his foreign policy team.

Carter Page (Naval Academy distinguished graduate and Naval intelligence officer) in 2013 worked as an "under-cover employee" of the FBI in a case that convicted Evgeny Buryakov and it was reported that he was still an UCE in March of 2016. The FBI never charged or even hinted that Page was anything but innocent and patriotic. However, in October 2016 the FBI told the FISA Court that he was a spy to support spying on him. Remember the FISA Court allows spying on him AND the persons he is in contact, which means almost everyone on the Trump transition team/administration.

Here is an excerpt from an article by WSJ's Kimberley Strassel:

In "late spring" of 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey briefed White House "National Security Council Principals" that the FBI had counterintelligence concerns about the Trump campaign. Carter Page was announced as a campaign adviser on March 21, and Paul Manafort joined the campaign March 29. The briefing likely referenced both men, since both had previously been on the radar of law enforcement. But here's what matters: With this briefing, Mr. Comey officially notified senior political operators on Team Obama that the bureau had eyes on Donald Trump and Russia. Imagine what might be done in these partisan times with such explosive information.

And what do you know? Sometime in April, the law firm Perkins Coie (on behalf the Clinton campaign) hired Fusion GPS, and Fusion turned its attention to Trump-Russia connections.

David G , May 31, 2018 at 4:56 pm

Most interesting, Chet Roman. Thanks.

My understanding is that Trump more or less pulled Page's name out of a hat to show the WashPost that he had a "foreign policy team", and thus that his campaign wasn't just a hollow sham, but that at that point he really had had no significant contact at all with Page – maybe hadn't even met him. It was just a name from his new political world that sprang to "mind" (or the Trumpian equivalent).

Of course, the Trump campaign *was* just a sham, by conventional Beltway standards: a ramshackle road show with no actual "foreign policy team", or any other policy team.

So maybe that random piece of B.S. from Trump has caused him a heap of trouble. This is part of why – no matter how bogus "Russia-gate" is – I just can't bring myself to feel sorry for old Cheeto Dust.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 6:56 am

Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal had some good advice:

"Mr. Trump has an even quicker way to bring the hostility to an end.

He can – and should – declassify everything possible, letting Congress and the public see the truth.

That would put an end to the daily spin and conspiracy theories. It would puncture Democratic arguments that the administration is seeking to gain this information only for itself, to "undermine" an investigation.

And it would end the Justice Department's campaign of secrecy, which has done such harm to its reputation with the public and with Congress."

What do you bet he does?

RickD , May 31, 2018 at 6:44 am

I have serious doubts about the article's veracity. There seems to be a thread running through it indicating an attempt to whitewash any Russian efforts to get Trump elected. To dismiss all the evidence of such efforts, and , despite this author's words, there is enough such evidence, seems more than a bit partisan.

Paul E. Merrell, J.D. , May 31, 2018 at 6:55 am

What evidence? I've seen none so far. A lot of claims that there is such evidence but no one seems to ever say what it is.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:06 am

RickD – thanks for the good laugh before bedtime. I'm with Mr. Merrell and I actually want to see some evidence. Maybe it was Professor Halper in the kitchen with the paring knife.

Realist , May 31, 2018 at 9:21 am

Unfortunately, what this guy says is what most Americans still seem to believe. When I ask people what is the actual hard evidence for "Russiagate" (because I don't know of any that has been corroborated), I get a response that there have been massive examples of Russian hacks, Russian posts, tweets and internet adverts–all meant to sabotage Hillary's candidacy, and very effective, mind you. Putin has been an evil genius worthy of a comic book villain (to date myself, a regular Lex Luthor). Sez who, ask I? Sez the trustworthy American media that would never lie to the public, sez they. You know, professional paragons of virtue like Rachel Maddow and her merry band.

Nobody seems aware of the recent findings about Halpern, none seem to have a realistic handle on the miniscule scope of the Russian "offenses" against American democracy. Rachel, the NY Times and WaPo have seen to that with their sins of both commission and omission. Even the Republican party is doing a half-hearted job of defending its own power base with rigorous and openly disseminated fact checking. It's like even many of the committee chairs with long seniority are reluctant to buck the conventional narrative peddled by the media. Many have chosen to retire rather than fight the media and the Deep State. What's a better interpretation of events? Or is one to believe that the silent voices, curious retirements and political heat generated by the Dems, the prosecutors and the media are all independent variables with no connections? These old pols recognise a good demonizing when they see it, especially when directed at them.

Personally, I think that not only the GOPers should be fighting like the devil to expose the truth (which should benefit them in this circumstance) but so should the media and all the watchdog agencies (ngo's) out there because our democracy WAS hijacked, but it was NOT by the Russians. Worse than that, it was done by internal domestic enemies of the people who must be outed and punished to save the constitution and the republic, if it is not too late. All the misinformation by influential insiders and the purported purveyors of truth accompanied by the deliberate silence by those who should be chirping like birds suggests it may well be far too late.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:53 pm

Realist – a most excellent post! Some poll result I read about the other day mentioned that well over half of the American public do NOT believe what they are being told by the media. That was good to hear. But you are right, there are still way too many who never question anything. If I ever get in trouble, I wouldn't want those types on my jury. They'd be wide awake during the prosecution's case and fast asleep during my defense.

This is the Swamp at work on both sides of the aisle. Most of the Republicans are hanging Trump out to dry. They've probably got too much dirt they want to keep hidden themselves, so retirement looks like a good idea. Get out of Dodge while the going is good, before the real fighting begins! The Democrats are battling for all they're worth, and I've got to hand it to them – they're dirty little fighters.

Yes, democracy has been hijacked. Hard to say how long this has been going on – maybe forever. If there is anything good about Trump's presidency, it's that the Deep State is being laid out and delivered up on a silver platter for all to see.

There has never been a better chance to take back the country than this. If this opportunity passes, it will never come again. They will make sure of it.

The greatest thing that Trump could do for the country would be to declassify all documents. Jeff Sessions is either part of the Deep State or he's been scared off. He's not going to act. Rosenstein is up to his eyeballs in this mess and he's not going to act. In fact, he's preventing Nunes from getting documents. It is up to Trump to act. I just hope he's not being surrounded by a bunch of bad apple lawyers who are giving him bad advice. He needs to go above the Department of Justice and declassify ALL documents. If he did that, a lot of these people would probably die of a heart attack within a minute.

mike k , May 31, 2018 at 7:11 am

You sure came out of the woodwork quickly to express your "serious doubts" RickD.

Skip Scott , May 31, 2018 at 8:07 am

Please provide "such evidence". I've yet to see any. The entire prosecution of RussiaGate has been one big Gish Gallop.

strgr-tgther , May 31, 2018 at 9:39 pm

RickD – Thank you for pointing that out! You were the only one!!! It is a very strange article leaving Putin and the Russians evidence out and also not a single word about Stromy Daniels witch is also very strange. I know Hillary would never have approved of any of this and they don't say that either.

John , June 1, 2018 at 2:26 am

What does Stormy Daniels have to do with RussiaGate?

You know that someone who committed the ultimate war crime by lying us into war to destroy Libya and re-institute slavery there, and who laughed after watching video of a man that Nelson Mandela called "The Greatest Living Champion of Human Rights on the Planet" be sodomized to death with a knife, is somehow too "moral" to do such a thing? Really?

It amazes me how utterly cultish those who support the Red Queen have shown themselves to be – without apparently realizing that they are obviously on par with the followers of Jim Jones!

strgr-tgther , June 1, 2018 at 12:17 pm

That is like saying what does income tax have to do with Al Capone. Who went to Alctraz because he did not pay income tax not for being a gangster. So we know Trump has sexual relations with Stormy Daniels, then afterward PAID her not to talk about it. So he paid Story Daniels for sex! That is Prostitution! Same thing. And that is inpeachable, using womens bodies as objects. If we don't prosecute Trump here then from now on all a John needs to say to the police is that he was not paying for sex but paying to keep quiet about it. And Cogress can get Trump for prostitution and disgracing the office of President. Without Russia investigations we would never have found out about this important fact, so that is what it has to do with Russia Gate.

Paul E. Merrell, J.D. , May 31, 2018 at 4:53 am

Guccifer 2.0's American Fingerprints Reveal An Operation Made In The USA: https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/05/guccifer-2-0s-american-fingerprints-reveal-an-operation-made-in-the-usa/

[Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... That did not prevent the "handpicked" authors of that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing "high confidence" that Russian intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks." Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say. ..."
"... The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack. ..."
"... "No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.] ..."
"... "Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as 'news fit to print' and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has never been mentioned since . ..."
"... "More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report , Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi." ..."
"... The CIA's reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates "demons," and insisting; "It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia."Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review. [ President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017 VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this. Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary straightforwardness. ] ..."
"... Another false flag operation? Suddenly false flag operations have become the weapon of choice. Interestingly enough, they are nefariously (always) committed by the US or US allies. MH17 was a false flag with an SU-25 Ukraine jet responsible for downing the passenger jet (to blame Russia). All of the chemical attacks in Syria were false flag operations with the supply of sarin/chlorine made in Turkey or directly given to the "rebels" by the CIA or US allies. The White Helmets were of course in on all of the details. Assad was just simply not capable of doing that to "his" people. Forget that the sarin had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply. Next it was the snipers who used a false flag operation during the Maidan revolution to shoot protesters and police to oust Yanukovych. Only the neo-Nazis could be capable of shooting the Maidan protesters so they could take power. And then Seth Rich was murdered so he couldn't reveal he was the "real" source of the leak. This was hinted by Assange when he offered a reward to find the killers. ..."
"... The author tosses out that the DNC hack was (potentially) a false flag operation by the CIA obviously to undermine Trump while victimizing Russia. ..."
"... I don't seen any cause to say that any false-flag theory you don't like is merely "tossed out" propaganda. One cannot tell in your comment where you think the accounts are credible and where not. No evidence that the Syria CW attacks "had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply." ..."
"... There can be no doubt that counterintelligence tools would be pursued by our intelligence agencies as a means to create narratives and false evidence based on the production of false flags which support desired geopolitical outcomes. There would be a need to create false flags using technology to support the geopolitical agenda which would be hard or impossible to trace using the forensic tools used by cyber sleuths. ..."
"... Russia-gate is American Exceptionalism writ large which takes on a more sinister aspect as groups like BLM and others are "linked" to alleged "Russian funding"on one and and Soros funding on another ..."
"... (FWIW, this is a new neoliberal phenomenon when the ultra-rich "liberals" can quietly fund marches on Washington and "grassroots" networking making those neophyte movements too easy targets with questionable robust foundation (color revolutions are possible when anyone is able to foot the cost of 1,000 or 2000 "free" signs or t-shirts -- impecccably designed and printed. ..."
"... Excellent post. Thanks also for reminding me I need to revisit the Vault 7 information as source material. These are incredibly important leaks that help connect the dots of criminal State intelligence activities designed to have remained forever hidden. ..."
"... Actually, both Brennan and Hayden testified to Congress that only 3 agencies signed off on their claim. They also said that they'd "hand picked" a special team to run their "investigation," and no other people were involved. So, people known to be perjurers cherry picked "evidence" to make a claim. Let's invade Iraq again. ..."
"... Mueller is not interested in the truth. He can't handle the truth. His purpose is not to divulge the truth. He has no use for truthtellers including the critical possessors of the truth whom you mentioned. This aversion to the truth is the biggest clue that Mueller's activities are a complete sham. ..."
"... Thanks, Ray, for revealing that the CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate is the likely cause of the Russiagate scams. ..."
"... Your disclaimer is hilarious: "We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental." ..."
"... For whatever reason, Ray McGovern chose not to mention the murder of Seth Rich, which pretty clearly points to the real source of the leak being him, as hinted by Assange offering a reward for anyone uncovering his killer. The whole thing stinks of a democratic conspiracy. ..."
"... Ray, from what I have seen in following his writing for years, meticulously only deals in knowns. The Seth Rich issue is not a known, it is speculation still. Yes, it probably is involved, but unless Craig Murray states that Seth Rich was the one who handed him the USB drive, it is not a known. ..."
"... There is a possibility that Seth Rich was not the one who leaked the information, but that the DNC bigwigs THOUGHT he was, in which case, by neither confirming nor denying that Seth Rich was the leaker, it may be that letting the DNC continue to think it was him is being done in protection of the actual leaker. Seth Rich could also have been killed for unrelated reasons, perhaps Imran Awan thought he was on to his doings. ..."
"... Don't forget this Twitter post by Wikileaks on October 30, 2016: Podesta: "I'm definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it." https://www.wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/36082#efmAGSAH- ..."
"... Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and Russians. Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump. Which was the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. Sure be interesting to see how Mueller and his crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face? ..."
"... If they had had any evidence to inculpate Russia, we would have all seen it by now. They know that by stating that there is an investigation going on: they can blame Russia. The Democratic National Committee is integrated by a pack of liars. ..."
"... My question is simple, when will we concentrate on reading Hillary's many emails? After all wasn't this the reason for the Russian interference mania? Until we do, take apart Hillary's correspondence with her lackeys, nothing will transpire of any worth. I should not be the one saying this, in as much as Bernie Sanders should be the one screaming it for justice from the highest roof tops, but he isn't. So what's up with that? Who all is involved in this scandalous coverup? What do the masters of corruption have on everybody? ..."
Jun 09, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

If you are wondering why so little is heard these days of accusations that Russia hacked into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand close scrutiny . It could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never bothered to investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate as no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team.

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity -- including two "alumni" who were former National Security Agency technical directors -- have long since concluded that Julian Assange did not acquire what he called the "emails related to Hillary Clinton" via a "hack" by the Russians or anyone else. They found, rather, that he got them from someone with physical access to Democratic National Committee computers who copied the material onto an external storage device -- probably a thumb drive. In December 2016 VIPS explained this in some detail in an open Memorandum to President Barack Obama.

On January 18, 2017 President Obama admitted that the "conclusions" of U.S. intelligence regarding how the alleged Russian hacking got to WikiLeaks were "inconclusive." Even the vapid FBI/CIA/NSA "Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections" of January 6, 2017, which tried to blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for election interference, contained no direct evidence of Russian involvement. That did not prevent the "handpicked" authors of that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing "high confidence" that Russian intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks." Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say.

Never mind. The FBI/CIA/NSA "assessment" became bible truth for partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who was among the first off the blocks to blame Russia for interfering to help Trump. It simply could not have been that Hillary Clinton was quite capable of snatching defeat out of victory all by herself. No, it had to have been the Russians.

Five days into the Trump presidency, I had a chance to challenge Schiff personally on the gaping disconnect between the Russians and WikiLeaks. Schiff still "can't share the evidence" with me or with anyone else, because it does not exist.

WikiLeaks

It was on June 12, 2016, just six weeks before the Democratic National Convention, that Assange announced the pending publication of "emails related to Hillary Clinton," throwing the Clinton campaign into panic mode, since the emails would document strong bias in favor of Clinton and successful attempts to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders. When the emails were published on July 22, just three days before the convention began, the campaign decided to create what I call a Magnificent Diversion, drawing attention away from the substance of the emails by blaming Russia for their release.

Clinton's PR chief Jennifer Palmieri later admitted that she golf-carted around to various media outlets at the convention with instructions "to get the press to focus on something even we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton." The diversion worked like a charm. Mainstream media kept shouting "The Russians did it," and gave little, if any, play to the DNC skullduggery revealed in the emails themselves. And like Brer' Fox, Bernie didn't say nothin'.

Meanwhile, highly sophisticated technical experts, were hard at work fabricating "forensic facts" to "prove" the Russians did it. Here's how it played out:

June 12, 2016: Assange announces that WikiLeaks is about to publish "emails related to Hillary Clinton."

June 14, 2016: DNC contractor CrowdStrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there is evidence it was injected by Russians.

June 15, 2016: "Guccifer 2.0" affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the "hack;" claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."

The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack.

Enter Independent Investigators

A year ago independent cyber-investigators completed the kind of forensic work that, for reasons best known to then-FBI Director James Comey, neither he nor the "handpicked analysts" who wrote the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment bothered to do. The independent investigators found verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record of an alleged Russian hack of July 5, 2016 showing that the "hack" that day of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or anyone else.

Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external storage device – a thumb drive, for example) by an insider -- the same process used by the DNC insider/leaker before June 12, 2016 for an altogether different purpose. (Once the metadata was found and the "fluid dynamics" principle of physics applied, this was not difficult to disprove the validity of the claim that Russia was responsible.)

One of these independent investigators publishing under the name of The Forensicator on May 31 published new evidence that the Guccifer 2.0 persona uploaded a document from the West Coast of the United States, and not from Russia.

In our July 24, 2017 Memorandum to President Donald Trump we stated , "We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI."

Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, the disclosure described below may be related. Even if it is not, it is something we think you should be made aware of in this general connection. On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began to publish a trove of original CIA documents that WikiLeaks labeled 'Vault 7.' WikiLeaks said it got the trove from a current or former CIA contractor and described it as comparable in scale and significance to the information Edward Snowden gave to reporters in 2013.

"No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.]

Marbled

"Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as 'news fit to print' and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has never been mentioned since .

"The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima, it seems, 'did not get the memo' in time. Her March 31 article bore the catching (and accurate) headline: 'WikiLeaks' latest release of CIA cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking operations.'

"The WikiLeaks release indicated that Marble was designed for flexible and easy-to-use 'obfuscation,' and that Marble source code includes a "de-obfuscator" to reverse CIA text obfuscation.

"More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report , Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi."

A few weeks later William Binney, a former NSA technical, and I commented on Vault 7 Marble, and were able to get a shortened op-ed version published in The Baltimore Sun

The CIA's reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates "demons," and insisting; "It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia."Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review. [ President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017 VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this. Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary straightforwardness. ]

We also do not know if you have discussed cyber issues in any detail with President Putin. In his interview with NBC's Megyn Kelly he seemed quite willing – perhaps even eager – to address issues related to the kind of cyber tools revealed in the Vault 7 disclosures, if only to indicate he has been briefed on them. Putin pointed out that today's technology enables hacking to be 'masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one can understand the origin' [of the hack] And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or any individual that everyone will think that they are the exact source of that attack.

"'Hackers may be anywhere,' he said. 'There may be hackers, by the way, in the United States who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia. Can't you imagine such a scenario? I can.'

New attention has been drawn to these issues after I discussed them in a widely published 16-minute interview last Friday.

In view of the highly politicized environment surrounding these issues, I believe I must append here the same notice that VIPS felt compelled to add to our key Memorandum of July 24, 2017:

"Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former intelligence colleagues.

"We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental." The fact we find it is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times.

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Savior in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer before serving as a CIA analyst for 27 years. His duties included preparing, and briefing one-on-one, the President's Daily Brief.


ThomasGilroy , June 9, 2018 at 9:44 am

"More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report, Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi."

Another false flag operation? Suddenly false flag operations have become the weapon of choice. Interestingly enough, they are nefariously (always) committed by the US or US allies. MH17 was a false flag with an SU-25 Ukraine jet responsible for downing the passenger jet (to blame Russia). All of the chemical attacks in Syria were false flag operations with the supply of sarin/chlorine made in Turkey or directly given to the "rebels" by the CIA or US allies. The White Helmets were of course in on all of the details. Assad was just simply not capable of doing that to "his" people. Forget that the sarin had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply. Next it was the snipers who used a false flag operation during the Maidan revolution to shoot protesters and police to oust Yanukovych. Only the neo-Nazis could be capable of shooting the Maidan protesters so they could take power. And then Seth Rich was murdered so he couldn't reveal he was the "real" source of the leak. This was hinted by Assange when he offered a reward to find the killers.

The author tosses out that the DNC hack was (potentially) a false flag operation by the CIA obviously to undermine Trump while victimizing Russia. It must be the Gulf of Tonkin all over again. While Crowdstrike might have a "dubious professional record and multiple conflicts of interest", their results were also confirmed by several other cyber-security firms (Wikipedia):

cybersecurity experts and firms, including CrowdStrike, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Mandiant, SecureWorks, ThreatConnect, and the editor for Ars Technica, have rejected the claims of "Guccifer 2.0" and have determined, on the basis of substantial evidence, that the cyberattacks were committed by two Russian state-sponsored groups (Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear).

Then there was Papadopoulas who coincidentally was given the information that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. Obviously, they were illegally obtained (unless this was another CIA false flag operation). This was before the release of the emails by WikiLeaks. This was followed by the Trump Tower meeting with Russians with connections to the Russian government and the release of the emails by WikiLeaks shortly thereafter. Additionally, Russia had the motive to defeat HRC and elect Trump. Yesterday, Trump pushed for the reinstatement of Russia at the G-7 summit. What a shock! All known evidence and motive points the finger directly at Russia.

Calling everything a false flag operation is really the easy way out, but ultimately, it lets the responsible culprits off of the hook.

anon , June 9, 2018 at 11:28 am

I don't seen any cause to say that any false-flag theory you don't like is merely "tossed out" propaganda. One cannot tell in your comment where you think the accounts are credible and where not. No evidence that the Syria CW attacks "had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply."

CitizenOne , June 8, 2018 at 11:40 pm

There can be no doubt that counterintelligence tools would be pursued by our intelligence agencies as a means to create narratives and false evidence based on the production of false flags which support desired geopolitical outcomes. There would be a need to create false flags using technology to support the geopolitical agenda which would be hard or impossible to trace using the forensic tools used by cyber sleuths.

In pre computer technology days there were also many false flags which were set up to create real world scenarios which suited the geopolitical agenda. Even today, there are many examples of tactical false flag operations either organized and orchestrated or utilized by the intelligence agencies to create the narrative which supports geopolitical objectives.

Examples:

The US loaded munitions in broad daylight visible to German spies onto the passenger ship Lusitania despite German warnings that they would torpedo any vessels suspected of carrying munitions. The Lusitania then proceeded to loiter unaccompanied by escorts in an area off the Ireland coast treading over the same waters until it was spotted by a German U-Boat and was torpedoed. This was not exactly a false flag since the German U-Boat pulled the trigger but it was required to gain public support for the entrance of the US into WWI. It worked.

There is evidence that the US was deliberately caught "off guard" in the Pearl Harbor Attack. Numerous coded communication intercepts were made but somehow the advanced warning radar on the island of Hawaii was mysteriously turned off in the hours before and during the Japanese attack which guaranteed that the attack would be successful and also guaranteed that our population would instantly sign on to the war against Japan. It worked.

There is evidence that the US deliberately ignored the intelligence reports that UBL was planning to conduct an attack on the US using planes as bombs. The terrorists who carried out the attacks on the twin towers were "allowed" to conduct them. The result was the war in Iraq which was sold based on a pack of lies about WMDs and which we used to go to war with Iraq.

The Tonkin Gulf incident which historians doubt actually happened or believe if it did was greatly exaggerated by intelligence and military sources was used to justify the war in Vietnam.

The Spanish American War was ginned up by William Randolph Hearst and his yellow journalism empire to justify attacking Cuba, Panama and the Philippines. The facts revealed by forensic analysis of the exploded USS Maine have shown that the cataclysm was caused by a boiler explosion not an enemy mine. At the time this was also widely believed to not be caused by a Spanish mine in the harbor but the news sold the story of Spanish treachery and war was waged.

In each case of physical false flags created on purpose, or allowed to happen or just made up by fictions based on useful information that could be manipulated and distorted the US was led to war. Some of these wars were just wars and others were wars of choice but in every case a false flag was needed to bring the nation into a state where we believed we were under attack and under the circumstances flocked to war. I will not be the judge of history or justice here since each of these events had both negative and positive consequences for our nation. What I will state is that it is obvious that the willingness to allow or create or just capitalize on the events which have led to war are an essential ingredient. Without a publicly perceived and publicly supported cause for war there can be no widespread support for war. I can also say our leaders have always known this.

Enter the age of technology and the computer age with the electronic contraptions which enable global communication and commerce.

Is it such a stretch to imagine that the governments desire to shape world events based on military actions would result in a plan to use these modern technologies to once again create in our minds a cyber scenario in which we are once again as a result of the "cyber" false flag prepared for us to go to war? Would it be too much of a stretch to imagine that the government would use the new electronic frontier just as it used the old physical world events to justify military action?

Again, I will not go on to condemn any action by our military but will focus on how did we get there and how did we arrive at a place where a majority favored war.

Whether created by physical or cyberspace methods we can conclude that such false flags will happen for better or worse in any medium available.

susan sunflower , June 8, 2018 at 7:52 pm

I'd like "evidence" and I'd also like "context" since apparently international electoral "highjinks" and monkey-wrenching and rat-f*cking have a long tradition and history (before anyone draws a weapon, kills a candidate or sicc's death squads on the citizenry.

The DNC e-mail publication "theft" I suspect represents very small small potatoes for so many reasons As Dixon at Black Agenda Report put it . Russia-gate is American Exceptionalism writ large which takes on a more sinister aspect as groups like BLM and others are "linked" to alleged "Russian funding"on one and and Soros funding on another

https://www.blackagendareport.com/russia-gate-and-crisis-american-exceptionalism

(FWIW, this is a new neoliberal phenomenon when the ultra-rich "liberals" can quietly fund marches on Washington and "grassroots" networking making those neophyte movements too easy targets with questionable robust foundation (color revolutions are possible when anyone is able to foot the cost of 1,000 or 2000 "free" signs or t-shirts -- impecccably designed and printed.

Gary Weglarz , June 8, 2018 at 11:08 am

Excellent post. Thanks also for reminding me I need to revisit the Vault 7 information as source material. These are incredibly important leaks that help connect the dots of criminal State intelligence activities designed to have remained forever hidden.

Skip Scott , June 8, 2018 at 1:07 pm

I can't think of any single piece of evidence that our MSM is under the very strict control of our so-called intelligence agencies than how fast and completely the Vault 7 releases got flushed down the memory hole. "Nothing to see here folks, move along."

Realist , June 9, 2018 at 1:36 am

http://www.unz.com/mwhitney/dems-put-finishing-touches-on-one-party-surveillance-superstate/

Skip Scott , June 9, 2018 at 7:05 am

Mbob-

I don't think anyone can predict whether or not Sanders would have won as a 3rd party candidate. He ran a remarkable campaign, but when he caved to the Clinton machine he lost a lot of supporters, including me. If he had stood up at the convention and talked of the DNC skullduggery exposed by Wikileaks, and said "either I run as a democrat, or I run as a Green, but I'm running", he would have at least gotten 15 pct to make the TV debates, and who knows what could have happened after that. 40 pct of registered voters didn't vote. That alone tells you it is possible he might have won.

Instead he expected us to follow him like he was the f'ing Pied Piper to elect another Wall St. loving warmonger. That's why he gets no "pass" from me. He (and the Queen of Chaos) gave us Trump. BTW, Obama doesn't get a "pass" either.

willow , June 8, 2018 at 9:24 pm

It's all about the money. A big motive for the DNC to conjure up Russia-gate was to keep donors from abandoning any future
Good Ship Hillary or other Blue Dog Democrat campaigns: "Our brand/platform wasn't flawed. It was the Rooskies."

Vivian O'Blivion , June 8, 2018 at 8:22 am

An earlier time line.

March 14th. Popadopoulos has first encounter with Mifsud.

April 26th. Mifsud tells Popadopoulos that Russians have "dirt" on Clinton, including "thousands of e-mails".

May 4th. Trump last man standing in Republican primary.

May 10th. Popadopoulos gets drunk with London based Australian diplomat and talks about "dirt" but not specifically e-mails.

June 9th. Don. Jr meets in Trump tower with Russians promising "dirt" but not specifically in form of e-mails.

It all comes down to who Mifsud is, who he is working for and why he has been "off grid" to journalists (but not presumably Intelligence services) for > 6 months.

Specific points.

On March 14th Popadopoulos knew he was transferring from team Carson to team Trump but this was not announced to the (presumably underwhelmed) world 'till March 21st. Whoever put Mifsud onto Popadopoulos was very quick on their feet.
The Australian diplomat broke chain of command by reporting the drunken conversation to the State Department as opposed to his domestic Intelligence service. If Mifsud was a western asset, Australian Intelligence would likely be aware of his status.
If Mifsud was a Russian asset why would demonstrably genuine Russians be trying to dish up the dirt on Clinton in June?

There are missing pieces to this jigsaw puzzle but it's starting to look like a deep state operation to dirty Trump in the unlikely event that he went on to win.

Realist , June 8, 2018 at 4:28 pm

Ms. Clinton was personally trying to tar Trump with allusions to "Russia" and being "Putin's puppet" long before he won the presidency, in fact, quite conspicuously during the two conventions and most pointedly during the debates. She was willing to use that ruse long before her defeat at the ballot box. It was the straw that she clung to and was willing to use as a pretext for overturning the election after the unthinkable happened. But, you are right, smearing Trump through association with Russia was part of her long game going back to the early primaries, especially since her forces (both in politics and in the media) were trying mightily to get him the nomination under the assumption that he would be the easiest (more like the only) Republican candidate that she could defeat come November.

Wcb , June 8, 2018 at 5:25 pm

Steven Halper?

Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:33 am

I might add to this informative article that the reason why Julian Assange has been ostracized and isolated from any public appearance, denied a cell phone, internet and visitors is that he tells the truth, and TPTB don't want him to say yet again that the emails were leaked from the DNC. I've heard him say it several times. H. Clinton was so shocked and angry that she didn't become president as she so confidently expected that her, almost knee-jerk, reaction was to find a reason that was outside of herself on which to blame her defeat. It's always surprised me that no one talks about what was in those emails which covered her plans for Iran and Russia (disgusting).
Trump is a sociopath, but the Russians had nothing to do with him becoming elected. I was please to read here that he or perhaps just Pompeo? met with Binney. That's a good thing, though Pompeo, too, is unstable and war hungry to follow Israel into bombing yet another innocent sovereign country. Thank, Mr. McGovern for another excellent coverage of this story.

MLS , June 7, 2018 at 9:59 pm

"no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team"

Do tell, Ray: How do you know what the GOP Congress appointed Special Prosecutor's investigation – with its unlimited budget, wide mandate, and notable paucity of leaks – has and has not done?

strgr-tgther , June 8, 2018 at 12:14 am

MLS: Thank you! No one stands up for what is right any more. We have 17 Intelligency agencies that say are election was stolen. And just last week the Republicans Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnel and Trey Gowdy (who I detest) said the FBI and CIA and NSA were just doing there jobs the way ALL AMERICANS woudl want them to. And even Adam Schiff, do you think he will tell any reporter what evidence he does have? #1 It is probably classified and #2 he is probably saving it for the inpeachment. We did not find out about the Nixon missing 18 minutes until the end anyways. All of these articles sound like the writer just copied Sean Hannity and wrote everything down he said, and yesterday he told all suspects in the Mueller investigation to Smash and Bleach there mobile devices, witch is OBSTRUCTION of justice and witness TAMPERING. A great American there!

Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:48 am

strgr-tgther:

Sean Hannity??? Ha, ha, ha.

As Mr. McGoven wrote .."any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental."

John , June 8, 2018 at 5:48 am

Sorry I had to come back and point out the ultimate irony of ANYONE who supports the Butcher of Libya complaining about having an election stolen from them (after the blatant rigging of the primary that caused her to take the nomination away from the ONE PERSON who was polling ahead of Trump beyond the margin of error of the polls.)

It is people like you who gave us Trump. The Pied Piper Candidate promoted by the DNC machine (as the emails that were LEAKED, not "hacked", as the metadata proves conclusively, show.)

incontinent reader , June 8, 2018 at 7:14 am

What is this baloney? Seventeen Intelligence agencies DID NOT conclude what you are alleging, And in fact, Brennan and his cabal avoided using a National intelligence Estimate, which would have shot down his cherry-picked 'assessment' before it got off the ground – and it would have been published for all to read.

The NSA has everything on everybody, yet has never released anything remotely indicating Russian collusion. Do you think the NSA Director, who, as you may recall, did not give a strong endorsement to the Brennan-Comey assessment, would have held back from the Congress such information, if it had existed, when he was questioned? Furthermore, former technical directors of the NSA, Binney, Wiebe and Loomis- the very best of the best- have proven through forensics that the Wikileaks disclosures were not obtained by hacking the DNC computers, but by a leak, most likely to a thumb drive on the East Coast of the U.S. How many times does it have to be laid out for you before you are willing and able to absorb the facts?

As for Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, (and Trey Gowdy, who was quite skilled on the Benghazi and the Clinton private email server investigations- investigations during which Schiff ran interference for Clinton- but has seemed unwilling to digest the Strozk, Page, McCabe, et al emails and demand a Bureau housecleaning), who cares what they think or say, what matters is the evidence.

I suggest you familiarize yourself with the facts- and start by rereading Ray's articles, and the piece by Joe diGenova posted on Ray's website.

Realist , June 8, 2018 at 4:12 pm

The guy's got Schiff for brains. Everyone who cares about the truth has known since before Mueller started his charade that the "17 intelligence agency" claim was entirely a ruse, bald-faced confected propaganda to anger the public to support the coup attempted by Ms. Clinton and her zombie followers. People are NOT going to support the Democratic party now or in the future when its tactics include subverting our public institutions, including the electoral process under the constitution–whether you like the results or not! If the Democratic party is to be saved, those honest people still in it should endeavor to drain the septic tank that has become their party before we can all drain the swamp that is the federal government and its ex-officio manipulators (otherwise known as the "deep state") in Washington.

Farmer Pete , June 8, 2018 at 7:30 am

"We have 17 Intelligency agencies that say are election was stolen."

You opened up with a talking point that is factually incorrect. The team of hand-picked spooks that slapped the "high confidence" report together came from 3 agencies. I know, 17 sounds like a lot and very convincing to us peasants. Regardless, it's important to practice a few ounces of skepticism when it comes to institutions with a long rap sheet of crime and deception. Taking their word for it as a substitute for actual observable evidence is naive to say the least. The rest of your hollow argument is filled with "probably(s)". If I were you, I'd turn off my TV and stop looking for scapegoats for an epically horrible presidential campaign and candidate.

strgr-tgther , June 8, 2018 at 12:50 pm

/horrible presidential campaign and candidate/ Say you. But we all went to sleep comfortable the night before the election where 97% of all poles said Clinton was going to be are next President. And that did not happen! So Robert Mueller is going to find out EXACTLY why. Stay tuned!!!

irina , June 8, 2018 at 3:40 pm

Not 'all'. I knew she was toast after reading that she had cancelled her election night fireworks
celebration, early on the morning of Election Day. She must have known it also, too.

And she was toast in my mind after seeing the ridiculous scene of her virtual image
'breaking the glass ceiling' during the Democratic Convention. So expensively stupid.

Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:50 pm

Mueller is simply orchestrating a dramatic charade to distract you from the obvious reason why she lost: Trump garnered more electoral votes, even after the popular votes were counted and recounted. Any evidence of ballot box stuffing in the key states pointed to the Democrats, so they gave that up. She and her supporters like you have never stopped trying to hoodwink the public either before or after the election. Too many voters were on to you, that's why she lost.

Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:57 pm

Indeed, stop the nonsense which can't be changed short of a coup d'etat, and start focusing on opposing the bad policy which this administration has been pursuing. I don't see the Dems doing that even in their incipient campaigns leading up to the November elections. Fact is, they are not inclined to change the policies, which are the same ones that got them "shellacked" at the ballot box in 2016. (I think Obama must own lots of stock in the shellack trade.)

Curious , June 8, 2018 at 6:27 pm

Ignorance of th facts keep showing up in your posts for some unknown reason. Sentence two: "we have 17 intelligency (sic) agencies that say ". this statement was debunked a long time ago.

Have you learned nothing yet regarding the hand-picked people out of three agencies after all this time? Given that set of lies it makes your post impossible to read.
I would suggest a review of what really happened before you perpetuate more myths and this will benefit all.

Also, a good reading of the Snowden Docs and vault 7 should scare you out of your shell since our "intelligeny" community can pretend to be Chinese, Russian, Iranian just for starters, and the blame game can start after hours instead of the needed weeks and/or months to determine the veracity of a hack and/or leak.

It's past trying to win you over with the actual 'time lines' and truths. Mr McGovern has re-emphasized in this article the very things you should be reading.
Start with Mr Binney and his technical evaluation of the forensics in the DNC docs and build out from there This is just a suggestion.

What never ceases to amaze me in your posts is the 'issue' that many of the docs were bought and paid for by the Clinton team, and yet amnesia has taken over those aspects as well. Shouldn't you start with the Clintons paying for this dirt before it was ever attributed to Trump?

Daniel , June 8, 2018 at 6:38 pm

Actually, both Brennan and Hayden testified to Congress that only 3 agencies signed off on their claim. They also said that they'd "hand picked" a special team to run their "investigation," and no other people were involved. So, people known to be perjurers cherry picked "evidence" to make a claim. Let's invade Iraq again.

More than 1/2 of their report was about RT, and even though that was all easily viewable public record, they got huge claims wrong. Basically, the best they had was that RT covered Occupy Wall Street and the NO DAPL and BLM protests, and horror of horrors, aired third party debates! In a democracy! How dare they?

Why didn't FBI subpoena DNC's servers so they could run their own forensics on them? Why did they just accept the claims of a private company founded by an Atlantic Council board member? Did you know that CrowdStrike had to backpedal on the exact same claim they made about the DNC server when Ukraine showed they were completely wrong regarding Ukie artillery?

Joe Lauria , June 8, 2018 at 2:12 am

Until he went incommunicado Assange stated on several occasions that he was never questioned by Muellers team. Craig Murray has said the same. And Kim Dotcom has written to Mueller offering evidence about the source and he says they have never replied to him.

Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:40 pm

Mueller is not interested in the truth. He can't handle the truth. His purpose is not to divulge the truth. He has no use for truthtellers including the critical possessors of the truth whom you mentioned. This aversion to the truth is the biggest clue that Mueller's activities are a complete sham.

Miranda Keefe , June 8, 2018 at 3:28 pm

MLS wrote, "How do you know what the GOP Congress appointed Special Prosecutor's investigation – with its unlimited budget, wide mandate, and notable paucity of leaks – has and has not done?"

Robert Mueller is NOT a Special Prosecutor appointed by the Congress. He is a special counsel appointed by the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, and is part of the Department of Justice.

I know no one who dislikes Trumps wants to hear it. But all Mueller's authority and power to act is derived from Donald J. Trump's executive authority because he won the 2016 presidential election. Mueller is down the chain of command in the Executive Department.

That's why this is all nonsense. What we basically have is Trump investigating himself. The framers of the Constitution never intended this. They intended Congress to investigate the Executive and that's why they gave Congress the power to remove him or her via impeachment.

As long as we continue with this folly of expecting the Justice Department to somehow investigate and prosecute a president we end up with two terrible possibilities. Either a corrupt president will exercise his legitimate authority to end the investigation like Nixon did -or- we have a Deep State beyond the reach of the elected president that can effectively investigate and prosecute a corrupt president, but also then has other powers with no democratic control.

The solution to this dilemma? An empowered Congress elected by the People operating as the Constitution intended.

As to the rest of your post? It is an example of the "will to believe." Me? I'll not act as if there is evidence of Russian interference until I'm shown evidence, not act as if it must be true, because I want to believe that, until it's fully proven that it didn't happen.

F. G. Sanford , June 7, 2018 at 8:22 pm

There must be some Trump-Russia ties.
Or so claim those CIA spies-
McCabe wants a deal, or else he won't squeal,
He'll dissemble when he testifies!

No one knows what's on Huma's computer.
There's no jury and no prosecutor.
Poor Adam Schiff hopes McCabe takes the fifth,
Special council might someday recruit her!

Assange is still embassy bound.
Mueller's case hasn't quite come unwound.
Wayne Madsen implies that there might be some ties,
To Israelis they haven't yet found!

Halper and Mifsud are players.
John Brennan used cutouts in layers.
If the scheme falls apart and the bureau is smart,
They'll go after them all as betrayers!

They needed historical fiction.
A dossier with salacious depiction!
Some urinous whores could get down on all fours,
They'd accomplish some bed sheet emiction!

Pablo Miller and Skripal were cited.
Sidney Blumenthal might have been slighted.
Christopher Steele offered Sidney a deal,
But the dossier's not copyrighted!

That story about Novichok,
Smells a lot like a very large crock.
But they can't be deposed or the story disclosed,
The Skripals have toxic brain block!

Papadopolis shot off his yap.
He told Downer, that affable chap-
There was dirt to report on the Clinton cohort,
Mifsud hooked him with that honey trap!

She was blond and a bombshell to boot.
Papadopolis thought she was cute.
She worked for Mifsud, a mysterious dude,
Now poor Paps is in grave disrepute!

But the trick was to tie it to Russians.
The Clinton team had some discussions.
Their big email scandal was easy to handle,
They'd blame Vlad for the bad repercussions!

There must have been Russian collusion.
That explained all the vote count confusion.
Guccifer Two made the Trump team come through,
If he won, it was just an illusion!

Lisa Page and Pete Strzok were disgusted
They schemed and they plotted and lusted.
If bald-headed Clapper appealed to Jake Tapper,
Brennan's Tweets might get Donald Trump busted!

There had to be cyber subversion.
It would serve as the perfect perversion.
They would claim it was missed if it didn't exist,
It's a logically perfect diversion!

Ray McGovern , June 8, 2018 at 1:03 am

BRAVO, F.G. and thanks.
Ray

Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:41 am

F.G., you've done it again, and I might add, topped even yourself! Thanks.

KiwiAntz , June 7, 2018 at 7:30 pm

What a joke, America, the most dishonest Country on Earth, has meddled, murdered & committed coups to overturn other Govts & interfered & continues to do so in just about every Country on Earth by using Trade sanctions, arming Terrorists & illegal invasions, has the barefaced cheek to puff out its chest & hypocritcally blame Russia for something that it does on a daily basis?? And the point with Mueller's investigation is not to find any Russian collusion evidence, who needs evidence when you can just make it up? The point is provide the US with a list of unfounded lies & excuses, FIRSTLY to slander & demonise RUSSIA for something they clearly didn't do! SECONDLY, was to provide a excuse for the Democrats dismal election loss result to the DONALD & his Trump Party which just happens to contain some Republicans? THIRDLY, to conduct a soft Coup by trying to get Trump impeached on "TRUMPED UP CHARGES OF RUSSIAN COLLUSION"? And FOURTLY to divert attention away from scrutiny & cover up Obama & Hillary Clinton's illegal, money grubbing activities & her treasonous behaviour with her private email server?? After two years of Russiagate nonsense with NOTHING to show for it, I think it's about time America owes Russia a public apology & compensation for its blatant lying & slander of a innocent Country for a crime they never committed?

Sam F , June 7, 2018 at 7:11 pm

Thanks, Ray, for revealing that the CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate is the likely cause of the Russiagate scams.

I am sure that they manipulate the digital voting machines directly and indirectly. True elections are now impossible.

Your disclaimer is hilarious: "We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental."

Antiwar7 , June 7, 2018 at 6:23 pm

Expecting the evil people running the show to respond to reason is futile, of course. All of these reports are really addressed to the peanut gallery, where true power lies, if only they could realize it.

Thanks, Ray and VIPS, for keeping up the good fight.

mike k , June 7, 2018 at 5:55 pm

For whatever reason, Ray McGovern chose not to mention the murder of Seth Rich, which pretty clearly points to the real source of the leak being him, as hinted by Assange offering a reward for anyone uncovering his killer. The whole thing stinks of a democratic conspiracy.

And BTW people have become shy about using the word conspiracy, for fear it will automatically brand one as a hoaxer. On the contrary, conspiracies are extremely common, the higher one climbs in the power hierarchy. Like monopolies, conspiracies are central to the way the oligarchs do business.

John , June 8, 2018 at 5:42 am

Ray, from what I have seen in following his writing for years, meticulously only deals in knowns. The Seth Rich issue is not a known, it is speculation still. Yes, it probably is involved, but unless Craig Murray states that Seth Rich was the one who handed him the USB drive, it is not a known.

There is a possibility that Seth Rich was not the one who leaked the information, but that the DNC bigwigs THOUGHT he was, in which case, by neither confirming nor denying that Seth Rich was the leaker, it may be that letting the DNC continue to think it was him is being done in protection of the actual leaker. Seth Rich could also have been killed for unrelated reasons, perhaps Imran Awan thought he was on to his doings.

Unfettered Fire , June 8, 2018 at 10:44 am

Don't forget this Twitter post by Wikileaks on October 30, 2016: Podesta: "I'm definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it." https://www.wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/36082#efmAGSAH-

Unfettered Fire , June 8, 2018 at 10:47 am

" whether or not"?!! Wow. That's an imperialistic statement.

Drew Hunkins , June 7, 2018 at 5:50 pm

Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and Russians. Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump. Which was the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. Sure be interesting to see how Mueller and his crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face?

So sickening to see the manner in which many DNC sycophants obsequiously genuflect to their godlike Mueller. A damn prosecutor who was arguably in bed with the Winter Hill Gang!

jose , June 7, 2018 at 5:13 pm

If they had had any evidence to inculpate Russia, we would have all seen it by now. They know that by stating that there is an investigation going on: they can blame Russia. The Democratic National Committee is integrated by a pack of liars.

Jeff , June 7, 2018 at 4:35 pm

Thanx, Ray. The sad news is that everybody now believes that Russia tried to "meddle" in our election and, since it's a belief, neither facts nor reality will dislodge it. Your disclaimer should also probably carry the warning – never believe a word a government official says especially if they are in the CIA, NSA, or FBI unless they provide proof. If they tell you that it's classified, that they can't divulge it, or anything of that sort, you know they are lying.

john wilson , June 7, 2018 at 4:09 pm

I suspect the real reason no evidence has been produced is because there isn't any. I know this is stating the obvious, but if you think about it, as long as the non extent evidence is supposedly being "investigated" the story remains alive. They know they aren't going to find anything even remotely plausible that would stand up to any kind of scrutiny, but as long as they are looking, it has the appearance that there might be something.

Joe Tedesky , June 7, 2018 at 4:08 pm

I first want to thank Ray and the VIPS for their continuing to follow through on this Russia-Gate story. And it is a story.

My question is simple, when will we concentrate on reading Hillary's many emails? After all wasn't this the reason for the Russian interference mania? Until we do, take apart Hillary's correspondence with her lackeys, nothing will transpire of any worth. I should not be the one saying this, in as much as Bernie Sanders should be the one screaming it for justice from the highest roof tops, but he isn't. So what's up with that? Who all is involved in this scandalous coverup? What do the masters of corruption have on everybody?

Now we have Sean Hannity making a strong case against the Clinton's and the FBI's careful handling of their crimes. What seems out of place, since this should be big news, is that CNN nor MSNBC seems to be covering this story in the same way Hannity is. I mean isn't this news, meant to be reported as news? Why avoid reporting on Hillary in such a manner? This must be that 'fake news' they all talk about boy am I smart.

In the end I have decided to be merely an observer, because there are no good guys or gals in our nation's capital worth believing. In the end even Hannity's version of what took place leads back to a guilty Russia. So, the way I see it, the swamp is being drained only to make more room for more, and new swamp creatures to emerge. Talk about spinning our wheels. When will good people arrive to finally once and for all drain this freaking swamp, once and for all?

Realist , June 7, 2018 at 5:25 pm

Ha, ha! Don't you enjoy the magic show being put on by the insiders desperately trying to hang onto their power even after being voted out of office? Their attempt to distract your attention from reality whilst feeding you their false illusions is worthy of Penn & Teller, or David Copperfield (the magician). Who ya gonna believe? Them or your lying eyes?

Joe Tedesky , June 7, 2018 at 10:00 pm

Realist, You can bet they will investigate everything but what needs investigated, as our Politico class devolves into survivalist in fighting, the mechanism of war goes uninterrupted. Joe

F. G. Sanford , June 7, 2018 at 5:34 pm

Joe, speaking of draining the swamp, check out my comment under Ray's June 1 article about Freddy Fleitz!

Sam F , June 7, 2018 at 6:59 pm

That is just what I was reminded of; here is an antiseptic but less emphatic last line:
"Swamp draining progresses apace.
It's being accomplished with grace:
They're taking great pains to clean out the drains,"
New swamp creatures will need all that space!

Unfettered Fire , June 8, 2018 at 11:00 am

We must realize that to them, "the Swamp" refers to those in office who still abide by New Deal policy. Despite the thoroughly discredited neoliberal economic policy, the radical right are driving the world in the libertarian direction of privatization, austerity, private bank control of money creation, dismantling the nation-state, contempt for the Constitution, etc.

[Jun 05, 2018] Mourning in America The Day RFK Was Shot in Los Angeles The American Conservative

Notable quotes:
"... Charles F, McElwee III is a writer based in northeastern Pennsylvania. Follow him on Twitter at @CFMcElwee . ..."
Jun 05, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

America had dramatically changed since John F. Kennedy seduced voters with the promises of the New Frontier. A young family, the campaign jingles, the embrace of television, and the prospect of America's first Catholic president injected a sense of patriotic adrenaline into the 1960 campaign. There were "high hopes" for Jack and a sense of cultural validation for Catholics who remembered Al Smith's failed presidential bid in 1928. In 1960, the Everly Brothers and Bobby Darin crooned through the radio, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird proved a national sensation, and Americans flocked to movies like Spartacus in magnificent downtown theaters.

But the frivolity and innocence, however illusory, were shattered on November 22, 1963. Kennedy's assassination violently shifted America's cultural fault lines. One afternoon accelerated the nation's sociological maladies, intensified its political divisions, and evaporated its black-and-white contentment. Americans proceeded on a Technicolor path of disruption, one that had transformed the nation by the time of Bobby's announcement on March 16, 1968. It was that year when The Doors and Cream blasted from transistor radios, John Updike's Couples landed on the cover of Time , and 2001: A Space Odyssey played in new suburban cinemas. The country had experienced a dervish frenzy, and Bobby was fully aware of his nation's turbulent course.

The country was rocked by young students protesting a worsening war in Vietnam. Racial tension exploded and riots destroyed urban neighborhoods. America's political evolution forever altered its electoral geography. Bobby was embarking on a remarkable campaign that challenged the incumbent president, a man he despised for many years. But the source of this strife stemmed from the White House years of Bobby's brother. "While he defined his vision more concretely and compellingly than Jack had -- from ending a disastrous war and addressing the crisis in the cities to removing a sadly out-of-touch president -- he failed to point out that the war, the festering ghettos, and Lyndon Johnson were all part of Jack Kennedy's legacy," wrote Larry Tye in his biography of Bobby.

For the 1968 primary, Kennedy metamorphosed into a liberal figure with an economic populist message. Kennedy's belated entry turned into an audacious crusade, with the candidate addressing racial injustice, income inequality, and the failure of Vietnam. He balanced this message with themes touching upon free enterprise and law and order. Kennedy hoped to appeal to minorities and working-class whites. He quickly became a messianic figure, and the press embellished his New Democrat image. By late March, Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection during a televised address. Through his departure, Johnson worked to maintain control of the party machine by supporting Hubert Humphrey, his devoted Vice President. But in the following weeks, Kennedy built momentum as he challenged McCarthy in states like Indiana and Nebraska. His performance in both states, where anti-Catholic sentiments lingered, testified to Kennedy's favorable electoral position.

In April 4, Kennedy learned that the Rev. King had been assassinated. He relayed the civil rights leader's death in a black neighborhood in Indianapolis. His words helped spare Indianapolis from the riots that erupted in cities across the country, ultimately leading to nearly 40 people killed and over 2,000 injured. MLK's assassination served as an unsettling reminder to Kennedy's family, friends, campaign aides, and traveling press. During Kennedy's first campaign stop in Kansas, the press corps stopped at a restaurant where the legendary columnist Jimmy Breslin asked, "Do you think this guy has the stuff to go all the way?"

"Yes, of course he has the stuff to go all the way," replied Newsweek's John J. Lindsay. "But he's not going to go all the way. The reason is that somebody is going to shoot him. I know it and you know it. Just as sure as we're sitting here somebody is going to shoot him. He's out there now waiting for him. And, please God, I don't think we'll have a country after it."

Despite what happened in 1963, the Secret Service had yet to provide protection of presidential and vice presidential candidates and nominees during the 1964 election or the 1968 primary. But all the signs were there that Kennedy needed protection. The frenzied crowds increased in size, taking a physical toll on the candidate. In one instance, "he was pulled so hard that he tumbled into the car door, splitting his lip and breaking a front tooth that required capping," writes Nye. "He ended up on a regimen of vitamins and antibiotics to fight fatigue and infection For most politicians, the challenge was to attract crowds; for Bobby, it was to survive them." In California, just 82 days after his announcement, Kennedy met the fate that so many feared.

♦♦♦

Bobby Kennedy was a complicated figure from a family that continues to engage America's imagination. In his autobiography, the novelist Philip Roth, who recently passed away, reflected on Kennedy's assassination:

He was by no means a political figure constructed on anything other than the human scale, and so, the night of his assassination and for days afterward, one felt witness to the violent cutting down not of a monumental force for justice and social change like King or the powerful embodiment of a people's massive misfortunes or a titan of religious potency but rather of a rival -- of a vital, imperfect, high-strung, egotistical, rivalrous, talented brother, who could be just as nasty as he was decent. The murder of a boyish politician of forty-two, a man so nakedly ambitious and virile, was a crime against ordinary human hope as well as against the claims of robust, independent appetite and, coming after the murders of President Kennedy at forty-six and Martin Luther King at thirty-nine, evoked the simplest, most familiar forms of despair.

For those schoolchildren and their parents in June 1968, Kennedy's campaign offered a sense of nostalgia. They remembered the exuberance of his brother's campaign, the optimism of his administration, and the possibilities of the 1960s. For the nation's large ethnic Catholic voting bloc, another Kennedy reminded them of that feeling of validation in the 1960 election. Of course, it had been a tumultuous decade for these voters. They lived in cities that had precipitously declined since JFK's campaign visits in 1960. Railroad stations ended passenger service, theaters closed, factories shuttered, and new highways offered an exodus to suburbia. As Catholics, they prayed for the conversion of Russia, adapted to Vatican II reforms, and adjusted to new parishes in the developing outskirts. Young draftees were shipped off to a catastrophic war, which only intensified their feelings of disillusionment. Their disenchantment raised questions about their sustained support for Democrats. Kennedy may have proved formidable for Nixon in the general election, but the Catholic vote was increasingly up for grabs.

Pat Buchanan understood this electoral opportunity for Republicans. In a 1971 memo, Buchanan argued that Catholics were the largest bloc of available Democratic voters for the GOP: "The fellows who join the K.of C. (Knights of Columbus), who make mass and communion every morning, who go on retreats, who join the Holy Name society, who fight against abortion in their legislatures, who send their kids to Catholic schools, who work on assembly lines and live in Polish, Irish, Italian and Catholic communities or who have headed to the suburbs -- these are the majority of Catholics; they are where our voters are."

In subsequent presidential elections, Catholic voters flocked to Democrats and Republicans. Their electoral preferences were driven by the issues of the moment and often by location. The geographical divide of our politics has only intensified. The 2016 presidential election encapsulated this trend. Voters in Appalachia and the Rust Belt overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump that year. Many of these voters previously supported Obama in both 2008 and 2012. In 1968, these voters likely appreciated Kennedy's campaign message. But the tragedy of the nation is now a loss of optimism -- the belief that tomorrow will be a better day. Americans are overwhelmed by ideological tension and socio-economic angst. The prosperity enjoyed by large metropolitan regions has not spilled over into the heartland. There is no nostalgia for 1968 because countless Americans understand that the nation has failed to address income inequality, job displacement, urban decline, and mass poverty. It was so long ago, but America did lose its innocence on November 22, 1963. Bobby Kennedy's death in 1968 served as a reminder that it would never return.

Charles F, McElwee III is a writer based in northeastern Pennsylvania. Follow him on Twitter at @CFMcElwee .

[Jun 05, 2018] The Political Assassin Who Brought Down RFK

Notable quotes:
"... Northern Observer, someday Israel will go the way of Rhodesia if it's lucky. Many believe Israel orchestrated JFK's death; he insisted on inspecting Dimona for nuclear weapon development. ..."
"... If you look at actual evidence in the case you would understand that Sirhan did not and could not have killed Sen. Kennedy. Just look at autopsy report and it says he was killed by bullets fired and virtual point blank range from below and the back of the head. In addition, sound analysis proves that there were 13 shots fired but the alleged murder weapon only held 8 shots. So let's stop this charade. ..."
Jun 05, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

More troublingly, Robert Kennedy's death occurred within five years of his elder brother's, and under similar circumstances. It is important to recall how unprecedented their deaths were to the generation who witnessed them. If time has removed the shock of the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, it should not obscure just how anomalous they are. Bad luck may be part of the mythos of the Kennedy family, but lightning does not strike the same place twice, and political assassinations are exceedingly rare in American history. Both Kennedy brothers hurled themselves into the most tumultuous and divisive issues of their time -- Israeli nationalism and anti-communism -- and both appeared to have paid a heavy price.


Miguel June 4, 2018 at 12:01 am

In the first place, I don't think that failure of Robert Kennedy had anything to do with a substantial limitation of the liberal world view, but with another concept, or argument:

The end cannot justify the means because it is the mean, which is a process, which conditionates the end, in itself only an outcome.

Robert Kennedy supported violence made by the Zionist movement, turned into a State, and if you ask me, it was that violence which -no pun intended- backfired against him.

Now, about the out balance between loyalty and allegiance homeland/nation, I think it should be looked at from Sirhan perspective. Yes, he had escaped from what, in his perspective, was zionist persecution, just to end in a country where that persecution was supported actively by some high profile politicians. I am not going to say that murder is right, but some how it had to feel for him as if that anti palestinian israely persecution had reappeared very near to his home.

From that point of view, he wasn't a refuge anymore; the country where he was living had become an acomplice of that persecution.

Maybe, if Robert Kennedy had considered a less bellicist way to support Israel, like sending military support without delivering neither the means nor the command decissions to the government of Israel, but keeping it in the hand of the U.S., who knows.

Pear Conference , says: June 4, 2018 at 8:25 am
This article doesn't quite try to justify Oswald's or Sirhan's actions. But it places them firmly in a political context rather than a criminal one.

It also suggests that JFK and RFK both went too far – that they "hurled themselves into the most tumultuous and divisive issues of their time" and thus bear a degree of responsibility for their own fates.

If we want to debate the merits of arming Israel, or undermining Cuba, then let's have that debate. But this is altogether the wrong way to frame it. I, for one, don't ever want the Overton window on such issues to be shifted by the acts, or even the potential acts, of an assassin.

TTT , says: June 4, 2018 at 9:05 am
Israel twice begged Jordan not to join the war that it was already fighting with Egypt and Syria – a war of aggression and genocide, where Nasser boasted of the impending total destruction of Israel, Egyptian state media spoke of a road from Tel Aviv to Cairo paved in Jewish skulls, and Israel's rabbinate consecrated national parks in case they had to be used for Jewish mass graves.

Sirhan Sirhan's entire identity was wrapped up in the frustrated need for Jewish servitude and inferiority, the bitterness that a second Holocaust had failed. He was exactly like the Klan cops in Philadelphia, Mississippi, murdering Freedom Riders who tried to deprive them of their most cherished resource: assured superiority over their traditional designated victim group.

JLF , says: June 4, 2018 at 10:16 am
Hinted at but ignored is another aspect by which 1968 presaged 2018. In 1968 Bobby Kennedy waited until after Gene McCarthy had challenged LBJ and LBJ had withdrawn from the race before entering. For many (most?) McCarthy backers, Kennedy was an opportunistic, privileged spoiler. In the same way, many of Bernie Sanders' supporters looked upon Hillary Clinton as the privileged spoiler of a Democratic Party establishment that had tried and failed to move the party to the right. The McGovern was followed by Carter, who was followed by Mondale, who was followed by Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, and Hillary. For Democrats, then, it's been fifty years of struggling to find a center, a struggle Republicans pretty much found in Ronald Reagan.
Donald , says: June 4, 2018 at 2:23 pm
The only way one can defend Israel's apartheid policies is by demonizing all of their victims. For examples, see TTT and Northern Observer.
mrscracker , says: June 4, 2018 at 2:27 pm
John Wilkes Booth was wrapped up in bitterness, defeat & a warped loyalty to his homeland, too. It's interesting I guess to examine assassins' motives, but to what point?
Sean , says: June 4, 2018 at 2:33 pm
Northern Observer, someday Israel will go the way of Rhodesia if it's lucky. Many believe Israel orchestrated JFK's death; he insisted on inspecting Dimona for nuclear weapon development.
Going My Way , says: June 4, 2018 at 3:09 pm
Let the many who criticize TAC for not printing pro Israeli essays read this one. Also, read the numerous blogs supporting this thrust. The "small nation" phrase was a tip-off to the author's loyalties. I think this article is more worthy of the New York Times. Let us not forget June 8, 1967, is another anniversary, when the sophisticated and unmarked aircraft and PT boats using napalm of the author's "small nation" attacked the USS Liberty in international water, with complete disregard to the ship's American markings and large US flag. http://www.gtr5.com/ This event received scant coverage on P19 of the aforementioned NYT. "Small nation"; indeed!
TTT , says: June 4, 2018 at 4:01 pm
The only way one can defend Israel's apartheid policies is by demonizing all of their victims.

Sirhan Sirhan is Jordanian – a nation that was invented specifically to be an apartheid state with no Jews at all, forever closed to Jewish inhabitation or immigration. That is his view of normalcy. I'm sorry it's also yours.

Steve Naidamast , says: June 4, 2018 at 4:19 pm
This is pure bunk. The idea that Sirhan Sirhan was the assassin of RFK has been categorically disproven by the analysis of the fatal bullets, which none of came from Sirhan's gun. And RFKs friends and close advisors all knew that he had no love for Israel. Whatever he said in support of Israel was for the media purposes only.
General Manager , says: June 4, 2018 at 4:27 pm
Having worked in Jordan and watched Israelis do business and as tourists (Jewish shrines) there, I saw and heard no antisemitism. From my perspective, there seemed to be a positive relationship. Elat and Aqaba are like sister cities. In fact, there seemed to be high-level cooperation. Keep looking you will find bigotry to justify your positions.
Someone in the crowd , says: June 4, 2018 at 5:56 pm
I completely agree with Steve Naidamast. This article is indeed "pure bunk" because Sirhan Sirhan is a side story. That's why this article, with such an angle, should simply never have been published.
Banger , says: June 4, 2018 at 8:29 pm
If you look at actual evidence in the case you would understand that Sirhan did not and could not have killed Sen. Kennedy. Just look at autopsy report and it says he was killed by bullets fired and virtual point blank range from below and the back of the head. In addition, sound analysis proves that there were 13 shots fired but the alleged murder weapon only held 8 shots. So let's stop this charade.
John Jeffery , says: June 4, 2018 at 9:49 pm
A laughably naive article which toes the CIA and Zionist line.
Donald , says: June 4, 2018 at 9:52 pm
TTT -- yo weren't just talking about Sirhan. I wasn't talking about him at all. I have no sympathy for people who practice terrorism, whether it is done by Palestinians, Jordanians, or the IDF.

[Jun 04, 2018] Ryan Dawson And Michael Collins Piper Israel And JFK

Notable quotes:
"... Final Judgement: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination was originally published 20 years ago in January. Michael Collins Piper in this book argued that the Israelis killed Kennedy. Vanunu endorsed Piper's book. ..."
"... A JFK researcher once wrote that Piper was on to something in his research linking Israel to the assassination of President. But he said that we had to proceed with caution. Because to be accused of anti-Semitism is about the same as being accused of being a child molester. ..."
Jan 24, 2014 | fromthetrenchesworldreport.com

Mordecai Vanunu was the original whistleblower. In 1986 he told the world that Israel had nuclear weapons publishing photos of the secret Dimona works in the British press. He said Prime Minister Ben Gurion ordered the assassination of JFK because the President opposed Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons. Ben Gurion resigned in protest over JFK's Israeli policies. Vanunu also wrote a letter in 1997 saying that there was even a link between the assassination of Kennedy and Israel's launching of the 1967 war.

Final Judgement: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination was originally published 20 years ago in January. Michael Collins Piper in this book argued that the Israelis killed Kennedy. Vanunu endorsed Piper's book.

The Oliver Stone movie JFK was the kosher version of the assassination. Piper does not dispute that Clay Shaw had connections to the CIA. But the film neglects Shaw's connections to the heart of the Israeli nuclear program. He was on the Board of Directors of Permindex, a Swiss assassination bureau. Permindex is an Israeli front and were not run by the CIA as Oliver Stone had said. A primary shareholder in Permindex was the Banque De Credit International of Geneva, founded by Tibor Rosenbaum, an arms procurer and financier for the Mossad. That bank was used by Meyer Lansky to launder hot money. Permindex was owned by CMC of Rome, which was founded by a Hungarian Jew named George Mandel who had deep connections with Israel and the Mossad. Mandel was the first man to start rumors about Auschwitz being a death camp. The Chairman of the Board at Permindex was Louis Bloomfield, a Canadian Jew and close associate of Edgar Bronfman. He also had long standing connections with the Rothschilds dating back before WW II.

The Stern family funded Clay Shaw's defense. They can be traced back to the Purple Gang of Detroit. The Stern family owned WDSU radio and TV stations in New Orleans. They ran stories on Lee Harvey Oswald who was a member of an FBI front group called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This gave Oswald the cover of being a Leftist while spying on American liberals. The Stern family was heavily invested in the NUMEC nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, which was the source of Israel's first nuclear bomb. NUMEC also dumped nuclear waste in Pennsylvania.

Piper said Clay Shaw might have had more to do with CIA-Mossad attempts to assassinate Charles De Gaulle than he did with the assassination of President Kennedy.

Ed Asner played Guy Bannister, the private detective, in the movie JFK. Bannister was a good friend ofKent and Phoebe Courtney. Bannister and the Courtneys were active in conservative politics. But the Courtneys did frustrate the work of people on the Right that the Anti-Defamation League did not like. Joe Pesci played David Ferrie in the movie JFK. He was a pilot and a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald. Bannister, Ferrie and Oswald spied on Leftists in New Orleans. Guy Bannister also was a friend of Botnick who was the head of the New Orleans of ADL office. The Courtneys, Bannister, Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald were actively spying on Leftists in New Orleans for the ADL and Botnick.

The producer of JFK was the Israel spy Arnon Milchan who sold nuclear triggers to Israel. A J Weberman, an Israeli citizen, was the first to say that District Attorney Jim Garrison had an unpublished manuscript that charged Israel was behind the assassination of President Kennedy.

John King offered Jim Garrison a judgeship to stop his investigation of Clay Shaw. King was a business partner of Bernie Cornfeld whose Investors Overseas Service was a 2.5 billion dollar fraud. It was a subsidiary of Permindex and was linked to Tibor Rosenbaum and the Mossad.

The London Jewish Chronicle denounced President Kennedy's UN delegation position that displaced Palestinians had the right to return to the land that Israel had illegally taken from them during the 1948 war. The Jewish Chronicle published this in London on November 22, 1963.

Adlai Stevenson, a former Presidential candidate, was the American UN ambassador at the time. Stevenson's son was also a Senator and opposed Israel's excesses. He was critical of Israel sinking the USS Liberty in the 1967 war, which killed 34 American sailors.

Lyndon Johnson said he wanted the USS Liberty to sink to the bottom of the Mediterranean even while the Israelis were attacking the ship. LBJ was sleeping with a former Irgun terrorist, Mathilde Krim. Her husband was one of LBJ's many Jewish advisers.

A JFK researcher once wrote that Piper was on to something in his research linking Israel to the assassination of President. But he said that we had to proceed with caution. Because to be accused of anti-Semitism is about the same as being accused of being a child molester.

.... ...

[Jun 04, 2018] Was LBJ Shacked up with a pretty Zionist when Israel attacked the USS Liberty?

Sep 19, 2014 | truthscooper.wordpress.com

The suggestion that LBJ was shacked up with a Zionist when Israel attacked and tried to sink the USS Liberty in 1967 is not used here as a metaphor, as in "strange bedfellows;" it is meant literally as in shacked up. You see, he was 'close friends" with Arthur and Mathilde Krim and Johnson even built a little cottage on his ranch called "Mathilde's house." No one has a tape of Johnson's doings in his bedroom that night, with the possible exception of J Edgar Hoover, who was famous for such things, and Hoover's secretary destroyed "those" files when he died.

We know LBJ had a different mistress , and in his usual crude manner said he could shall we say "get more sex" than JFK. So was he shacked up with the pretty Zionist or not? You will have to judge on probabilities. In a way, that is not is the big scandal, anyway.

The big scandal is that Israel attacked the USS Liberty as a false flag, to blame it on Egypt at the start of the Six Day War and thus draw the U.S. in openly on Israel's side. The big scandal is that LBJ ordered other ships to NOT help them and 34 men died in a vicious attack that, save for a miracle, did NOT send the ship to the bottom of the sea, killing all on board.

[Jun 04, 2018] Links between LBJ and Mathilde Krim by Philip Weiss

Was she genially attracted to Johnson, or she was on "special mission"?
This "pretty woman" was a former member of Irgun, no more no less: "Danon spent his time "recruiting and carrying out secret Irgun operations throughout Western Europe," and his wife used her bicycle to transport explosives across international borders bound for the Irgun in Palestine– "a seemingly innocent petite and pretty blonde out for a bicycle ride," Neff says."
Also: "At the University of Geneva, Mathilde was a brilliant student of biology and genetics. Appalled by newsreels of Nazi concentration camps in 1945, she sought out Jewish activists, joined the Zionist underground Irgun and spent a summer smuggling guns over the French border for resistance [ sic ] fighters against British rule in Palestine." "Mathilde became so enamored of the Jewish struggle and of Danon's daring undercover operations in Europe that she converted to Judaism and married Danon. Then she, too, became an Irgun agent."
If we approach JFK assassination from cue bono principle it is clear the Israel can be viewed as a few beneficiaries of his death. Especially taking into account the level of Links of LBJ and Israel lobby.
Notable quotes:
"... Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days that Changed the Middle East ..."
"... The Samson Option ..."
Jan 18, 2018 | mondoweiss.net

Originally from: The not-so-secret life of Mathilde Krim by Philip Weiss

On January 15, Mathilde Krim, a scientist and socialite, died on Long Island at 91, and the obituaries described her courageous leadership in the fight against AIDS. Krim was incensed by the widespread stigmatization of AIDS victims as somehow deserving the disease, and she worked to lift prejudice that kept our society from taking the illness seriously. (I saw her work for myself, attending a fundraiser at her East Side townhouse back in the 90's).

What the news has not told you about is Krim's other great achievement: helping to swing the White House to Israel's side in the 1960's. The no-daylight policy of U.S. alignment with the Israeli government, so obvious today in Trump's deference to Netanyahu, was born under Mathilde Krim's dear friend Lyndon Johnson. In the feverish weeks surrounding the 1967 war, Krim, who had once emigrated to Israel, and her husband Arthur, a leading fundraiser, were continually at Johnson's side, and advised him on what to say publicly.

"Johnson was the pivotal president for our relationship with Israel and I think Mathilde Krim's sway over Johnson was such that it turned the entire relationship, allowing Israel to continue on, especially after the Six Day War, in a manner that defied not only the U.N. but the whole world with regard to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians," says Martin Brod, a retired systems analyst in New York who has long studied the role of Israel's American friends in cementing the special relationship. Here is that story.

Mathilde Krim was a person of depth, intrigue and compassion. Born Mathilde Galland in 1926 in Italy to parents of Swiss, Italian and Austrian background, she moved with her family to Switzerland as a girl and went on to be a brilliant student, earning a Ph. D. in genetics from the University of Geneva.

When she learned about the Holocaust as a teenager, Krim identified with Jews. She felt as she did for AIDS victims 40 years on, a need to protect them against bigotry, abandonment, and rejection from the wider community.

These feelings led Krim to support Zionist militants during and after the war. The New York Times obituary by Robert D. McFadden includes one reference to her Zionist zeal:

Appalled by newsreels of Nazi concentration camps in 1945, she sought out Jewish activists, joined the Zionist underground Irgun and spent a summer smuggling guns over the French border for resistance fighters against British rule in Palestine.

After earning a bachelor's degree in 1948, she married an Irgun comrade, David Danon, a Bulgarian medical student, and converted to Judaism.

Danon had been exiled by the British from Palestine for his Irgun activities, and Krim saw him as a "dashing and heroic figure" dedicated to a noble cause that had used terrorism to achieve its ends, she said in an interview with the late Donald Neff, a former Time Magazine correspondent, for his book Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days that Changed the Middle East (1984).

Krim said she was moved by the "despair" of the Zionists. The blowing up of the King David Hotel in 1946 and the assassination of Lord Moyne in 1944 "represented the depth of the convictions of Danon and the Irgunists, the measure of both their commitment and their despair," Neff related. Danon spent his time "recruiting and carrying out secret Irgun operations throughout Western Europe," and his wife used her bicycle to transport explosives across international borders bound for the Irgun in Palestine– "a seemingly innocent petite and pretty blonde out for a bicycle ride," Neff says.

Mathilde Krim in the lab, undated photo

She and Danon had a daughter and moved to Israel in 1953, but there the marriage ended, and Krim didn't stay an Israeli that long either. She was working as a geneticist at the Weizmann Institute south of Tel Aviv when board member Arthur Krim came to visit. Arthur was a leading entertainment lawyer and studio executive, a former chairman of United Artists and Orion Pictures, and assiduously political. He was an adviser to several Democratic presidents due to his fundraising network, backing traditional Jewish causes: Israel and the U.S. civil rights movement.

"The story was that the head of the Weizmann Institute introduced Mathilde to Arthur Krim, suggesting that he might find her interesting because she spoke many languages and was a very attractive woman," Brod says. "It developed into a romance after she showed him around the institute."

Arthur and Mathilde Krim with President Kennedy, May 1962, at the Krim residence in NY. Photo by Cecil Stoughton.

The two married in 1958, when Mathilde was 32 and Arthur was 48. Mathilde soon moved to New York, and went to work at Sloan Kettering as a researcher. And Arthur became chair of the Democratic National Finance Committee.

Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday, Mr. President in Madison Square Garden in 1962.

It was on that account that Mathilde formed one of the most important relationships of her life. In May 1962 Arthur Krim helped assemble Hollywood names for the famous fundraising gala at the Madison Square Garden at which Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday, Mr. President to Jack Kennedy (a few months before her death). The after-party was held at the Krim mansion, Mathilde Krim related later in an interview with the LBJ Library; and Vice President Lyndon Johnson was an outsider at the party. Mathilde empathized with Johnson and befriended him as he sat on a staircase.

I think he was a great man, that's the best word. And he was imposing. He was not only physically an imposing man, and great. He had a great heart, he had a great intelligence, and he put them both to work, in fantastic ways.

Brod believes that Mathilde Krim was strategic in forming the friendship.

From the day they first met which was at the party for JFK at the Krim residence in the city– from that day forward she speaks proudly of having nurtured a relationship with Johnson because Johnson was not part of the JFK inner circle. I don't think it was an accident that she approached Johnson and developed this ongoing relationship. I have a feeling that from her entry into the United States if not before there was a plan of how she could best serve Israel and she began serving them when she was living in Switzerland in her first marriage and her work with the Stern gang. She had a strong stomach to involve herself with that kind of terror, and she certainly lived up to it here.

The transition from Kennedy to Johnson in 1963 was an important moment in the history of the special relationship.

Kennedy had bridled at the pro-Israel influence. In 1960, his campaign was in trouble when a group of Jewish leaders gave him $500,000 at the Pierre Hotel in New York, and then "interrogated Kennedy stringently on matters affecting Jews and Israel," (as Abba Eban later related ). "As an American citizen [Kennedy] was outraged" by the effort to take "control" of JFK's Middle East policy, his friend the newspaperman Charles Bartlett told Seymour Hersh.

As president, Kennedy maintained some distance from the Israeli government. He supported the right of return of Palestinian refugees and vigorously opposed Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons. The CIA had obtained evidence of the Israeli nuclear project in the desert at Dimona– claimed to be a fabric factory, Brod says– and in the year before he was assassinated, Kennedy had pushed Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his successor, Levi Eshkol, to account for the activities.

His successor had fewer scruples about backing Israel. Johnson's political career was interwoven with Jews, as his wife later reflected, and he saw that nuclear nonproliferation "made for bad politics," as Hersh says in The Samson Option , because it alienated the Jewish community. Johnson ultimately suppressed intelligence reports that Israel was becoming a nuclear power. "By 1968, the President had no intention of doing anything to stop the Israeli bomb," Hersh writes.

Mathilde Krim dances with Johnson at January 20, 1965, inaugural ball following his reelection in 1964.

Mathilde Krim was undoubtedly a factor in that policymaking. Throughout his presidency, the Krims were among Johnson's very closest friends. They had a room in the White House and built a house on Lake Lyndon B. Johnson in the Texas hill country so as to be near his ranch in Stonewall when he was on vacation there. Johnson stayed at their house in New York.

It has been suggested that Mathilde Krim was LBJ's lover. "It was a barely hidden secret in leading government circles in Israel and the United States at the time that Mrs. Krim was extremely close to Lyndon Johnson," Helena Cobban wrote in her blogpost on Krim last week. While Brod points out that Johnson was a "competitive womanizer," according to his aide Bill Moyers, and certainly the president had social opportunities alone with Mathilde Krim.

Mathilde Krim and Lady Bird Johnson with President Johnson in a helicopter en route to the LBJ Ranch from the Krim Ranch, November 1966. Photo by Mike Geissinger of the White House.

But the essence of the relationship was political; and the Krims' influence was apparent throughout the days leading up to the 1967 war, when Johnson signaled to Israel that it had a yellow light to go ahead with the war, a signal "tantamount to a green one," in the view of scholar William Quandt, as it let the Israelis know that the U.S. would not condemn them for launching the war, and if they got into trouble the US would come to their side.

Mathilde Krim was a "key channel" for the Israelis to signal their plans to Johnson and to get signals in return, Cobban writes:

The huge role that Mrs. Krim played in 1967 is well-known to everyone who has seriously studied US-Israeli relations at that time. After all, she was an integral part of a well-oiled pro-Israeli influence movement at the heart of the US political system, and the DC-Tel Aviv signaling process that she was part of worked strongly in Israel's favor to transform not just the Middle East but the whole shape of global politics.

Donald Neff also says that Mathilde Krim's influence swayed American policy: Johnson "left himself more open to a passionately partisan voice than was prudent or even healthy during the accelerating crisis."

Neff's book documents Mathilde Krim's steady presence at Johnson's side that spring. Ten days before the war began, Johnson spent Memorial Day weekend 1967 at his ranch in Texas with the Krims, and regularly received communications about the mounting crisis in the Middle East from Eshkol with the Krims close at hand.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, Arthur Krim, A.W. Moursund, Lady Bird Johnson, Mathilde Krim. At a ranch near Kingsland, Texas, April 13, 1968. White House photo by Mike Geissinger.

"We talked with him all the time about Israel," Krim told Neff. Johnson admired the Israelis because he was a rancher dealing with dry land, she said, and "he had an entirely emotional liking for Jews, for what they had suffered, for the way they had been discriminated against, as he felt he had been discriminated against by the Eastern Establishment."

On June 3, the following Saturday night, the Krims were Johnson's company at a fundraiser at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, intended in part to shore up his support in the Jewish community. Arthur Krim hosted the fundraiser; and Johnson sat between Mathilde Krim and Mary Lasker, another huge contributor to the party (and widow of Albert Lasker, an Israel backer). The legendary fundraiser Abe Feinberg was there, and served as a conduit for the Israeli war plans, reports William Quandt in his book Peace Process .

"[H]e leaned over and whispered in his ear: 'Mr President, it can't be held any longer. It's going to be within the next twenty-four hours."

Two days later, on the morning of June 5, Mathilde Krim was in her bed in her room on the third floor of the White House when Johnson came in to tell her the war had begun. In his book 1967, Tom Segev reported that Johnson was accompanied by two security men and that Krim opened the door in her nightgown. Johnson said, "We are at war," then turned around and left. According to Segev, Johnson was angry. "Until the end of his life he viewed the war as a mistake." (That regret about the war seems to be footnoted by Segev to former national security adviser Walt Rostow's archive).

Later that afternoon, the Jewish community was angered when State Department spokesperson Robert J. McCloskey said at a press conference: "Our position is neutral in thought, word and deed." The statement suggested that the U.S. would do to Israel what it had done under Eisenhower in 1956, and force the country to withdraw from lands it seized in war.

Over the next few days Johnson came under intense pressure to deny McCloskey's assertion. "Seldom, if ever, had a president been subjected or allowed himself to be subjected, to such a concerted campaign as Lyndon Johnson that Wednesday. It was all pro-Israel; Arabs seemed to have no advocates," Neff notes acidly.

Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas phoned Johnson, and Mathilde Krim dictated memos to the president, urging him to repair the damage that McCloskey had done with Jewish Americans.
In one memo that LBJ later read to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Krim called on the president to make a speech calling "for a permanent peace settlement." Those words meant that the U.S. would not demand an Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories.

In another memo, Krim told the president he did not understand "the resentment still lingering [among Jews] after the McCloskey statement" and the political dangers inherent. She channeled the Israelis and American Jews:

"There are reports of very strong anti-American feelings in Israel -- that Israelis feel they have won the war not with the U.S. but despite the U.S. In the Jewish community it is very difficult to explain the coincidence of the statement and the beginning of hostilities. The Jews are a people with a persecution complex and they understood the statement of the State Dept. to mean that in an hour of gravest danger to them that this country disengaged itself That is why they reacted so violently

"There is great danger that the Jewish rally to be held tomorrow in Lafayette Square here will be anti-Johnson, rather than a pro-Israel demonstration. Even Minister [Ephraim] Evron [at the Israeli embassy] says things are going out of hand."

She advised Johnson that he could "salvage" the situation if he made a "very strong statement." Krim then went back to New York City, but her last call to the White House June 7 was at a minute before midnight, Neff reports.

She was back at Johnson's side on the weekend, which he spent at Camp David preparing a speech that he would give on Monday, June 12, "which was to establish the nation's official policy in the Middle East," Neff says. Johnson read drafts of his speech Saturday night at dinner with the Krims and others, "inserting additions and making changes, also accepting comments and suggestions from all at the table," according to notes in the Presidential Daily Diary. Also commenting at that dinner: Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt. Such was Mathilde Krim's status.

Johnson gave the speech on Monday morning, and issued five principles of peace in the region, beginning with "security for all nations in the region." And though the list included "justice for the refugees," Johnson did not call on Israel to withdraw– not till all principles were attained.

[Jun 03, 2018] Did Israel Kill the Kennedys by Laurent Guyénot

The most valuable part is the comments. They, while biased, given a very good overview of the complexity of the issues and the US political system and political clans that seen power within it.
I think more powerful interests the Israel were involved. Israel would never do this on their own. Now more then 50 years after JFK assassination I have suspicion that probably this murder will never be solved although several plausible hypothesis were already establish (the role on LBJ and CIA, especially Angleton, are two most prominent). The theory tht Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin theory is discredited, but there is no consensus about what should replace it other then consensus that CIA played an important role and there was understand that LBJ will cover this up.
A really interesting quote from comments: " I think Gary Wean was correct, there was a plot to stage a fake assassination attempt on JFK within which the actual assassination was hidden, presumably overseen by Angleton. Too many who knew better were looking the other way, and their effective complicity made them very interested in a cover up.
Notable quotes:
"... In March 1964, he had a face-to-face conversation with mobster Jimmy Hoffa, his sworn enemy, whom he had battled for ten years ..."
"... Robert also asked his friend Daniel Moynihan to search for any complicity in the Secret Service, responsible for the President's security ..."
"... And of course, Robert suspected Johnson, whom he had always mistrusted, as Jeff Shesol documents in Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade (1997). ..."
"... Robert also contacted a former MI6 officer who had been a friend of his family when his father was Ambassador in London. This British retired officer in turn contacted some trusted friends in France, and arrangements were made for two French Intelligence operatives to conduct, over a three-year period, a quiet investigation that involved hundreds of interviews in the United States. Their report, replete with innuendo about Lyndon Johnson and right-wing Texas oil barons, was delivered to Bobby Kennedy only months before his own assassination in June of 1968. ..."
"... "President Kennedy's assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick, complete with accessories and fake mirrors, and when the curtain fell, the actors, and even the scenery disappeared. [ ] the plotters were correct when they guessed that their crime would be concealed by shadows and silences, that it would be blamed on a 'madman' and negligence." ..."
"... Garrison was allowed to view Abraham Zapruder's amateur film, confiscated by the FBI on the day of the assassination. This film, despite evident tampering, shows that the fatal shot came from the "grassy knoll" well in front of the President, not from the School Book Depository located behind him, where Oswald was supposed to be shooting from. ..."
"... He refrained from openly supporting Garrison, believing that since the outcome of the investigation was uncertain, it could jeopardize his plans to reopen the case later, and even weaken his chances of election by construing his motivation as a family feud. ..."
"... In conclusion, there can be little doubt that, had he been elected president, Robert Kennedy would have done everything possible to reopen the case of his brother's assassination, in one way or another. This fact certainly did not escape John's murderers. They had no other option but to stop him. This first conclusion is a sufficient reason to conduct a comparative analysis of both Kennedy assassinations, in search of some converging clues that might lead us to the trail of a common mastermind. We begin with Robert's assassination. ..."
"... Even if we assume that Sirhan did kill Robert Kennedy, a second aspect of the case raises question: according to several witnesses, Sirhan seemed to be in a state of trance during the shooting. ..."
"... In 2008, Harvard University professor Daniel Brown, a noted expert in hypnosis and trauma memory loss, interviewed Sirhan for a total of 60 hours, and concluded that Sirhan, whom he classifies in the category of "high hypnotizables," acted unvoluntarily under the effect of hypnotic suggestion: "His firing of the gun was neither under his voluntary control, nor done with conscious knowledge, but is likely a product of automatic hypnotic behavior and coercive control." [17] Jacqui Goddard, "Sirhan Sirhan, assassin of Robert F.Kennedy, launches new campaign for freedom 42 years later," The Telegraph, December 3, 2011, on www.telegraph.co.uk/search/ ..."
"... We know that in the 1960s, American military agencies were experimenting on mental control. Dr Sidney Gottlieb, son of Hungarian Jews, directed the infamous CIA MKUltra project, which, among other things, were to answer questions such as: "Can a person under hypnosis be forced to commit murder?" according to a declassified document dated May 1951. [18] Colin Ross, Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists , Manitou Communications, 2000,summary on www.wanttoknow.info/bluebird10pg ..."
"... hypnotize him into becoming ..."
"... programmed killer" ..."
"... If Sirhan was hypnotically programmed, the question is: Who had some interest in having a visceral anti-Zionist Palestinian blamed for the killing of Robert Kennedy? Israel, of course. But then, we are faced with a dilemma, for why would Israel want to kill Robert Kennedy if Robert Kennedy was supportive of Israel, as the mainstream narrative goes? ..."
"... Robert had not been, in his brother's government, a particularly pro-Israel Attorney General: He had infuriated Zionist leaders by supporting an investigation led by Senator William Fulbright of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations aimed at registering the American Zionist Council as a "foreign agent" subject to the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would had considerably hindered its efficiency (after 1963, the AZD escaped this procedure by changing its status and renaming itself AIPAC) [21] The Israel Lobby Archive, www.irmep.org/ila/forrel/ . ..."
"... Robert Kennedy's death had not been a bad thing for the precious "American-Israeli relationship." Rather, it was a great loss for the Arab world, where Bobby was mourned just as had his brother John before him. ..."
"... But there is plenty of evidence that Angleton, who was also the head of the CIA "Israel Office," was a Mossad mole. According to his biographer Tom Mangold, "Angleton's closest professional friends overseas [ ] came from the Mossad and [ ] he was held in immense esteem by his Israeli colleagues and by the state of Israel, which was to award him profound honors after his death." [24] Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: the CIA's Master Spy Hunter, Simon & Schuster, 1991, p. 318. No less that two monuments were dedicated to him at memorial services in Israel during ceremonies attended by chiefs of Israeli Intelligence and even a future Prime Minister. [25] Michael Howard Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of COunterintelligence, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008, p. 153. ..."
"... Oswald's assassin is known as Jack Ruby, but few people know that his real name was Jacob Leon Rubenstein, and that he was the son of Jewish Polish immigrants. Ruby was a member of the Jewish underworld. He was a friend of Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen, whom he had known and admired since 1946. ..."
"... there is a direct line connecting Jack Ruby, via Mickey Cohen, to the Israeli terrorist ring, and in particular to Menachem Begin, a specialist in false flag terror. We also know that Ruby phoned Al Gruber, a Mickey Cohen associate, just after Oswald's arrest; no doubt he received then "an offer he couldn't refuse," as they say in the underworld. ..."
"... a single bullet supposed to have caused seven wounds to Kennedy and John Connally sitting before him in the limousine, and later found in pristine condition on a gurney in Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. ..."
"... Five months later, Kennedy's death relieved Israel of all pressure (diplomatic or otherwise) to stop its nuclear program. Faced with Johnson's complete lack of interest in that issue, John McCone resigned from the CIA in 1965, declaring: "When I cannot get the President to read my reports, then it's time to go." ..."
"... Kennedy's determination to stop Israel's Dimona project was only part of the "Kennedy problem". During his first months in the White House, Kennedy committed himself by letters to Nasser and other Arab heads of State to support UN Resolution 194 for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. Ben-Gurion reacted with a letter to the Israeli ambassador in Washington, intended to be circulated among Jewish American leaders, in which he stated: ..."
"... "Israel will regard this plan as a more serious danger to her existence than all the threats of the Arab dictators and Kings, than all the Arab armies, than all of Nasser's missiles and his Soviet MIGs. [ ] Israel will fight against this implementation down to the last man.'" [43] Quoted in George and Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment: America's Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present , W.W. Norton & Co., 1992, p. 51. ..."
"... After Kennedy's death, American foreign policy was reversed again, without the American public being aware of it. Johnson cut the economic aid to Egypt, and increased the military aid to Israel, which reached 92 million dollars in 1966, more than the total of all previous years combined. ..."
"... Several investigators have identified Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy's vice-president, as the mastermind of the Kennedy assassination. It is, at least, beyond doubt that the plotters acted with the foreknowledge that Johnson, who automatically stepped in as head of State after Kennedy's death, would cover them. ..."
"... Johnson's privileged control over the Navy is an important aspect of the case because the Navy was critical in the setting up and in the cover-up of the plot. ..."
"... Lee Harvey Oswald had been recruited by the Navy and not by the CIA. He was a Marine, and as a Marine he had worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). ..."
"... at the Naval Hospital in Washington, under the control of Navy officers, that Kennedy's autopsy was performed, after his body had been literally stolen at gunpoint from Parkland Hospital in Dallas. The report of this autopsy stated that the fatal bullet had entered the back of Kennedy's skull, which contradicted the testimonies of twenty-one members of the Dallas hospital staff who saw two entry bullet-wounds on the front of Kennedy's body. This was critical because Oswald was presumably shooting from behind Kennedy, and could not possibly have caused these bullet wounds. ..."
"... It is noteworthy that Johnson had actually taken advantage of his connections in the Navy to participate in the greatest corruption case ever recorded at that time. His accomplice Fred Korth was forced to resign as Navy Secretary in November 1963, only weeks before the Dallas coup, after the Justice Department headed by Robert Kennedy had implicated him in a fraud involving a $7 billion contract for the construction of 1,700 TFX military aircraft by General Dynamics, a Texan company. Johnson's personal secretary, Bobby Baker, was charged in the same case. ..."
"... Because of this mounting scandal and other suspicions of corruption, Kennedy was determined to change Vice-President for his upcoming reelection campaign. ..."
"... President's visit, Nixon publicized the rumor of Johnson's removal, and the Dallas Morning News was reporting on November 22 nd : "Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson." Instead, Johnson became president that very day. ..."
"... According to his biographer Robert Caro, Johnson was a man thirsting "for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will." ..."
"... Jack Ruby, whom Nixon identified a one of "Johnson's boys," according to former Nixon operative Roger Stone ..."
"... He said that feared that his act would be used "to create some falsehood about some of the Jewish faith," but added that "maybe something can be saved [ ], if our President, Lyndon Johnson, knew the truth from me." [49] Read Ruby's deposition on jfkmurdersolved.com/ruby.htm With such words, Ruby seems to be trying to send a message to Johnson through the Commission, or rather a warning that he might spill the beans about Israel's involvement if Johnson did not intervene in his favor. We get the impression that Ruby expected Johnson to pardon him. ..."
"... It is on record, thanks to Kennedy insider Arthur Schlesinger ( A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House, 1965), that the two men who convinced Kennedy to take Johnson as his running mate, were Philip Graham and Joseph Alsop, respectively publisher and columnist of the Washington Post , and strong supporters of Israel. ..."
"... Thanks to JFK's death, Israel was also able to carry out its plan to annex Palestinian territories beyond the boundaries imposed by the United Nations Partition plan. By leaning on Pentagon and CIA hawks, Johnson intensified the Cold War and created the climate of tension which Israel needed in order to demonize Egyptian president Nasser and reinforce its own stature as indispensable ally in the Middle East. ..."
"... During the Six Day War of 1967, Israel managed to triple its territory, while creating the illusion of acting in legitimate defense. The lie could not deceive American Intelligence agencies, but Johnson had given a green light to Israel's attack, and even authorized James Angleton of the CIA to give Israel the precise positions of the Egyptian air bases, which enabled Israel to destroy them in just a few hours. ..."
"... Meanwhile, Johnson, from the White House, intervened personally to prohibit the nearby Sixth Fleet from rescuing the USS Liberty after the crew, despite the initial destruction of its transmitters, had managed to send off an SOS. ..."
"... The USS Liberty affair was suppressed by a commission of inquiry headed by Admiral John Sidney McCain II, Commander-in-Chief of US Naval Forces in Europe (and Father of Arizona Senator John McCain III). Johnson accepted Israel's spurious "targeting error" explanation. In January 1968 he invited the Israeli Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, to Washington, and warmly welcomed him to his Texas ranch. What's more, Johnson rewarded Israel by lifting the embargo on offensive military equipment: US-made tanks and aircraft immediately flowed to Tel Aviv. ..."
"... Let's now conclude our overview of the evidence: beside the fact that John and Robert were brothers, their assassinations have at least two things in common: Lyndon Johnson and Israel. ..."
"... Laurent Guyénot is the author of JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State , Progressive Press, 2014 , and From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land Clash of Civilizations , 2018. ($30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, POB 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556). ..."
"... With my limited studies on the JFK murder I came to the same conclusion: Piper was essentially correct, but you fill up the case of Robert Kennedy in a convincing way. Maybe Meyer Lansky could be mentioned, he probably had some role. But the issue was the bomb. ..."
"... I think Gary Wean was correct, there was a plot to stage a fake assassination attempt on JFK within which the actual assassination was hidden, presumably overseen by Angleton. Too many who knew better were looking the other way, and their effective complicity made them very interested in a cover up. ..."
"... Israel was created by the British oligarchs as a bridgehead in the Middle East. Furthering Israel was/is furthering the interests of those oligarchs (who ran the British Empire which morphed to the Anglo-American Empire). JFK was critical of Israel. If someone killed him, it the Anglo-American deep state. Israel likely pulled the trigger. Let's remember what the fake father of Modern Zionism who admired Cecil Rhodes, Theodor Herl said: "England will get ten million agents for her greatness and influence." ..."
"... In spite of the mendacious narrative regurgitated in the West about the war of 1967, it was Israel who planned and attacked its neighbors. The seizing of the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza were objectives Israel couldn't achieve in 1948 and deterring Nasser, an objective failed in 1956. The only problem Israel had was: would another US President intervene. Norman Finkelstein, who's research on 1967 is to date unchallenged successfully, showed that Israel sent diplomats to Washington ..."
"... Cuba casinos and crime were run by Meyer Lansky. You immediately get the Israel connection as he was a great fried of Israel. Cuban gangsters are implied in the conspiracy to kill JFK, but that is a link to the theory of Piper. To find the high level perpetrators it is only enough to ask what important US politics changed when LBJ become the President. Towards Cuba or gangsters, no. ..."
"... Did Israel kill the Kennedys? It is entirely possible. In fact, any conspiracy theory that links the murders that does not see the Israelis and American Jews involved is almost certainly a waste of time. But here is what is essential: if Israel and/or American Jews 'did it,' you can bet your every penny and the lives of your children, spouse, and siblings that America's WASP Deep State was behind it all. ..."
"... This article is simply bizarre. If the CIA didn't do it why is it still sanitizing the files 55 years later? ..."
"... LBJ's negotiation with Warren is a matter of historical record. He told Warren that if he didn't stick with the official bullshit story, Cuba's responsibility would lead to war entailing nuclear war with Russia. ..."
"... John, Robert and Ted Kennedy were all extremely friendly to Israel and extremely supportive of the interests of diaspora Jews. They led the Democratic Party away from the old-left emphasis on economic justice and peace, towards the new-left emphasis on issues of race and sex. ..."
"... They weakened the labor unions with their campaign against the Teamsters, they supported tax cuts for the very wealthy, their support for increased immigration was hostile to the economic interests of the American working class, and they supported an intensification of the cold war against the Soviet Union. They even knowingly lied about an imaginary "missile gap", in order to present the Democratic Party as more hawkish than Eisenhower's Republicans. ..."
"... In response to the Suez Crisis, Khrushchev's Soviet Union definitively became the patron of Israel's Arab enemies. Simultaneously, Khrushchev was overseeing a Thermidorian reaction against the excesses of early Bolshevism in eastern Europe. Stalin was denounced, Matyas Rakosi was exiled, Kaganovich was purged from the Politburo, Solzhenitsyn was released from the gulags, and the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries were treated less harshly than they would have been in the days of Lenin and Trotsky. A new Bukharinite, almost semi-nationalist, form of communism developed in eastern Europe – far less deadly, and with jobs and patronage more fairly distributed among the various ethnicities ..."
"... I have no desire to defend the Jews, or Judaism, or Zionism, or the State of Israel, but the charges that they were involved with the Kennedy assassinations are completely without merit and ought to be repugnant to decent people. The fact that they were directly responsible for the attack on the USS Liberty is more than enough reason to despise the Israelis; they do not need to be beaten with every club or charged with every crime. To do so is vindictive and paranoid and shameful, and I cannot be sanguine about the motives of those who would whip themselves and others into such a frenzy. ..."
"... Here's Mathilde Krim with a soirée of Fine Folks to include LBJ & Lady Bird. She certainly made the rounds. Definitely an Intelligence Operative considering her prodigious network of contacts ..."
"... Not Israel exactly but the banker clans that created Israel with US wealth and still own monopolies in banking, media, and drugs legal and illegal. Kennedy was put in office because they thought he was just a skirt chasing son of a bootlegger that would not interfere with the Globalist agenda. Kind of like Bill Clinton. Then he starts talking about "secret societies" and backing off the constant war agenda. And he fostered a trusting relationship with Russia, trying to really be president. He is the last one to try that. ..."
"... I recently bought a book about Lansky's Havana operations from Cuba. Before the revolution by Castro Lansky run the crime empire there. It is also written of his connections to Israel, which you can check even from Wikipedia. We all get our information from books and documents. This book was rather OK concerning facts. Lansky lost a lot when Castro came to power. In 1963 Lansky had a very good reason to want the USA to attack Cuba to gain his empire. Besides, he run the USA organized crime at that time and had reasons not to like Kennedys actions against organized crime. ..."
"... Behind the JFK and RFK assassinations is the Allen Dulles gang: Richard Helms, David Atlee Phillips, and James Jesus Angleton. ..."
"... Oswald was a CIA asset since his time as Marine serving at the US Atsugi base in Japan. Researcher HP Albarelli connects Oswald to right-wing Agency operative and pedophile David Ferrie as far back as the early 1950s. Oswald was also part of Angleton's false defector program, which inserted him into the USSR in the late 1950s. ..."
"... The willingness of so many revisionists to make saints out of the Kennedys -- which on any objective reading they clearly were not -- is by itself sufficient to discover the all-too-human wellsprings of their motivation. You have a beef with Israel, with the CIA, with Lyndon Johnson, with the whole American Deep State. I get that; I'm no fan of these people, either. But I'm not going to pervert my entire view of history so as to cast them in the role of the eternal villain. Self-deception is not only bad for your psychological health, it's also very politically inexpedient. You will never accomplish anything by this method. ..."
"... Garbage. Oswald was impersonated in Mexico. He didn't try to kill Walker. ..."
"... The most likely scenario is of course that the assassinations met the needs of not only Israel/Mossad, but of the U.S. oligarchs/Wall Street, European oligarchs, and the U.S. deep state forces of the CIA/Pentagon. It isn't an "either/or" with the Mossad vs the CIA as to who is the culprit, but rather that everyone benefited by these assassinations. From the U.S. Joint Chiefs who wanted to end JFK's efforts to stop the Cold War, to Mossad who wanted carte blanche Israeli power in the Middle East AND the bomb, to the CIA which most definitely did not want to be "splintered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds" – you have a set of powerful interests that converge and all benefit by these deaths. ..."
"... The whole debate of whether Israel is the tail wagging the dog misses the point that the very creation of Israel was all about helping the Western colonial powers maintain neo-colonial power in the Middle East as their former colonies were being liberated post-WWII. ..."
"... all these parties not only benefited, but also knew each other's secrets and operated in coordination to make these events happen, and to sew intrigue and endless questions in their wake. ..."
"... the CIA had planned a faked failed assassination coup to force JFK into acting against Castro, but was double-crossed. This fits the scenario which I also believe for 9/11. http://rockthetruth.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-911-triple-cross.html And I liked Janney's book. ..."
"... Next we have to look what changed in the US policy after the successful assassination, since it had to have some goal. The USA did not attack Cuba, so that was not the goal. The USA forgot Israel's nuclear bomb project, so that was the goal. (Go through the other alternatives and discard.) ..."
"... Because local Jews & pro-Israel bunch are not equivalent to "deep state". It is true that Zionist Jews are now more influential than ever, but they do not "own" US nor direct most currents of US policy. Being 2% of US population, Jews are perhaps 20-25% among American elites (which, evidently, is not the majority), and most of them are liberals who are not involved in shaping of American middle east politics. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld . were/are American imperialists, and not some Jewish puppets. ..."
"... It is bizarre to consider that Israelis would even think of, let alone try to execute US president, just because he gave them slap on the wrist at some point. ..."
"... And, in 1963, Zionist Jews (and all US Jews) were much less influential then today, after 5 decades that have, beginning with counter-cultural 60s, multiculturalism & Vietnam war, transformed US beyond recognition. Back in 50s/early 60s they had just wanted to assimilate into society as quickly as possible & minimize traces of their ethnic identity, while Israel was a schnorrer, beggar economy trying to survive & keep a low profile. ..."
"... That Golda Meir or Ben Gurion would even contemplate anything similar is simply weird: https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-golda-meir-had-doubts-on-kennedy-death-1.5292291 ..."
"... According to Stephen Green, for the purposes of this internal memorandum, Kent defined "acquisition" by Israel as either (a) a detonation of a nuclear device with or without the possession of actual nuclear weapons, or (b) an announcement by Israel that it possessed nuclear weapons, even without testing. Kent's primary conclusion was that an Israeli bomb would cause 'substantial damage to the U.S. and Western position in the Arab world. ..."
"... Thus it was that John F. Kennedy informed Israel, in no uncertain terms, that he intended – first and foremost – to place America's interests – not Israel's interests – at the center of U.S. Middle East policy. ..."
"... Here's just one example of the CIA trying to clean out the jewish Israeli agents at the CIA. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/355/661/500422/ ..."
"... JFK was killed by somebody. This somebody had power to modify Audiograph data in 1970ies. This data was available to CIA, FBI and the Warren Commission members, maybe also to others. CIA had dealings with mafia concerning assassination of Castro. The mafia that had been in Havana was Lansky's mafia. Thus, CIA had dealings with Lansky's gangsters. Dulles, LBJ and Angleton did not like JFK's policies, especially towards Israel. Israel was weak at that time, but had friends in the US, like Lansky, Angleton, LBJ, Dulles. Together these might have pulled the assassination, but even together they could not make the coverup by media. There had to be media and the US media has a tendency to silence one topic only. No President can control the media, the CIA can influence, but not control, mafia cannot control media. Only one power can do it and does it. ..."
"... [It's not good commenting policy to produce a continuing series of lengthy totally unsourced excerpts, spread over series of different comments, which makes it difficult for others to avoid them. They have now been consolidated, but you should stop this sort of bad behavior.] ..."
"... In case of JFK it is pretty obvious that Israel was the greatest beneficiary of his death because of JFK determination to stop Israel's nuclear program. Some correspondence of JFK with PM's of Israel is available on line. Israel defense doctrine was formulate to be based on what later was called Samson Option. In 1963 Israel still cooperated with France on its secret nuclear program. ..."
"... JFK definitively was set on stopping Israel nuclear program which Israel was conducting in secret cooperation with France. After strong letter on May 18, 163 letter PM Ben Gurion preferred to resign than to answer the letter ..."
"... During that same 1962-63 period Senator William J. Fulbright of Arkansas, Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, convened hearings on the legal status of the American Zionist Council (AZC). The Committee uncovered evidence that the Jewish Agency, a predecessor to the state of Israel, operated a massive network of financial "conduits" which funnelled funds to U.S. Israel lobby groups. As a result, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) ordered the AZC to openly register and disclose all of its foreign funded lobbying activity in the United States. The attempt was subsequently thwarted first by the Israel lobby itself and then by the death of President Kennedy which lead to growing concerns regarding the impact of the ever-growing Zionist influence on U.S. policy making decisions. On April 15, 1973, Fulbright -- who lost his Senate seat the following year -- had no qualms about boldly announcing on CBS Face the Nation that : "Israel controls the U.S. Senate. The Senate is subservient, much too much; we should be more concerned about U.S. interests rather than doing the bidding of Israel. The great majority of the Senate of the U.S. -- somewhere around 80% -- is completely in support of Israel; anything Israel wants; Israel gets. This has been demonstrated time and again, and this has made [foreign policy] difficult for our government." ..."
"... While it is quite plausible that the Zionist entity and the CIA regime have congruent criminal interests, this is not what Guyanot theorizes. He imagines a CIA that sets up all the preconditions for a coup, without actually meaning to go through with it, and a foreign devil that unexpectedly takes it all and runs with it. That's idiotic. It also happens to be CIA's boilerplate excuse for all their grave crimes. There's nothing new up there. What's worse, it's plagiarized from Langley fops and jarheads. It's not just stupid, but stupid in a telltale way. ..."
Jun 03, 2018 | www.unz.com

... ... ...

As Lance deHaven-Smith has remarked in Conspiracy Theory in America:

"It is seldom considered that the Kennedy assassinations might have been serial murders. In fact, in speaking about the murders, Americans rarely use the plural, 'Kennedy assassinations'. [ ] Clearly, this quirk in the Kennedy assassination(s) lexicon reflects an unconscious effort by journalists, politicians, and millions of ordinary Americans to avoid thinking about the two assassinations together, despite the fact that the victims are connected in countless ways." [1] Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America , University of Texas Press, 2013,kindle 284-292.

John and Robert were bound by an unshakable loyalty. Kennedy biographers have stressed the absolute dedication of Robert to his elder brother. Robert had successfully managed John's campaign for the Senate in 1952, then his presidential campaign in 1960. John made him not only his Attorney General, but also his most trusted adviser, even on matters of Foreign or Military affairs. What John appreciated most in Robert was his sense of justice and the rectitude of his moral judgment. It is Robert, for example, who encouraged John to fully endorse the cause of the Blacks' civil rights movement [2] John Lewis' testimony is in the PBS documentary American Experience Robert F. Kennedy. .

Given this exceptional bond between the Kennedy brothers, what is the probability that the two Kennedy assassinations were unrelated? Rather, we should start with the assumption that they are related. Basic common sense suggests that the Kennedy brothers have been killed by the same force, and for the same motives. It is, at least, a logical working hypothesis that Robert was eliminated from the presidential race because he had to be prevented from reaching a position where he could reopen the case of his brother's death. Both his loyalty to his brother's memory, and his obsession with justice, made it predictable that, if he reached the White House, he would do just that. But was there, in 1968, any clear indication that he would?

Did Bobby plan to reopen the investigation on his brother's assassination?

The question has been positively answered by David Talbot in his book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years , published in 2007 by Simon & Schuster. Robert had never believed in the Warren Report's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin of his brother. Knowing too well what to expect from Johnson, he had refused to testify before the Warren Commission. When its report came out, he had no choice but to publicly endorse it, but "privately he was dismissive of it," as his son Robert Kennedy, Jr. remembers [3] Associated Press, "RFK children speak about JFK assassination," January 12, 2013, on www.usatoday.com . To close friends who wondered why he wouldn't voice his doubt, he said: "there's nothing I can do about it. Not now." [4] David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years , Simon & Schuster, 2007, p. 278-280, 305.

From 22 November 1963, Robert was alienated and monitored by Johnson and Hoover. Although still Attorney General, he knew he was powerless against the forces that had killed his brother. Yet he lost no time beginning his own investigation; he first asked CIA director John McCone, a Kennedy friend, to find out if the Agency had anything to do with the plot, and came out convinced that it hadn't. In March 1964, he had a face-to-face conversation with mobster Jimmy Hoffa, his sworn enemy, whom he had battled for ten years, and whom he suspected of having taken revenge on his brother. Robert also asked his friend Daniel Moynihan to search for any complicity in the Secret Service, responsible for the President's security [5] David Talbot, Brothers, op. cit. , 2007, p. 21-22. . And of course, Robert suspected Johnson, whom he had always mistrusted, as Jeff Shesol documents in Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade (1997).

In fact, a mere week after JFK's death, November 29, 1963, Bill Walton, a friend of the Kennedys, travelled to Moscow and passed to Nikita Khrushchev, via a trusted agent who had already carried secret communications between Khrushchev and John Kennedy, a message from Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy; according to the memo found in the Soviet archives in the 90s by Alexandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali ( One Hell of a Gamble , 1998), Robert and Jackie wanted to inform the Soviet Premier that they believed John Kennedy had been "the victim of a right-wing conspiracy," and that "the cooling that might occur in U.S.-Soviet relations because of Johnson would not last forever." [6] David Talbot, Brothers, op. cit., p. 25-7.

ORDER IT NOW

Robert also contacted a former MI6 officer who had been a friend of his family when his father was Ambassador in London. This British retired officer in turn contacted some trusted friends in France, and arrangements were made for two French Intelligence operatives to conduct, over a three-year period, a quiet investigation that involved hundreds of interviews in the United States. Their report, replete with innuendo about Lyndon Johnson and right-wing Texas oil barons, was delivered to Bobby Kennedy only months before his own assassination in June of 1968. After Bobby's death, the last surviving brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, showed no interest in the material. The investigators then hired a French writer by the name of Hervé Lamarr to fashion the material into a book, under the pseudonym of James Hepburn. The book was first published in French under the title L'Amérique brűle, and was translated under the title Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK . Its conclusion is worth quoting:

"President Kennedy's assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick, complete with accessories and fake mirrors, and when the curtain fell, the actors, and even the scenery disappeared. [ ] the plotters were correct when they guessed that their crime would be concealed by shadows and silences, that it would be blamed on a 'madman' and negligence." [7] James Hepburn, Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK, Penmarin Books, 2002, p. 269.

Robert had planned to run for the American Presidency in 1972, but the escalation of the Vietnam War precipitated his decision to run in 1968. Another factor may have been the opening of the investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in 1967. Garrison was allowed to view Abraham Zapruder's amateur film, confiscated by the FBI on the day of the assassination. This film, despite evident tampering, shows that the fatal shot came from the "grassy knoll" well in front of the President, not from the School Book Depository located behind him, where Oswald was supposed to be shooting from.

When talk of the investigation began, Kennedy asked one of his closest advisors, Frank Mankievitch, to follow its developments, "so if it gets to a point where I can do something about this, you can tell me what I need to know." He confided to his friend William Attwood, then editor of Look magazine, that he, like Garrison, suspected a conspiracy, "but I can't do anything until we get control of the White House." [8] David Talbot, Brothers, op. cit., p. 312-314. He refrained from openly supporting Garrison, believing that since the outcome of the investigation was uncertain, it could jeopardize his plans to reopen the case later, and even weaken his chances of election by construing his motivation as a family feud.

In conclusion, there can be little doubt that, had he been elected president, Robert Kennedy would have done everything possible to reopen the case of his brother's assassination, in one way or another. This fact certainly did not escape John's murderers. They had no other option but to stop him. This first conclusion is a sufficient reason to conduct a comparative analysis of both Kennedy assassinations, in search of some converging clues that might lead us to the trail of a common mastermind. We begin with Robert's assassination.

Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian motivated by hatred of Israel?

Just hours after Robert's assassination, the press was able to inform the American people, not only of the identity of the assassin, but also of his motive, and even of his detailed biography. [9] Extract of TV news in the documentary film Evidence of Revision: Part 4: The RFK assassination as never seen before , 01:11:42 Twenty-four-year-old Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was born in Jordania, and had moved to the United States when his family was expelled from West Jerusalem in 1948. After the shooting, a newspaper clipping was found in Sirhan's pocket, quoting favorable comments made by Robert regarding Israel and, in particular, what sounded like an electoral commitment: "The United States should without delay sell Israel the 50 Phantom jets she has so long been promised." Handwritten notes by Sirhan found in a notebook at his home confirmed that his act had been premeditated and motivated by his hatred of Israel.

That became the story line of the mainstream media from day one. Jerry Cohen of the Los Angeles Times wrote a front page article, saying that Sirhan is "described by acquaintances as a 'virulent' anti-Israeli," (Cohen changed that into "virulent anti-semite" in an article for the The Salt Lake Tribune ), and that: " Investigation and disclosures from persons who knew him best revealed [him] as a young man with a supreme hatred for the state of Israel." Cohen infers that "Senator Kennedy [ ] became a personification of that hatred because of his recent pro-Israeli statements." Cohen further revealed that:

"About three weeks ago the young Jordanian refugee accused of shooting Sen. Robert Kennedy wrote a memo to himself, [ ] The memo said: 'Kennedy must be assassinated before June 5, 1968' -- the first anniversary of the six-day war in which Israel humiliated three Arab neighbors, Egypt, Syria and Jordan." [10] Jerry Cohen, "Yorty Reveals That Suspect's Memo Set Deadline for Death," Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1968, pages 1 and 12, on latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2008/06/june-6-1968.html. Jerry Cohen, "Jerusalem-Born Suspect Called An Anti-Semite," The Salt Lake Tribune , June 6, 1968, on www.newspapers.com. See also Harry Rosenthal, "Senator Kennedy's support for Israel promoted decision declares Sirhan," The Telegraph, March 5, 1969, on news.google.com

After September 11, 2001, the tragedy of Robert's assassination was installed into the Neocon mythology of the Clash of Civilizations and the War on Terror the story. Sirhan became a precursor of Islamic terrorism on the American soil. In a book entitled The Forgotten Terrorist, Mel Ayton, who specializes in debunking conspiracy theories, claims to present "a wealth of evidence about [Sirhan's] fanatical Palestinian nationalism," and to demonstrate that "Sirhan was the lone assassin whose politically motivated act was a forerunner of present-day terrorism" (as written on the back cover).

In 2008, on the 40 th anniversary of Robert's death, Sasha Issenberg of the Boston Globe recalled that the death of Robert Kennedy was "a first taste of Mideast terror." He quotes Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz (best known as Jonathan Pollard's lawyer), as saying:

"I thought of it as an act of violence motivated by hatred of Israel and of anybody who supported Israel. [ ] It was in some ways the beginning of Islamic terrorism in America. It was the first shot. A lot of us didn't recognize it at the time." [11] Sasha Issenberg, "Slaying gave US a first taste of Mideast terror," Boston Globe, June 5, 2008, on www.boston.com

The fact that Sirhan was from a Christian family was lost on Dershowitz. The Jewish Forward took care to mention it on the same occasion, only to add that Islamic fanaticism ran in his veins anyway:

"But what he shared with his Muslim cousins -- the perpetrators of September 11 -- was a visceral, irrational hatred of Israel. It drove him to murder a man whom some still believe might have been the greatest hope of an earlier generation."

" Robert Kennedy was the first American victim of modern Arab terrorism," the Forward journalist hammered; "Sirhan hated Kennedy because he had supported Israel." [12] Jeffrey Salkin, "Remember What Bobby Kennedy Died For," Forward.com, June 5, 2008. Also Michael Fischbach, "First Shot in Terror War Killed RFK," Los Angeles Times, June 02, 2003, on articles.latimes.com

This leitmotiv of the public discourse begs the question: Was Bobby really a supporter of Israel? But before we answer that question, there is on more pressing one:

Did Sirhan really kill Bobby?

If we trust official statements and mainstream news, the assassination of Robert Kennedy is an open-and-shut case. The identity of the killer suffers no discussion, since he was arrested on the spot, with the smoking gun in his hand. In reality, ballistic and forensic evidence show that none of Sirhan's bullets hit Kennedy.

According to the autopsy report of Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Thomas Noguchi, Robert Kennedy died of a gunshot wound to the brain, fired from behind the right ear at point blank range, following an upward angle. Nogushi restated his conclusion in his 1983 memoirs, Coroner . Yet the sworn testimony of twelve shooting witnesses established that Robert had never turned his back on Sirhan and that Sirhan was five to six feet away from his target when he fired.

Tallying all the bullet impacts in the pantry, and those that wounded five people around Kennedy, it has been estimated that at least twelve bullets were fired, while Sirhan's gun carried only eight. On April 23, 2011, attorneys William Pepper and his associate, Laurie Dusek, gathered all this evidence and more in a 58-page file submitted to the Court of California, asking that Sirhan's case be reopened. They documented major irregularities in the 1968 trial, including the fact that the bullet tested in laboratory to be compared to the the one extracted from Robert's brain had not been shot by Sirhan's revolver, but by another gun, with a different serial number; thus, instead of incriminating Sirhan, the ballistic test in fact proved him innocent. Pepper has also provided a computer analysis of audio recordings during the shooting, made by engineer Philip Van Praag in 2008, which confirms that two guns are heard. [13] Frank Morales, "The Assassination of RFK: A Time for Justice!" June 16, 2012, on www.globalresearch.ca; watch on YouTube, "RFK Assassination 40 th Anniversary (2008) Paul Schrade on CNN."

The presence of a second shooter was signaled by several witnesses and reported on the same day by a few news media. There are strong suspicions that the second shooter was Thane Eugene Cesar, a security guard hired for the evening, who was stuck behind Kennedy at the moment of the shooting, and seen with his pistol drawn by several witnesses. One of them, Don Schulman, positively saw him fire. Cesar was never investigated, even though he did not conceal his hatred for the Kennedys, who according to his recorded statement, had "sold the country down the road to the commies." [14] Philip Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations On the Conspiracy And Cover-Up, S.P.I. Books , 1994, p. 25. For a full overview, watch Shane O'Sullivan's 2007 investigative documentary RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy. For more detail, read his book Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy , Union Square Press, 2008. See also Don Schulman's testimony in The Second Gun (1973), from 42 min 40.

Even if we assume that Sirhan did kill Robert Kennedy, a second aspect of the case raises question: according to several witnesses, Sirhan seemed to be in a state of trance during the shooting. More importantly, Sirhan has always claimed, and continues to claim, that he has never had any recollection of his act:

"I was told by my attorney that I shot and killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy and that to deny this would be completely futile, [but] I had and continue to have no memory of the shooting of Senator Kennedy."

He also claims to have no memory of "many things and incidents which took place in the weeks leading up to the shooting." [15] In a parole hearing in 2011, failing to convince the judges for the fourteenth time. Watch on YouTube, "Sirhan Sirhan Denied Parole": www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsm1hKPI9EU Some repetitive lines written of a notebook found in Sirhan's bedroom, which Sirhan recognizes as his own handwriting but does not remember writing, are reminiscent of automatic writing. [16] Shane O'Sullivan, Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy , Union Square Press, 2008, p. 5, 44, 103.

Psychiatric expertise, including lie-detector tests, have confirmed that Sirhan's amnesia is not faked. In 2008, Harvard University professor Daniel Brown, a noted expert in hypnosis and trauma memory loss, interviewed Sirhan for a total of 60 hours, and concluded that Sirhan, whom he classifies in the category of "high hypnotizables," acted unvoluntarily under the effect of hypnotic suggestion: "His firing of the gun was neither under his voluntary control, nor done with conscious knowledge, but is likely a product of automatic hypnotic behavior and coercive control." [17] Jacqui Goddard, "Sirhan Sirhan, assassin of Robert F.Kennedy, launches new campaign for freedom 42 years later," The Telegraph, December 3, 2011, on www.telegraph.co.uk/search/

We know that in the 1960s, American military agencies were experimenting on mental control. Dr Sidney Gottlieb, son of Hungarian Jews, directed the infamous CIA MKUltra project, which, among other things, were to answer questions such as: "Can a person under hypnosis be forced to commit murder?" according to a declassified document dated May 1951. [18] Colin Ross, Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists , Manitou Communications, 2000,summary on www.wanttoknow.info/bluebird10pg According to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, author of Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (Random House, 2018), in 1968, an Israeli military psychologist by the name of Benjamin Shalit had concocted a plan to take a Palestinian prisoner and " brainwash and hypnotize him into becoming a programmed killer" aimed at Yasser Arafat. [19] David B. Green, "Brainwashing and Cross-dressing: Israel's Assassination Program Laid Bare in Shocking Detail," Haaretz, February 5, 2018.

If Sirhan was hypnotically programmed, the question is: Who had some interest in having a visceral anti-Zionist Palestinian blamed for the killing of Robert Kennedy? Israel, of course. But then, we are faced with a dilemma, for why would Israel want to kill Robert Kennedy if Robert Kennedy was supportive of Israel, as the mainstream narrative goes?

Was Robert Kennedy really a friend of Israel?

The dilemma rests on a misleading assumption, which is part of the deception. In fact, Robert Kennedy was definitely not pro-Israel. He was simply campaigning in 1968. As everyone knows, a few good wishes and empty promises to Israel are an inescapable ritual in such circumstances. And Robert's statement in an Oregon synagogue, mentioned in the May 27 Pasadena Independent Star-News article found in Sirhan's pocket, didn't exceed the minimal requirements. Its author David Lawrence had, in an earlier article entitled "Paradoxical Bob," underlined how little credit should be given to such electoral promises: "Presidential candidates are out to get votes and some of them do not realize their own inconsistencies."

All things considered, there is no ground for believing that Robert Kennedy would have been, as president of the US, particularly Israel-friendly. The Kennedy family, proudly Irish and Catholic, was known for its hostility to Jewish influence in politics, a classic theme of anti-Kennedy literature, best represented by the 1996 book by Ronald Kessler with the highly suggestive title, The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded. [20] Ronald Kessler, The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996.

Robert had not been, in his brother's government, a particularly pro-Israel Attorney General: He had infuriated Zionist leaders by supporting an investigation led by Senator William Fulbright of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations aimed at registering the American Zionist Council as a "foreign agent" subject to the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would had considerably hindered its efficiency (after 1963, the AZD escaped this procedure by changing its status and renaming itself AIPAC) [21] The Israel Lobby Archive, www.irmep.org/ila/forrel/ .

In conclusion, it is only with outstanding hypocrisy that The Jewish Daily Forward could write, on the 40th anniversary of Bobby's death:

"In remembering Bobby Kennedy, let us remember not just what he lived for, but also what he died for -- namely, the precious nature of the American-Israeli relationship." [22] Jeffrey Salkin, "Remember What Bobby Kennedy Died For , " op. cit. .

Robert Kennedy's death had not been a bad thing for the precious "American-Israeli relationship." Rather, it was a great loss for the Arab world, where Bobby was mourned just as had his brother John before him.

Of course, the fact that the Zionist media lied when granting Robert Kennedy some posthumous certificate of good will toward Israel, and thereby provided Israel with a fake alibi, is not a sufficient reason for concluding that Israel murdered Robert. Even the fact that the masterminds of the plot chose as their programmed instrument an anti-Zionist Palestinian, and thereby stirred a strong anti-Palestinian feeling among Americans at the same time as getting rid of Robert, does not prove that Israel was involved. What is still lacking for a serious presumption is a plausible motive.

The motive of Robert's assassination must be found, not in what Robert publicly declared in an Oregon synagogue during his presidential campaign, but rather in what he confided only to his most close friends: his intention to reopen the investigation on his brother's death. Our next question, therefore, is: What would an unbiased investigation, conducted under the supervision of Robert in the White House, have revealed?

Did the CIA assassinate Kennedy?

It is obvious to anybody just vaguely informed that a genuine investigation would first establish that Oswald was a mere "patsy" , as he said himself, a scapegoat prepared in advance to be blamed for the crime and then be slaughtered without a trial. We will not here review the evidence that contradicts the official thesis of the lone gunman. It can be found in numerous books and documentary films.

Just as notorious is the theory that the plot to kill Kennedy originated from a secret network within the CIA, in collusion with extremist elements in the Pentagon. That conspiracy theory looms the largest in books, articles and films that have been produced since John Kennedy died.

That CIA-Pentagon theory, as I will call it (add the military-industrial complex if you wish) has a major flaw in the motive ascribed to the killers: besides getting rid of Kennedy, the theory goes, the aim was to create a pretext for invading Cuba, something the CIA had always pushed for and Kennedy had refused to do (the Bay of Pigs fiasco). With Oswald groomed as a pro-Castro communist, the Dallas shooting was staged as a false flag attack to be blamed on Cuba. But then, why did no invasion of Cuba followed Kennedy's assassination? Why was the pro-Castro Oswald abandoned by the Warren Commission in favor of the lone nut Oswald? Those who address the question, like James Douglass in his JFK and the Unspeakable , credit Johnson with preventing the invasion. Johnson, we are led to understand, had nothing to do with the assassination plot, and thwarted the plotters' ultimate aim to start World War III. This is to ignore the tremendous amount of evidence accumulated against Johnson for fifty years, and documented in such groundbreaking books as Phillip Nelson's LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK's Assassination (2010) or Roger Stone's The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ (2013).

Another weakness in the CIA-Pentagon theory is the lack of agreement about the mastermind of the plot. In fact, one of the names that comes up most often is James Jesus Angleton, the head of Counter-Intelligence within the CIA, about whom Professor John Newman writes in Oswald and the CIA :

"In my view, whoever Oswald's direct handler or handlers were, we must now seriously consider the possibility that Angleton was probably their general manager. No one else in the Agency had the access, the authority, and the diabolically ingenious mind to manage this sophisticated plot." [23] Michael Collins Piper, False Flag, op. cit., p. 78.

But there is plenty of evidence that Angleton, who was also the head of the CIA "Israel Office," was a Mossad mole. According to his biographer Tom Mangold, "Angleton's closest professional friends overseas [ ] came from the Mossad and [ ] he was held in immense esteem by his Israeli colleagues and by the state of Israel, which was to award him profound honors after his death." [24] Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: the CIA's Master Spy Hunter, Simon & Schuster, 1991, p. 318. No less that two monuments were dedicated to him at memorial services in Israel during ceremonies attended by chiefs of Israeli Intelligence and even a future Prime Minister. [25] Michael Howard Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of COunterintelligence, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008, p. 153.

Another aspect must be taken into account: if the trail of the CIA is such a well-trodden path among Kennedy researchers, it is because it has been cut and marked by the mainstream media themselves, as well as by Hollywood. And that began even before the assassination, on October 3, 1963, with an article by the New York Times' chief Washington correspondent Arthur Krock. The article denounced the CIA's "unrestrained thirst for power" and quotidian unnamed "very high official" who claimed that the White House could not control the CIA, and that:

"If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the Government, it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon. The agency represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone." [26] "Assassination studies Kennedy knew a coup was coming," on Youtube. Image of Arthur Krock's article is shown on www.youtube.com/watch?v=snE161QnL1U at 1:36.

In such a way, The New York Times was planting a sign, a month and a half before the Dallas killing, pointing to the CIA as the most likely instigator of the upcoming coup. The sign said: "The President is going to fall victim of a coup, and it will come from the CIA."

One month after Kennedy's assassination, it was the turn of the Washington Post to use a very similar trick, by publishing an op-ed signed by Harry Truman, in which the former president said he was "disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment." "I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations," at the point of becoming across the globe "a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue [ ] there are now some searching questions that need to be answered." [27] "Harry Truman Writes: Limit CIA Role to Intelligence," Washington Post, December 22, 1963, quoted in Mark Lane, Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK , Skyhorse Publishing, 2011 , p. 246. Truman was hinting at the CIA's role in toppling foreign governments and assassinating elected leaders abroad. But given the timing of his article, one month to the day after Dallas, it could only be understood by anyone with ears to hear, and at least subliminally by the rest, as an indictment of the CIA in the Kennedy assassination. This article, widely reprinted in the 1970s after the creation of the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, is regarded as Truman's whistleblowing. Yet its mea culpa style is quite unlike Truman; that is because it was not written by Truman, but by his longtime assistant and ghostwriter, a Russian born Jew named David Noyes, whom Sidney Krasnoff calls "Truman's alter ego" in his book, Truman and Noyes: Story of a President's Alter Ego (1997). Truman probably never saw the article prior to its publication in the Washington Post morning edition, but he may be responsible for its deletion from the afternoon print runs. [28] Thomas Troy, "Truman on CIA," September 22, 1993, on www.cia.gov ; Sidney Krasnoff, Truman and Noyes: Story of a President's Alter Ego, Jonathan Stuart Press, 1997.

So the two most influential American newspapers, while ostensibly defending the official theory of the lone gunman, have planted directional signs pointing to the CIA. Most Kennedy truthers have followed the signs with enthusiasm.

In the 70s, the mainstream media and publishing industry played again a major role in steering conspiracy theorists toward the CIA, while avoiding any hint of Israeli involvement. One major contributor to that effort was A. J. Weberman, with his 1975 book Coup d'État in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, co-authored by Michael Canfield . According to the New York Jewish Daily Forward (December 28, 2012), Weberman had "immigrated to Israel in 1959 and has dual American-Israeli citizenship," and is "a close associate of Jewish Defense Organization founder Mordechai Levy, whose fringe group is a spin-off of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane's militant right-wing Jewish Defense League." Weberman acknowledged Neocon Richard Perle's assistance in his investigation. [29] Michael Collins Piper, False Flags: Template for Terror, American Free Press, 2013, p. 67. The Weberman-Canfield book contributed to the momentum that led the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to reinvestigate in 1976 the murders of JFK and Dr. Martin Luther King.

It is also in this context that Newsweek journalist Edward Jay Epstein published an interview of George De Mohrenschildt, a Russian geologist and consultant for Texan oilmen who had befriended Oswald and his Russian wife in Dallas in 1962. In this interview, De Mohrenschildt admitted that Oswald had been introduced to him at the instigation of Dallas CIA agent J. Walton Moore. [30] James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, Touchstone, 2008 , p. 46. That piece of information is dubious for several reasons: First, Moore was officially FBI rather than CIA. Second, De Mohrenschildt was in no position to confirm or deny the words that Epstein ascribed to him: he was found dead a few hours after giving the interview. In fact, De Mohrenschildt's interview published by Epstein contradicts De Mohrenschildt's own manuscript account of his relationship to Oswald, revealed after his death. [31] George de Mohrenschilldt, I am a Patsy! on jfkassassination.net/russ/jfkinfo4/jfk12/hscapatsy.htm De Mohrenschildt's death was ruled a suicide. The Sheriff's report mentions that in his last months he complained that "the Jews" and "the Jewish mafia" were out to get him. [32] Read the Sheriff's Office report on mcadams.posc.mu.edu/death2.txt Needless to say, Epstein didn't mention anything about this. More suspicions arise from the fact that Epstein's main source for his 1978 book, Legend: the Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald , was James Jesus Angleton, who was actively spreading disinformation at the time of the HSCA, defending the theory that Oswald was a KGB agent with CIA connections.

That Israeli agents have been instrumental in spreading conspiracy theories targeting the CIA is also evidenced by Oliver Stone's film JFK released in 1991, starring Kevin Costner in the role of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. This film, which shook public opinion to the point of motivating the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, was produced by Arnon Milchan, described in a 2011 biography as being from his youth "one of the most important covert agents that Israeli intelligence has ever fielded," involved in arms smuggling from the US to Israel. [33] Meir Doron, Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon – Arnon Milchan , Gefen Books, 2011, p. xi. In 2013 Milchan publicly revealed his extended activity as a secret agent of Israel, working in particular to boost Israel's nuclear program. [34] Stuart Winer, "Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan reveals past as secret agent," The Times of Israel, November 25, 2013, on www.timesofisrael.com ; Meir Doron, Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon – Arnon Milchan , Gefen Books, 2011, p. xi It is therefore no wonder that Stone's film gives no hint of the Mossad connection that Garrison stumbled upon.

Who killed JFK?

By a strange paradox, the authors who stand for the consensual conspiracy theory of a CIA plot against Kennedy build their case on the biography of Oswald, while at the same time claiming that Oswald had almost nothing to do with the killing. If Oswald was "just a patsy," as he publicly claimed, the quest for the real culprits must logically begin by investigating the man who silenced Oswald.

Oswald's assassin is known as Jack Ruby, but few people know that his real name was Jacob Leon Rubenstein, and that he was the son of Jewish Polish immigrants. Ruby was a member of the Jewish underworld. He was a friend of Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen, whom he had known and admired since 1946. Cohen was the successor of the famed Benjamin Siegelbaum, aka Bugsy Siegel, one of the bosses of Murder Incorporated . Cohen was infatuated with the Zionist cause, as he explained in his memoirs: "Now I got so engrossed with Israel that I actually pushed aside a lot of my activities and done nothing but what was involved with this Irgun war". [35] Mickey Cohen, In My Own Words , Prentice-Hall, 1975, p. 91-92. Mickey Cohen was in contact with Menachem Begin, the former Irgun chief, with whom he even "spent a lot of time," according to Gary Wean, former detective sergeant for the Los Angeles Police Department. So there is a direct line connecting Jack Ruby, via Mickey Cohen, to the Israeli terrorist ring, and in particular to Menachem Begin, a specialist in false flag terror. We also know that Ruby phoned Al Gruber, a Mickey Cohen associate, just after Oswald's arrest; no doubt he received then "an offer he couldn't refuse," as they say in the underworld. [36] Michael Collins Piper, Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy , American Free Press, 6 th ed., ebook 2005, p. 133-155, 226. Ruby's defense lawyer William Kunstler wrote in his memoirs that Ruby told him he had killed Oswald "for the Jews," and Ruby's rabbi Hillel Silverman received the same confession when visiting Ruby in jail. [37] William Kunstler, My Life as a Radical Lawyer , Carol Publishing, 1994, p. 158; Steve North, "Lee Harvey Oswald's Killer 'Jack Ruby' Came From Strong Jewish Background," The Forward , November 17, 2013, on forward.com

That is not all. At every levels of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, we also find the fingerprints of the Israeli deep state. JFK's trip to Dallas, being officially "non political," was sponsored by a powerful business group known as the Dallas Citizens Council, dominated by Julius Schepps, "a wholesale liquor distributor, member of every synagogue in town, and de facto leader of the Jewish community," as described by Bryan Edward Stone in The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas. [38] Bryan Edward Stone, The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas, University of Texas Press, 2010, p. 200. Kennedy was on his way to the reception organized in his honor when he was shot.

The "host committee" inviting Kennedy was chaired by another influential figure of the wealthy Jewish community in Dallas: advertising executive and PR man Sam Bloom. According to former British Intelligence Officer Colonel John Hughes-Wilson, it was Bloom who suggested to the Police "that they move the alleged assassin [Oswald] from the Dallas police station to the Dallas County Jail in order to give the newsmen a good story and pictures." Oswald was shot by Ruby during this transfert. Hughes-Wilson adds that, "when the police later searched Ruby's home, they found a slip of paper with Bloom's name, address and telephone number on it." [39] John Hughes-Wilson, JFK-An American Coup d'État: The Truth Behind the Kennedy Assassination, John Blake, 2014.

After the Dallas tragedy, Israel's sayanim were also busy fabricating the official lie. Apart from its chairman Earl Warren, chosen for his figurative role as Chief Justice, all key people in the investigative Commission were either personal enemies of Kennedy -- like Allen Dulles, the CIA director fired by Kennedy in 1961 -- or ardent Zionists. The man who played the key role in fabricating the government lie purveyed by the Warren Commission was Arlen Specter, the inventor of what came to be called the "magic bullet" theory: a single bullet supposed to have caused seven wounds to Kennedy and John Connally sitting before him in the limousine, and later found in pristine condition on a gurney in Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Specter, who with an ironic touch of chutzpah titled his autobiography Passion for Truth, was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and, at his death in 2012, was mourned by the Israeli government as "an unswerving defender of the Jewish State," and by AIPAC, as "a leading architect of the congressional bond between our country and Israel." [40] Natasha Mozgovaya, "Prominent Jewish-American politician Arlan Specter dies at 82," Haaretz, October 14, 2012, on www.haaretz.com.

So, at all stages of the plot, we find a Zionist cabal including business men, politicians and Irgun-connected gangsters, not forgetting media executives, all devoted to Israel.

The most plausible motive for Israel to kill Kennedy has been revealed by two books: Seymour Hersh's The Samson Option in 1991, then Avner Cohen's Israel and the Bomb in 1998, and the lead has been followed up in 2007 by Michael Karpin in The Bomb in the Basement. What these investigators reveal is that Kennedy, informed by the CIA in 1960 of the military aim pursued at the Dimona complex in the Negev desert, was firmly determined to force Israel to renounce it. With that purpose in mind, he replaced CIA Director Allen Dulles by John McCone, who had, as Eisenhower's chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), leaked to The New York Times the truth about Israel's Dimona project; the story was printed on December 19, 1960, weeks before Kennedy was to take office. As Alan Hart writes, "there can be no doubt that Kennedy's determination to stop Israel developing its own nuclear bomb was the prime factor in his decision to appoint McCone." [41] Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 2: David Becomes Goliath, Clarity Press, 2009 , p. 273. Then Kennedy urged Ben-Gurion to allow regular inspections of Dimona, first verbally in New York in 1961, and later through more and more insistent letters. In the last one, cabled June 15, 1963 to the Israeli ambassador with instruction to hand it personally to Ben-Gurion, Kennedy demanded Ben-Gurion's agreement for an immediate visit followed by regular visits every six months, otherwise "this Government's commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized." [42] Warren Bass, Support any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance, 2003, p. 219. The result was unexpected: Ben-Gurion avoided official reception of the letter by announcing his resignation on June 16. As soon as the new Prime Minister Levi Eshkol took office, Kennedy sent him a similar letter, dated July 5, 1963, to no avail. Did Ben-Gurion resign in order to deal with Kennedy from another level?

Five months later, Kennedy's death relieved Israel of all pressure (diplomatic or otherwise) to stop its nuclear program. Faced with Johnson's complete lack of interest in that issue, John McCone resigned from the CIA in 1965, declaring: "When I cannot get the President to read my reports, then it's time to go."

Kennedy's determination to stop Israel's Dimona project was only part of the "Kennedy problem". During his first months in the White House, Kennedy committed himself by letters to Nasser and other Arab heads of State to support UN Resolution 194 for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. Ben-Gurion reacted with a letter to the Israeli ambassador in Washington, intended to be circulated among Jewish American leaders, in which he stated:

"Israel will regard this plan as a more serious danger to her existence than all the threats of the Arab dictators and Kings, than all the Arab armies, than all of Nasser's missiles and his Soviet MIGs. [ ] Israel will fight against this implementation down to the last man.'" [43] Quoted in George and Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment: America's Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present , W.W. Norton & Co., 1992, p. 51.

Kennedy behaved warmly toward Nasser, Israel's worst enemy. Historian Philip Muehlenbeck writes:

"While the Eisenhower administration had sought to isolate Nasser and reduce his influence through building up Saudi Arabia's King Saud as a conservative rival to the Egyptian president, the Kennedy administration pursued the exact opposite strategy." [44] Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy's Courting of African Nationalist Leaders, Oxford UP, 2012.

After Kennedy's death, American foreign policy was reversed again, without the American public being aware of it. Johnson cut the economic aid to Egypt, and increased the military aid to Israel, which reached 92 million dollars in 1966, more than the total of all previous years combined.

For 50 years, the Israeli trail in the Kennedy assassination has been smothered, and anyone who mentioned it was immediately ostracized. American congressman Paul Findley nevertheless dared write in March 1992 in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs : "It is interesting to note that in all the words written and uttered about the Kennedy assassination, Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, has never been mentioned." One single author has seriously investigated that trail: Michael Collins Piper, in his 1995 book Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy. Piper was largely ignored by the mainstream of the Kennedy truth movement. But his work has made its way nevertheless. In 2013, Martin Sandler wrote about Piper's work in his edition of letters by Kennedy, which included those addressed to Ben-Gurion about Dimona: "Of all the conspiracy theories, it remains one of the most intriguing." It is, in fact, a theory widespread in Arab countries. [45] Listen to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on the topic on www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV4kvhs8I8E

The case against Lyndon Johnson

Several investigators have identified Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy's vice-president, as the mastermind of the Kennedy assassination. It is, at least, beyond doubt that the plotters acted with the foreknowledge that Johnson, who automatically stepped in as head of State after Kennedy's death, would cover them. The context of national crisis enabled him to bully both Justice and the press while achieving his life's ambition. Johnson not just benefitted from the plot; he participated in its elaboration. As a former senator from Texas, he could mobilize high-ranked accomplices in Dallas to prepare the ambush. Johnson also had his men in the Navy. In 1961, Texan senator John Connally had been appointed as Navy Secretary at the request of Johnson. When Connally resigned eleven months later to run for governor of Texas, Johnson convinced Kennedy to name another of his Texan friends, Fred Korth.

Johnson's privileged control over the Navy is an important aspect of the case because the Navy was critical in the setting up and in the cover-up of the plot. First, contrary to a widespread but erroneous belief, Lee Harvey Oswald had been recruited by the Navy and not by the CIA. He was a Marine, and as a Marine he had worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).

Secondly, it is at the Naval Hospital in Washington, under the control of Navy officers, that Kennedy's autopsy was performed, after his body had been literally stolen at gunpoint from Parkland Hospital in Dallas. The report of this autopsy stated that the fatal bullet had entered the back of Kennedy's skull, which contradicted the testimonies of twenty-one members of the Dallas hospital staff who saw two entry bullet-wounds on the front of Kennedy's body. This was critical because Oswald was presumably shooting from behind Kennedy, and could not possibly have caused these bullet wounds.

It is noteworthy that Johnson had actually taken advantage of his connections in the Navy to participate in the greatest corruption case ever recorded at that time. His accomplice Fred Korth was forced to resign as Navy Secretary in November 1963, only weeks before the Dallas coup, after the Justice Department headed by Robert Kennedy had implicated him in a fraud involving a $7 billion contract for the construction of 1,700 TFX military aircraft by General Dynamics, a Texan company. Johnson's personal secretary, Bobby Baker, was charged in the same case.

Because of this mounting scandal and other suspicions of corruption, Kennedy was determined to change Vice-President for his upcoming reelection campaign. [46] Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK's Assassination, XLibris, 2010, p. 372. While in Dallas the day before the President's visit, Nixon publicized the rumor of Johnson's removal, and the Dallas Morning News was reporting on November 22 nd : "Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson." Instead, Johnson became president that very day.

Many Americans immediately suspected Johnson's involvement in the Dallas coup, especially after the publication in 1964 of a book by James Evetts Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon , which portrayed Johnson as deeply corrupt. According to his biographer Robert Caro, Johnson was a man thirsting "for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will." [47] Quoted in Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind, op. cit. , p. 17.

The evidence incriminating Johnson does not conflict with the evidence against Israel, quite the contrary. First, both trails converge in the person of Jack Ruby, whom Nixon identified a one of "Johnson's boys," according to former Nixon operative Roger Stone. [48] Patrick Howley, "Why Jack Ruby was probably part of the Kennedy conspiracy," The Daily Caller, March 14, 2014, on dailycaller.com The hypothesis that Ruby acted on Johnson's orders is a likely explanation for some of his odd statements to the Warren Commission:

"If you don't take me back to Washington tonight to give me a chance to prove to the President that I am not guilty, then you will see the most tragic thing that will ever happen." "There will be a certain tragic occurrence happening if you don't take my testimony and somehow vindicate me so my people don't suffer because of what I have done."

He said that feared that his act would be used "to create some falsehood about some of the Jewish faith," but added that "maybe something can be saved [ ], if our President, Lyndon Johnson, knew the truth from me." [49] Read Ruby's deposition on jfkmurdersolved.com/ruby.htm With such words, Ruby seems to be trying to send a message to Johnson through the Commission, or rather a warning that he might spill the beans about Israel's involvement if Johnson did not intervene in his favor. We get the impression that Ruby expected Johnson to pardon him.

Yet Johnson did nothing to get Ruby out of jail. Ruby's sense of betrayal would explain why in 1965, after having been sentenced to life imprisonment, Ruby implicitly accused Johnson of Kennedy's murder in a press conference: "If [Adlai Stevenson] was Vice-President there would never have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy." [50] See on YouTube, "Jack Ruby Talks."

Ruby died from a mysterious disease in his prison in 1967.

A Crypto-Zionist president?

Ruby is not the only link between Johnson and Israel, far from it. In truth, Johnson had always been Israel's man. His electoral campaigns had been funded since 1948 by Zionist financier Abraham Feinberg, who happened to be president of the Americans for Haganah Incorporated, which raised money for the Jewish militia. It is the same Feinberg who, after the Democratic primaries in 1960, made the following proposal to Kennedy, as Kennedy himself later reported to his friend Charles Bartlett: "We know your campaign is in trouble. We're willing to pay your bills if you'll let us have control of your Middle East policy." Bartlett recalls that Kennedy was deeply upset and swore that, "if he ever did get to be President, he was going to do something about it." [51] Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy , Random House, 1991, p. 94-97.

It is on record, thanks to Kennedy insider Arthur Schlesinger ( A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House, 1965), that the two men who convinced Kennedy to take Johnson as his running mate, were Philip Graham and Joseph Alsop, respectively publisher and columnist of the Washington Post , and strong supporters of Israel. [52] Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House (1965), Mariner Books, 2002, p. 56; Alan Hart, Zionism, vol. 2, op. cit., p. 257. Schlesinger doesn't reveal Graham and Alsop's arguments, and states that Kennedy's final decision "defies historical reconstruction" -- a curious statement for a historian so well informed on the topic. But Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy's personal secretary for twelve years, had her own idea about it. She believed that Kennedy was blackmailed with proofs of his many infidelities to his wife: " Jack knew that Hoover and LBJ would just fill the air with womanizing." Whatever the details of the blackmail, Kennedy once confided to his assistant Hyman Raskin, as an apology for taking Johnson, "I was left with no choice [ ] those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened me with problems and I don't need more problems." [53] Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind, op; cit. , p. 320.

In 2013, Associated Press reported about newly released tapes from Johnson's White House office showing LBJ's "personal and often emotional connection to Israel," and pointed out that under Johnson, "the United States became Israel's chief diplomatic ally and primary arms supplier." An article from the 5 Towns Jewish Times "Our First Jewish President Lyndon Johnson?" recalls Johnson's continuous support of Jews and Israel in the 1940s and 50s, and concludes: "President Johnson firmly pointed American policy in a pro-Israel direction." The article also mentions that, "research into Johnson's personal history indicates that he inherited his concern for the Jewish people from his family. His aunt Jessie Johnson Hatcher, a major influence on LBJ, was a member of the Zionist Organization of America." And, in an additional note: "The line of Jewish mothers can be traced back three generations in Lyndon Johnson's family tree. There is little doubt that he was Jewish." [54] Morris Smith, "Our First Jewish President Lyndon Johnson? – an update!!," 5 Towns Jewish Times, April 11, 2013, on 5tjt.com.

Whatever was the reason of Johnson's loyalty to Israel, it is a fact that, thanks to Johnson, Israel could continue its military nuclear program undisturbed, and acquire its first atomic bomb around 1965. Historian Stephen Green writes: "Lyndon Johnson's White House saw no Dimona, heard no Dimona, and spoke no Dimona when the reactor went critical in early 1964." [55] Stephen Green, Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel, William Morrow & Co., 1984, p. 166.

Thanks to JFK's death, Israel was also able to carry out its plan to annex Palestinian territories beyond the boundaries imposed by the United Nations Partition plan. By leaning on Pentagon and CIA hawks, Johnson intensified the Cold War and created the climate of tension which Israel needed in order to demonize Egyptian president Nasser and reinforce its own stature as indispensable ally in the Middle East.

During the Six Day War of 1967, Israel managed to triple its territory, while creating the illusion of acting in legitimate defense. The lie could not deceive American Intelligence agencies, but Johnson had given a green light to Israel's attack, and even authorized James Angleton of the CIA to give Israel the precise positions of the Egyptian air bases, which enabled Israel to destroy them in just a few hours.

Four days after the start of the Israeli attack, Nasser accepted the ceasefire request from the UN Security Council. It was too soon for Israel, which had not yet achieved all its territorial objectives. On June 8, 1967, the USS Liberty, a NSA spy ship stationed in international waters off Sinai, was bombed, strafed and torpedoed during 75 minutes by Israeli Mirage jets and three torpedo boats, with the obvious intention of sinking it without leaving any survivors. (Even the rescue channels were machine-gunned.) Meanwhile, Johnson, from the White House, intervened personally to prohibit the nearby Sixth Fleet from rescuing the USS Liberty after the crew, despite the initial destruction of its transmitters, had managed to send off an SOS.

The attack would have been blamed on Egypt if it had succeeded, that is, if the ship had sunk and its crew had all died. The operation would then have given Johnson a pretext for interveening on the side of Israel against Egypt.

But it failed. The USS Liberty affair was suppressed by a commission of inquiry headed by Admiral John Sidney McCain II, Commander-in-Chief of US Naval Forces in Europe (and Father of Arizona Senator John McCain III). Johnson accepted Israel's spurious "targeting error" explanation. In January 1968 he invited the Israeli Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, to Washington, and warmly welcomed him to his Texas ranch. What's more, Johnson rewarded Israel by lifting the embargo on offensive military equipment: US-made tanks and aircraft immediately flowed to Tel Aviv.

This failed false flag attack is evidence of the secret complicity of Johnson and Israel, implying high treason on the part of Johnson.

Conclusion

Let's now conclude our overview of the evidence: beside the fact that John and Robert were brothers, their assassinations have at least two things in common: Lyndon Johnson and Israel.

First, their deaths are precisely framed by Johnson's presidency, which was also the context for other political assassinations, such as Martin-Luther King's. Johnson was in control of the State during the two investigations on John and Robert's murders.

Secondly, in both cases, we find the fingerprints of Israel's deep state. In the case of Robert, it is the choice of the manipulated patsy, which was obviously meant to disguise Robert's assassination as an act of hatred against Israel. In the case of John, it it is the identity of the man asked to kill the patsy, a Jewish gangster linked to the Irgun.

Johnson and Israel, the two common elements in the Kennedy assassinations, are themselves closely linked, since Johnson can be considered as a high-level sayan, a man secretly devoted to Israel, or owned by Israel, to the point of committing high treason against the nation he had been elected to lead and protect.

The causal link between the two assassinations then becomes clear: even if Robert had been pro-Israel, which he was not, Israel and Johnson would still have had a compelling reason to eliminate him before he got to the White House, where he could -- and would -- reopen the investigation on his brother's death.

What should have been obvious from the start now appears brightly clear: in order to solve the mystery of the assassination of John Kennedy, one has simply to look into the two other assassinations which are connected to it: the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man whose trial could have exposed the hoax and possibly put the plotters into the light, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the man who would have reopened the case if he had lived. And both these assassinations bear the signature of Israel.

At his death in 1968, Robert Kennedy left eleven orphans, not counting John's two children, whom he had somewhat adopted. John's son, John F. Kennedy Jr., aka John John, who had turned three the day of his father's funeral, embodied the Kennedy myth in the heart of all Americans. The route seemed traced for him to become president one day. He died on July 16, 1999, with his pregnant wife and his sister-in-law, when his private plane suddenly and mysteriously nose-dived into the ocean a few seconds after he had announced his landing on the Kennedy property in Massachusetts.

John John had long been portrayed as a superficial, spoiled and harmless young man. But that image was as misleading as young Halmet's in Shakespeare's play. John had serious interest in mind, and, at age 39, he was just entering politics. In 1995 he founded George magazine, which seemed harmless until it began to take an interest in political assassinations. In March 1997, George published a 13-page article by the mother of Yigal Amir, the convicted assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The article was supporting the thesis of a conspiracy by the Israeli far-right. So JFK Jr. was eliminated while following in the footsteps of his father, entering politics through the door of journalism and taking an interest in the crimes of the Israeli deep state. Canadian-Israeli journalist Barry Chamish believes John Kennedy Jr. was assassinated precisely for that. [56] Barry Chamish, "The Murder of JFK Jr – Ten Years Later," www.barrychamish.com (also on: www.rense.com/general87/tenyrs.htm).

The nonsensical notion of a mysterious curse on the Kennedy family is an obvious smoke screen. The unsolved murders of JFK and his two legitimate heirs -- his younger brother and his only son -- require a more rational explanation. The sense that the official stories about their deaths amount to a huge cover-up is obsessing the American psyche, a bit like a repressed family secret affecting the whole personality from a subconscious level.

President John Kennedy and his brother are heroic, almost Christ-like figures, in the heart of a growing community of citizens who have become aware of the disastrous longtime effect of their assassinations. Only when the American public at large come to grips with the truth of their deaths and honor their legacy and sacrifice will America have a chance to be redeemed and be great again.

Laurent Guyénot is the author of JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State , Progressive Press, 2014 , and From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land Clash of Civilizations , 2018. ($30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, POB 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556). Footnotes

[1] Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America , University of Texas Press, 2013,kindle 284-292.

[2] John Lewis' testimony is in the PBS documentary American Experience Robert F. Kennedy.

[3] Associated Press, "RFK children speak about JFK assassination," January 12, 2013, on www.usatoday.com

[4] David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years , Simon & Schuster, 2007, p. 278-280, 305.

[5] David Talbot, Brothers, op. cit. , 2007, p. 21-22.

[6] David Talbot, Brothers, op. cit., p. 25-7.

[7] James Hepburn, Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK, Penmarin Books, 2002, p. 269.

[8] David Talbot, Brothers, op. cit., p. 312-314.

[9] Extract of TV news in the documentary film Evidence of Revision: Part 4: The RFK assassination as never seen before , 01:11:42

[10] Jerry Cohen, "Yorty Reveals That Suspect's Memo Set Deadline for Death," Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1968, pages 1 and 12, on latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2008/06/june-6-1968.html. Jerry Cohen, "Jerusalem-Born Suspect Called An Anti-Semite," The Salt Lake Tribune , June 6, 1968, on www.newspapers.com. See also Harry Rosenthal, "Senator Kennedy's support for Israel promoted decision declares Sirhan," The Telegraph, March 5, 1969, on news.google.com

[11] Sasha Issenberg, "Slaying gave US a first taste of Mideast terror," Boston Globe, June 5, 2008, on www.boston.com

[12] Jeffrey Salkin, "Remember What Bobby Kennedy Died For," Forward.com, June 5, 2008. Also Michael Fischbach, "First Shot in Terror War Killed RFK," Los Angeles Times, June 02, 2003, on articles.latimes.com

[13] Frank Morales, "The Assassination of RFK: A Time for Justice!" June 16, 2012, on www.globalresearch.ca; watch on YouTube, "RFK Assassination 40 th Anniversary (2008) Paul Schrade on CNN."

[14] Philip Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations On the Conspiracy And Cover-Up, S.P.I. Books , 1994, p. 25. For a full overview, watch Shane O'Sullivan's 2007 investigative documentary RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy. For more detail, read his book Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy , Union Square Press, 2008. See also Don Schulman's testimony in The Second Gun (1973), from 42 min 40.

[15] In a parole hearing in 2011, failing to convince the judges for the fourteenth time. Watch on YouTube, "Sirhan Sirhan Denied Parole": www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsm1hKPI9EU

[16] Shane O'Sullivan, Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy , Union Square Press, 2008, p. 5, 44, 103.

[17] Jacqui Goddard, "Sirhan Sirhan, assassin of Robert F.Kennedy, launches new campaign for freedom 42 years later," The Telegraph, December 3, 2011, on www.telegraph.co.uk/search/

[18] Colin Ross, Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists , Manitou Communications, 2000,summary on www.wanttoknow.info/bluebird10pg

[19] David B. Green, "Brainwashing and Cross-dressing: Israel's Assassination Program Laid Bare in Shocking Detail," Haaretz, February 5, 2018.

[20] Ronald Kessler, The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996.

[21] The Israel Lobby Archive, www.irmep.org/ila/forrel/

[22] Jeffrey Salkin, "Remember What Bobby Kennedy Died For , " op. cit. .

[23] Michael Collins Piper, False Flag, op. cit., p. 78.

[24] Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: the CIA's Master Spy Hunter, Simon & Schuster, 1991, p. 318.

[25] Michael Howard Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of COunterintelligence, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008, p. 153.

[26] "Assassination studies Kennedy knew a coup was coming," on Youtube. Image of Arthur Krock's article is shown on www.youtube.com/watch?v=snE161QnL1U at 1:36.

[27] "Harry Truman Writes: Limit CIA Role to Intelligence," Washington Post, December 22, 1963, quoted in Mark Lane, Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK , Skyhorse Publishing, 2011 , p. 246.

[28] Thomas Troy, "Truman on CIA," September 22, 1993, on www.cia.gov ; Sidney Krasnoff, Truman and Noyes: Story of a President's Alter Ego, Jonathan Stuart Press, 1997.

[29] Michael Collins Piper, False Flags: Template for Terror, American Free Press, 2013, p. 67.

[30] James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, Touchstone, 2008 , p. 46.

[31] George de Mohrenschilldt, I am a Patsy! on jfkassassination.net/russ/jfkinfo4/jfk12/hscapatsy.htm

[32] Read the Sheriff's Office report on mcadams.posc.mu.edu/death2.txt

[33] Meir Doron, Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon – Arnon Milchan , Gefen Books, 2011, p. xi.

[34] Stuart Winer, "Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan reveals past as secret agent," The Times of Israel, November 25, 2013, on www.timesofisrael.com ; Meir Doron, Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon – Arnon Milchan , Gefen Books, 2011, p. xi

[35] Mickey Cohen, In My Own Words , Prentice-Hall, 1975, p. 91-92.

[36] Michael Collins Piper, Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy , American Free Press, 6 th ed., ebook 2005, p. 133-155, 226.

[37] William Kunstler, My Life as a Radical Lawyer , Carol Publishing, 1994, p. 158; Steve North, "Lee Harvey Oswald's Killer 'Jack Ruby' Came From Strong Jewish Background," The Forward , November 17, 2013, on forward.com

[38] Bryan Edward Stone, The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas, University of Texas Press, 2010, p. 200.

[39] John Hughes-Wilson, JFK-An American Coup d'État: The Truth Behind the Kennedy Assassination, John Blake, 2014.

[40] Natasha Mozgovaya, "Prominent Jewish-American politician Arlan Specter dies at 82," Haaretz, October 14, 2012, on www.haaretz.com.

[41] Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 2: David Becomes Goliath, Clarity Press, 2009 , p. 273.

[42] Warren Bass, Support any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance, 2003, p. 219.

[43] Quoted in George and Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment: America's Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present , W.W. Norton & Co., 1992, p. 51.

[44] Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy's Courting of African Nationalist Leaders, Oxford UP, 2012.

[45] Listen to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on the topic on www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV4kvhs8I8E

[46] Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK's Assassination, XLibris, 2010, p. 372.

[47] Quoted in Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind, op. cit. , p. 17.

[48] Patrick Howley, "Why Jack Ruby was probably part of the Kennedy conspiracy," The Daily Caller, March 14, 2014, on dailycaller.com

[49] Read Ruby's deposition on jfkmurdersolved.com/ruby.htm

[50] See on YouTube, "Jack Ruby Talks."

[51] Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy , Random House, 1991, p. 94-97.

[52] Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House (1965), Mariner Books, 2002, p. 56; Alan Hart, Zionism, vol. 2, op. cit., p. 257.

[53] Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind, op; cit. , p. 320.

[54] Morris Smith, "Our First Jewish President Lyndon Johnson? – an update!!," 5 Towns Jewish Times, April 11, 2013, on 5tjt.com.

[55] Stephen Green, Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel, William Morrow & Co., 1984, p. 166.

[56] Barry Chamish, "The Murder of JFK Jr – Ten Years Later," www.barrychamish.com (also on: www.rense.com/general87/tenyrs.htm).


Biff , June 3, 2018 at 5:26 am GMT

Truman was hinting at the CIA's role in toppling foreign governments and assassinating elected leaders abroad.

Motive and the means to get it done. I always thought the CIA was suspect, but obviously there are more angles to the story. Good article.

Wizard of Oz , June 3, 2018 at 5:31 am GMT
My interest in this is as the reader of a good thriller which I can excuse myself spending time on because it is just possible that I shall learn something about the real world including important levels of government. So no dog in any fight. But I am alerted to conventional journalistic slickness by such foolishness as the snide and inaccurate statement that Alan Dershowitz is best known as counsel for Jonathan Pollard. Also the slippery statement that a connection between the two brothers' assassinations should be "assumed". (Obviously it is worth asking a few questions such as "could there be common motives but that sort of intelligent lateral thinking is not what the author was talking about).

Arthur J. Schlesinger is mentioned so why not his careful journal record of what RFK had to say about his brother's assassination. A recent NYRB article suggests that, while he didn't think much of the Warren Commission's work, his suspicions only extended to Cuba and "gangsters".

A recent TV series (not mentioned here) using recently declassified material does strongly suggest that Oswald was relying for support on a group if fiercely anti-Castro Cubans who had been infiltrated by a Castro man. Not difficult to see why in the end he might have thought he was a patsy. Also there is no mention here of the at least plausible theory that the fatal bullet was one accidentally fired by a Secret Serviceman in the car behind.

The total rubbish about JFK Jr's plane crash also serves to undermine credibility and support the view that this is written by someone suffering a severe case of confirmation bias.

j2 , June 3, 2018 at 5:44 am GMT
A very good article. With my limited studies on the JFK murder I came to the same conclusion: Piper was essentially correct, but you fill up the case of Robert Kennedy in a convincing way. Maybe Meyer Lansky could be mentioned, he probably had some role. But the issue was the bomb.
Al Moenee , June 3, 2018 at 6:15 am GMT
The truth is that Robert Kennedy was much despised by Israel and its Jewish-American lobby of the time, the American Zionist Council (AZC) and was considered a major foe. After many months of back and forth, on Oct 11, 1963 the New York law firm representing the AZC received a formal written demand from Attorney General RFK's office to immediately (72 hours) proceed to register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938. Forms for said registration accompanied the letter. This would have upended the AZC's operations and rendered it or any subsequent Israeli lobby (AIPAC) – near powerless.
LondonBob , June 3, 2018 at 6:59 am GMT
The JFK assasination is a very interesting whodunnit and the couple of books I have read on it led to me to the very same conclusion as the author. A lot of credit must go to Piper. I think Gary Wean was correct, there was a plot to stage a fake assassination attempt on JFK within which the actual assassination was hidden, presumably overseen by Angleton. Too many who knew better were looking the other way, and their effective complicity made them very interested in a cover up.
Hiram of Tyre , June 3, 2018 at 7:06 am GMT
Israel was created by the British oligarchs as a bridgehead in the Middle East. Furthering Israel was/is furthering the interests of those oligarchs (who ran the British Empire which morphed to the Anglo-American Empire). JFK was critical of Israel. If someone killed him, it the Anglo-American deep state. Israel likely pulled the trigger. Let's remember what the fake father of Modern Zionism who admired Cecil Rhodes, Theodor Herl said: "England will get ten million agents for her greatness and influence."

A parallel could also be established between the killing of JFK and the "Six-Day War" of 1967

In 1954, Israeli teamed with the Muslim Brotherhood to plant explosives in American and British offices to start a civil war to prompt the presence of British troops. The failed terror plot was known as the "Lavon Affair".

In 1956, Israel (supported by Britain and France) invaded Egypt to retake the Suez Canal nationalized by Nasser. Deterring Nasser who had crushed the Muslim Brotherhood (a British machination aimed at keeping Muslim nations backwards culturally and economically ( https://bit.ly/2J06YDO )) was also another primary objective. Einsenhower was the one who tenaciously worked on removing Israel from Egypt but it didn't come easy:

1956-1957: England and France removed their troops following Einsenhower's advise but Israel did not. As a result, Eisenhower joined the 75 countries at the UN General Assembly (February 1957) to pass a resolution against Israel's occupation of Egyptian territory. Despite that, Israel still refused to remove its troops. It made Einsenhower reach out to the Congress but it was heavily bought out by Zionists and the end-result was to no avail.. When that failed, Einsenhower met with congressional leaders to gather support but even they were in support of Israel. Einsenhower then went on TV to make the case public. After which he threatened Israel with sanctions (including the $40M of tax deductible donations and $60M of private bonds). Making the case public and threatening economically worked – Israel withdrew its troops.

The failed invasion was a major blow to Britain (who's PM resigned) France and Israel (who destroyed everything on its way out).

In spite of the mendacious narrative regurgitated in the West about the war of 1967, it was Israel who planned and attacked its neighbors. The seizing of the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza were objectives Israel couldn't achieve in 1948 and deterring Nasser, an objective failed in 1956. The only problem Israel had was: would another US President intervene. Norman Finkelstein, who's research on 1967 is to date unchallenged successfully, showed that Israel sent diplomats to Washington

http://mondoweiss.net/2017/06/provoked-fighting-survival/

"No repeat of Einsehower's repudication".

We all know who followed JFK. None other than absolute bent-over to Israel, Lyndon Johnson.

-- -- --

If I could make a parallel on the Palestinians: it's "interesting" how they always found themselves in the spotlight of major plots, killings and terror acts after the creation of the British Zionist State known as Israel. One has to only remember the airplane hijackings, Munich, etc. Coincidentally, most of those Palestinians were all led by the infamous Abu Nidal – who was never apprehended while the rest of the Palestinians were either killed or arrested.

The case of 9/11 wasn't any different. The five dancing Israelis, who were "documenting the event" from New Jersey proclaimed – while being arrested:

"We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are your problem."

Ari Ben-Menashe, in his book "Profits of War : Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network" spoke of the CIA and the Mossad covertly training Palestinians in Yugoslavia to have them attack Western targets. The ultimate goal was to draw negative attention and sentiment against their cause.

Mike Sylwester , Website June 3, 2018 at 7:08 am GMT
Most of the information was from the book Nemesis: The True Story of Aristotle Onassis, Jackie O, and the Love Triangle That Brought Down the Kennedys , by Peter Evans.

In December 1971 Aristotle Onassis's ex-wife Tina met with their daughter Christina to ask her to stop bad-mouthing her current husband Stavros Niarchos, a man long hated by Aristotle Onassis. Christina was Niarcho's niece and step-daughter, since he had been married to Tina's sister Eugenie and was now married to Tina herself. Among the accusations that Christina kept repeating about Niarchos was that he had murdered Eugenie. In order to give Christina a broader perspective, Tina informed Christina that her father Aristotle had financed the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

The next day Christina passed this information on to her brother Alexander Onassis, who subsequently placed some related papers into a safe-deposit box. After that, Alexander told his lover Fiona Thyssen that these papers would prevent his father Aristotle from harming Fiona, a woman long hated by Aristotle Onassis. Since Fiona was 16 years older than Alexander, Aristotle considered her to be a gold-digger and wanted her out of Alexander's life.

Several months later Alexander showed some of his papers to Yannis Georgakis, a lawyer who was close to the entire Onassis family. The papers included photocopies of pages from the notebooks of Sirhan Sirhan, who had assassinated Robert Kennedy. During the weeks before the assassination, Sirhan would place himself into a hypnotic state and write stream-of-conscious thoughts into a notebook. On one page Sirhan had written at the center of a roundel, amid Arabic writing, the single name Fiona . On another page he had written 2 Narkos! . On a third page, between the lines One Hundred thousand Dollars and Dollars and One Hundreds , Sirhan had written in Arabic: they should be killed , next to which he had written the number three .

It was obvious to Tina, Christina and Alexander that for some reason Sirhan had been hypnotized into a fixation on killing three people -- Fiona Thyssen, Stavros Niarchos, and Robert Kennedy -- who had long been fiercely hated by Aristotle Onassis.

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[MORE]
In the fall of 1974 a 34-year-old photographer Helene Gaillet was stranded in Paris on her way to a job in Africa, because the job was canceled. A year earlier she had met Aristotle Onassis at a dinner party in New York, and he had told her to call him if she ever needed a place to stay in Paris. She called his number but was told he was away on his private island, Skorpios, in the Aegean Sea. Several minutes later, however, Onassis returned her call and invited her to join him in Skorpios. He would fly her there at his own expense. She accepted his invitation and subsequently spent several days with him there.

During that time they had a short affair, which included a series of intimate conversations about their lives. By that time his health was failing (he died four months later), so he was in a confessional mood. During one of those conversations he told her, "You know, Helene, I put up the money for Bobby Kennedy's murder."

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In May 1968 the above-mentioned lawyer Yannis Georgakis was serving as the chief executive officer of Olympic Airways, which was owned by Aristotle Onassis. Georgakis was informed by a Mossad official serving in Israel's embassy in Paris that Onassis was meeting regularly in Paris with a Palestinian terrorist named Mahmoud Hamshari. About a week later Onassis informed Georgakis that a Palestinian terrorist group had demanded $1.2 million in protection money from Olympic Airlines, threatening to blow up the company's airliners if the money was not paid. Onassis said he had reached an agreement with Hamshari and now needed $200,000 from the company's funds to pay the first installment of the protection money. Onassis assured Georgakis that the subsequent installment payments would be arranged "off the books" and channeled through Onassis's Panama corporations.

Reluctantly, Georgakis agreed to provide the $200,000. He asked to be included in any future negotiations between Onassis and Hamshari, but Onassis assured him that the entire agreement had already been settled and that no further negotiations should occur.

Onassis flew to New York with the $200,000 in cash. He put all the money into a shopping bag and gave it to his long-time chauffeur, Roosevelt Zanders, who personally delivered the money to someone in an apartment at United Nations Plaza. As instructed by Onassis, Zanders did not ask for a receipt for the money.

To be continued.
Continued from my previous comment at 7:08 a.m.

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In January 1954 Aristotle Onassis signed a secret agreement with Saudi Arabia's finance minister. The agreement basically said that Onassis would provide Saudi Arabia with its own fleet of oil tankers. Saudi Arabia expected that its ownership of such a fleet would help that country to become independent of Western petroleum companies, to earn a fuller share of profits, and eventually to nationalize the entire industry on its territory. Onassis expected to earn hundreds of millions of dollars for his role in the arrangement.

Despite the secrecy, however, the US Government soon learned of the deal and during the following months employed a variety of methods to undermine it. The US Justice Department found fault with Onassis's past purchases of oil tankers and subsequently seized his tankers and also money he had earned from those tankers. In February 1954 the Justice Department arrested Onassis himself and charged him with criminal conspiracy to buy the tankers illegally. The State Department pressured the Saudi government to disassociate itself from Onassis. Arrangements were made for Peru to seize nine of Onassis's whaling ships. One of Onassis's business associates was pressured to sue Onassis for swindling him out of $200,000 and to accuse Onassis of paying a $350,000 bribe to the Saudi finance minister. Eventually in October 1954 King Saud decided not to sign the agreement, which therefore became void. All these developments almost bankrupted Onassis.

Most of Onassis's anger about the collapse of the Saudi deal was misdirected toward Robert Kennedy, who in 1954 was a 29-year-old attorney working on the staff of a Senate subcommittee. One of Kennedy's investigations for the subcommittee had raised accusations about shipping business that some Greek companies conducted with Red China, but this issue did not involve Onassis in particular. Kennedy did not play any apparent role in the seizure of Onassis's assets or in his arrest. The business associate who sued Onassis hired as an expert witness an accountant who had worked for Robert's father Joseph Kennedy for many years, but that accountant had no direct association with Robert Kennedy himself.

In fact Robert Kennedy had nothing at all to do with the US Government's discovery of Onassis's Saudi deal. The CIA station in Athens had been informed about it by another Greek shipper, Stavros Niarchos, who was Onassis's brother-in-law (the two men were married to two sisters). Niarchos had heard about the deal from Onassis's wife Tina, who was involved in a love affair with Niarchos.

In order to protect the real source of its information, the CIA cleverly encouraged Onassis's initial reaction that the deal had been exposed during Kennedy's investigation of the Greek shippers who did business with Red China. For example, the accountant of Robert Kennedy's father was apparently moved into and out of the lawsuit in order to inflame Onassis's suspicions about Kenned's role in the matter. Niarchos himself certainly collaborated in the continuing effort to divert Onassis's anger away from himself and onto Kennedy. And in the following years Kennedy himself publicly criticized Onassis on many occasions, which further enraged Onassis.

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In the early 1960s Onassis became closely involved in several business enterprises with a fellow Greek ex-patriot, Spyros Skouras, who had immigrated to the United States in 1912. Skouras became a movie producer and during that career, he clashed angrily several times with Joseph Kennedy, who was also a movie producer. In May 1962 Skouras's movie studio was losing millions of dollars in the filming of Cleopatra and Something's Got to Give . The latter movie starred Marilyn Monroe, who was extraordinarily capricious and absent during the filming. In conversations with Onassis, Skouras blamed Monroe's misbehavior on Robert Kennedy, her secret lover. Skouras knew about this affair (and about Monroe's earlier affair with John Kennedy) and informed Onassis.

Exasperated by the problems and losses caused by these two films, Skouras decided to leave the movie business and to establish a shipping business. Onassis invested $10 million in Skouras's shipping business, which intended to introduce new loading and unloading technology that would require far fewer longshoremen. Because of this manpower issue, Onassis became involved in negotiations with Jimmy Hoffa, the chief of the Teamsters labor union and also a hater of Robert Kennedy, who was then the US Attorney General.

During this same time, Onassis began a love affair with Lee Radziwill, the younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy. Lee and her husband Prince Stanislas Radziwill were each divorced from previous spouses when they married each other, so they married in a civil wedding instead of a Roman Catholic wedding. Since John Kennedy was now President of the United States, Robert Kennedy used the family's prestige to try to convince the Catholic Church to annul the Radziwills' previous marriages. This effort (and the Kennedy family's reputation) was endangered by publicity about Lee's affair with Onassis, and so Robert Kennedy phoned Onassis directly and asked him to stay away from Lee. Onassis responded with the words, "Bobby, you and Jack fuck your movie queen [Monroe] and I'll fuck my princess [Radziwill]." Onassis thus revealed to Robert Kennedy that he knew about the Kennedy-Monroe affairs, which were still very secret.

Also during this same time, Hoffa learned (perhaps from Onassis) about the Kennedy brothers' affairs with Monroe and so he bugged Monroe's home and telephones to record related conversations. Through these recordings, Hoffa learned that Monroe and Robert Kennedy had met in Monroe's home on August 4, 1962, a few hours before she died of an overdose and that some of Kennedy's associates had subsequently entered her house during the period between her death and the notification of the police. Hoffa apparently hinted to Onassis about the existence of these tape recordings, since Onassis asked Monroe's publicist whether he knew anything about them, offering to pay big money to buy them.

=====

During the following months Robert Kennedy communicated subtle threats in order to pressure Onassis to stay away from Lee Radziwill. The main thrust of these threats was that Kennedy would exploit his position as US Attorney General to cause legal problems for Onassis and his businesses. This pressure backfired, as Onassis arranged for Radziwill to live blatantly with him on his yacht. The feud escalated dramatically in September 1963, when Jackie herself also moved onto the yacht for a few weeks in order to convalesce from a miscarriage. Robert Kennedy responded by continuing his subtle threats against Onassis, and Onassis responded by seducing Jacqueline on the yacht.

Refreshed by her affair with Onassis, Jacqueline returned to the White House. A few weeks later, on November 22, 1963, John Kennedy was assassinated. At Jacqueline's invitation, Onassis came and stayed in the White House during the funeral days. Robert Kennedy confronted Onassis in the White House, and they eventually engaged in a ridiculous argument that embarrassed Onassis in front of the other guests. Kennedy wrote up a written statement for Onassis to sign, promising to donate half of his wealth to the poor, and Onassis signed the paper with Greek words that nullified the promise.

In the months following the assassination, Jacqueline wanted to quickly marry Onassis, but this desire was discouraged by Robert Kennedy, who now headed the Kennedy family. Robert Kennedy managed to prevent the marriage as long as he lived. He was assassinated on June 5, 1968. Onassis then married Jacqueline on October 20.

=====

To be continued.
Continued from my previous comments.

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In January 1968 David Karr arranged for Mahmoud Hamshari, also known as Dr. Michel Hassner, to be introduced to Aristotle Onassis. Karr introduced Dr. Michel Hassner to Onassis's circle as an expert in aviation finance who would propose a restructuring of the debt of Onassis's Olympic Airline. Eventually, Hamshari (aka Hassner), using money provided by Onassis, arranged for Sirhan Sirhan to assassinate Robert Kennedy.

David Karr had known Onassis since 1956. Karr worked in many varied jobs during his life, but at that time he managed a public relations company that specialized in helping companies that were involved in proxy fights in corporate takeovers. It might be more accurate to say that Karr was specialized in performing dirty tricks for his clients. He collected and distributed (or threatened to distribute) scandalous information about his clients' opponents. By 1967 Onassis was using Karr for a variety of secret tasks; in that year, for example, he asked Karr to ask Soviet officials about possibly supplying crude oil for a refinery he considered building near Athens. Onassis's closest associates wondered about that assignment, because Karr had no expertise related to the petroleum business or to the Soviet Union. Onasssis's trust in Karr was a mystery.

At some point in his own past, while working as a movie producer in Hollywood, Karr had become acquainted with William Joseph Bryan, Jr., a local hypnotist. Bryan's American Institute of Hypnosis treated people in the film industry for alcohol and drug additions, and he had served as the technical adviser on the filming of the movie The Manchurian Candidate. Karr gave Bryan's phone number to Hamshari and advised him to visit Bryan. Karr later said he referred Hamshari to Bryan because Hamshari complained that he suffered headaches whenever he visited Los Angeles, which he did frequently during 1967 and 1968.

==============

In the summer of 1979 Karr contacted Leslie Linder, a former movie agent, whom Karr had known while he worked in the movie business. Karr wanted Linder to represent his proposed memoirs, which would include a revelation that Onassis had played a key role in the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Linder was interested and scheduled another discussion of the proposal again with the added participation of Oscar Beuselinck, a London lawyer.

In the meantime, Karr departed for a business meeting in Moscow, where he planned to open a big hotel. He remarked that he had all the evidence of the Onassis story in Paris, and he promised to call Linder and Beuselinck as soon as he returned from Moscow.

Karr was found dead in his Paris apartment on the morning of July 7, 1979. He had a fractured larynx, and blood was found on his pillow. A forensic examination concluded he had died of a heart attack, but his widow Evia Karr and his business partner Ronnie Driver insist that Karr was murdered by agents of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Continued from my previous comments

=====

Mahmoud Hamshari was born in a village near Jaffa in 1939 and eventually became an important official in the Palestinian Fatah. In June 1967, following the Six-Day War, he attended a Fatah meeting in Damascus to discuss further strategy. The meeting's participants represented a broad scope of attitudes within Fatah, and Hamshari appeared to be among the most aggressive. When he spoke, he focused his anger on US support of Israel and proposed actions that would attack the US. In particular, he proposed the Fatah "kill a high-profile American on American soil" in order to make the US "think twice about backing the Jews."

This proposal seemed to earn little explicit support at the meeting, so Hamshari then proposed that the organization greatly increase its fund-raising activities in the US, in order to manipulate the US to support the Palestinians too. Fatah apparently adopted this proposal and assigned Hamshari himself to implement it, operating under the supervision of Fatah's intelligence chief, Abu Iyad (Salah Khalef). In the following months, Hamshari began to travel to Europe and the United States, using several false names, including Dr. Michel Hassner. Late in 1967 a Fatah official gave Hamshari a list of Palestinian immigrants living in Los Angeles. The list had been acquired from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which had records on the Sirhan family, then living in Los Angeles.

=====

In some unknown circumstances, Dr. Hassner (Hamshari) began to associate frequently with David Karr, a mysterious associate of Aristotle Onassis. Karr did not introduce Hassner to Onassis directly, but instead introduced him indirectly into Onassis's nner circle as an investment consultant for Arab Bank, specializing in the restructuring of airline debts. Such expertise was of interest because Onassis's Olympic airline was struggling with debts. A meeting between Hassner and Onassis was scheduled for a day in January 1968 in Paris, but Onassis left for Athens unexpectedly right before the meeting. Therefore Hassner met instead with several members of Onassis's inner circle. The airline's chief executive officer, Yannis Georgakis, was not informed about the meeting by Onassis and so did not participate.

At this meeting, Hassner revealed to the group that he had been approached by a Palestinian terror group who demanded that the airline pay $350,000 to the group so that they not blow up bombs on Olympic airliners. Hassner said he was acting only as an honest broker, a facilitator, and did not know the identities of the terrorists, who had contacted him through the Palestine National Fund.

After Onassis returned to Paris, he began to meet frequently in Paris with Hassner, the two alone. Between meetings, Hassner sometimes traveled to Los Angeles and back. Karr says that during this period he gave Hassner the phone number of a Los Angeles hypnotist named William Joseph Bryan, Jr.

Georgakis, the CEO of Olympic, heard about Hassner for the first time in May 1968. He heard about him not from Onassis, but from a Mossad official stationed at the Israeli embassy in Paris. Onassis himself informed Georgakis about a week later, saying that he had already decided to pay $1.2 million (no longer just $350,000) to Hassner and that Georgakis should provide the first $200,000 in cash from Olympic funds. Georgakis complied, and Onassis subsequently flew with the cash to New York, where his chauffeur delivered it to an apartment at United Nations Plaza.

=====

To be continued.

Allow me to conclude with one more passage.

=====

On the evening of June 4, 1968, an itinerant Christian preacher named Jerry Owen (he himself said) parked a horse trailer outside the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Robert Kennedy's campaign organization had scheduled its anticipated victory following the California primary elections. Later that night, Sirhan assassinated Kennedy in the hotel. The next day, Owen reported to the Los Angeles police that he had picked up Sirhan and a young woman hitchhiking on June 3. During the course of that meeting, Owen said, Sirhan had agreed to buy a horse from Owen on the night of June 4 in the hotel parking lot. That deal, explained Owen, was why he himself had parked his horse trailer in the parking lot and why Sirhan had four one-hundred-dollar bills in his pocket when he was arrested. Owen further surmised that Sirhan intended to use the horse trailer as a get-away vehicle.

The Police basically dismissed Owen's report as a publicity stunt. (In 1970 this incident was examined in a lawsuit that Owen filed against a television station. During that trial, several witnessed testified that Owen had become acquainted with Sirhan at the Corona race track, where on one occasion a few weeks before the assassination Owen had given Sirhan a large wad of cash)

Immediately after he was arrested, Sirhan declared that "I did it for my country." Within a few minutes, though, he began avoiding any discussion of his motive. He instead wanted to talk with the investigating policemen about Albert DeSalvo, the so-called Boston Strangler. Later, Sirhan claimed that he had no memory of anything about the assassination, about his intention, about his notebooks, or about the act itself. During his trial he reluctantly allowed his lawyers to construct a legal defense of diminished responsibility due to mental illness.

Sirhan was not hypnotized by himself or anyone else in order to manipulate him to assassinate Robert Kennedy. Even without the hypnosis, Sirhan was willing and eager to assassinate Kennedy because of the latter's support for Israel. The initial purpose of Sirhan's self-hypnosis was to focus his mind and bolster courage for this difficult mission. Eventually, though, the hypnosis served also as a legal excuse to try to avoid execution. The notebook served as evidence that he was often in deep trances and so plausibly had no memory of the assassination. Also, the hypnosis deflected political blame from the Palestinian cause as Sirhan's main motivation.

Sirhan hoped that if he could avoid execution, then eventually he would be freed in a prisoner swap forced by Palestinian terrorists. He was sentenced to death, but later that sentence was commuted when the Supreme Court declared the death penalty to be unconstitutional.

Sirhan mentioned Albert DeSalvo repeatedly in his notebooks and at the police station immediately after his arrest. DeSalvo had been hypnotized by a Los Angeles hypnotist named William Joseph Bryan. After he died in 1977, a couple of prostitutes whom he frequently hired told investigators that he sometimes bragged that he had hypnotized Albert DeSalvo and Sirhan Sirhan.

Colin Wright , Website June 3, 2018 at 7:49 am GMT
' Given this exceptional bond between the Kennedy brothers, what is the probability that the two Kennedy assassinations were unrelated? '

On the face of it, the probability would be about the same as it would be if they hadn't been particularly close.

Heros , June 3, 2018 at 8:33 am GMT
"Did the Rothschilds kill the Kennedies" FIFY.

They most certainly did. They stole US enriched plutonium and triggers for Israel's continuing illegal nuclear weapons programs. They also whipped up the entire cold war and the Vietnam war as a cover for the genocide and theft of Palestine. They passed nuclear weapons research through jews like the Rosenbergs and Pollard to their other puppet, the USSR, so that the US and the entire planet could be kept under their strategy of tension while they set up the capital of the planet in Jerusalem.

But that is all merely frosting on the cake. This family and its satellites started the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the US war of northern aggression, the Spanish-American war, WWI, WWII, the Korean War and is directly responsible for the never ending wars for Eretz Israel. With their Havara agreement, this family set up all the jews that it deemed racially inferior to suffer through WWII in Europe while it forced the National Socialists to set up training centers to train young Zionist Übermenschen in all facets of German technology before shipping them, with their belongings, tools and equipment to Palestine. It is also amazing that immediately after the war they twisted Germany's arm into resuming the shipments of technology, power stations, trains and ships.

Israel clearly is not a legal state in any sense of the word. It is the capital of by far the worlds largest crime syndicate. It is a scourge to all humanity.

Greg Bacon , Website June 3, 2018 at 8:46 am GMT
Jack Ruby's real name was Jacob Rubenstein , a Chosen One who participated in the horrendous murder of a beloved US president.

If you read those CIA docs released last Fall, there was one page that specifically mentioned that Jews were involved in JFK's murder.

"We now have plenty of money–our new backers are Jews–as soon as we or (they) take care of Kennedy."

Go to page 64 of this file:

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32241845.pdf

JFK had also told an aide that Israel would have the 'bomb' over his dead body. Well, Israel has the bomb and control of the USA, thanks to their murders of the Kennedy's and the masterminding of the 9/11 False Flag.

But if you point this out, you'll get hit with a barrage of anti-Semite slurs, accusing one of being a neo-Nazi or worse, all the while never discussing what you just wrote.

j2 , June 3, 2018 at 9:07 am GMT
@Wizard of Oz

"A recent NYRB article suggests that, while he didn't think much of the Warren Commission's work, his suspicions only extended to Cuba and "gangsters"."

Cuba casinos and crime were run by Meyer Lansky. You immediately get the Israel connection as he was a great fried of Israel. Cuban gangsters are implied in the conspiracy to kill JFK, but that is a link to the theory of Piper. To find the high level perpetrators it is only enough to ask what important US politics changed when LBJ become the President. Towards Cuba or gangsters, no.

Felix Krull , June 3, 2018 at 11:20 am GMT
Thank you for not resorting to clickbait headlines.
Jake , June 3, 2018 at 11:29 am GMT
Did Israel kill the Kennedys? It is entirely possible. In fact, any conspiracy theory that links the murders that does not see the Israelis and American Jews involved is almost certainly a waste of time. But here is what is essential: if Israel and/or American Jews 'did it,' you can bet your every penny and the lives of your children, spouse, and siblings that America's WASP Deep State was behind it all.
Beefcake the Mighty , June 3, 2018 at 11:44 am GMT
FYI: https://archive.org/details/FinalJudgment
Florin 74 , June 3, 2018 at 12:05 pm GMT
read "Final Judgment" by Michael Collins Piper.

Johnson's involvement in the USS Liberty incident (an effort to lie us into a war for Israel) should not be viewed in isolation.

http://americanfreepress.net/PDF/Final_Judgment.pdf

Tono Bungay , June 3, 2018 at 12:16 pm GMT
Once this guy writes, "Given this exceptional bond between the Kennedy brothers, what is the probability that the two Kennedy assassinations were unrelated? Rather, we should start with the assumption that they are related. Basic common sense suggests that the Kennedy brothers have been killed by the same force, and for the same motives," there is really no point in reading further. If his reasoning is so weak and silly as this, what confidence can a reader have in anything else he might come up with? Two women tried to kill Gerald Ford in 1975; does "basic common sense suggest" that they represented "the same force"? Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both killed in 1968; does that suggest their murders were related? This guy belongs on Infowars.
Aardvark , June 3, 2018 at 12:33 pm GMT
@Heros

I had long thought the shareholders of the Federal Reserve (FR) were behind the assasination. Kennedy had signed the executive order to forbid the FR from charging interest on its fraud money. He had also proposed the issuance of United States Notes backed by silver. This would have denied the FR a lot of future income.

Later events by Johnson surely indicated he was at least a water boy for the FR. Johnson went on to sign the coin act that removed silver from dimes and quarters and reduced the amount of silver in fifty cent coins. He also removed the gold cover requirement for Federal Reserve notes.

At the very least there were two reasons to get rid of Kennedy; stop the Dimona project and remove jeopardy to FR income.

Aardvark , June 3, 2018 at 12:42 pm GMT
@Aardvark

I meant to say stop Kennedy from halting the Dimona project.

Miro23 , June 3, 2018 at 12:43 pm GMT

It is the same Feinberg who, after the Democratic primaries in 1960, made the following proposal to Kennedy, as Kennedy himself later reported to his friend Charles Bartlett: "We know your campaign is in trouble. We're willing to pay your bills if you'll let us have control of your Middle East policy."

Whatever the details of the blackmail, Kennedy once confided to his assistant Hyman Raskin, as an apology for taking Johnson, "I was left with no choice [ ] those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened me with problems and I don't need more problems."

I wonder if Trump is confiding in anyone? If he is, it would be interesting to hear what he's saying.

The Alarmist , June 3, 2018 at 12:54 pm GMT
@quasi_verbatim

"We all know that Jack and Bobby were killed by lone nutcases three years apart and there can't possibly be any connection between them. Stop messing about with the Official Narrative."

Maybe the Magic Bullet got Bobby too.

In any case, the involvement of Israel would explain why the complete JFK assassination files will never see the light of day. Even the CIA doesn't have that kind of clout.

Wizard of Oz , June 3, 2018 at 1:11 pm GMT
@j2

My comment was about the author's failure to take account of one of tbe best sources for what RFK thought and proposed. Obviously that suggests the question whether it was sloppy research or dishonest suppression.

As to your Meyer Lansky point you do not indicate whether you have any serious claim to knowing anything useful about him and/or his connection to Israel but surely it is rubbish to talk of his interest in Cuban casinos being relevant. Really!? In 1963? And anyway you would only be making sense if you were asserting – with reason – that RFK felt constrained to use to his friend Schlesinger "Cubans or gangsters" as code for Israel.

Or, conceivably you think RFK didn't know what you know about the involvement of Israel but wanted a further inquiry which might have produced an embarrassing truth about Israel. Really?

DESERT FOX , June 3, 2018 at 1:20 pm GMT
Not only did Israel kill JFK and RFK but they also killed JFKjr. with a bomb on his plane and the Israelis did 911 and by the way the Israeli attack on the USS LIBERTY where 34 dead and 174 were wounded in brutal attack on an American ship and every one of these diabolical act proved over and over again that Israel and the Zionists control America lock stock and gun barrel.

America is an Israeli slavery colony and the America military is a proxy arm of the IDF to fight Israels wars .

Bardon Kaldian , June 3, 2018 at 1:24 pm GMT
This whole article on Israeli angle is simply preposterous.

If the Dimona project was so crucial, there were numerous other options for Israel to try to persuade JFK to let them proceed with their project. To try to latch JFK's supposedly adamant decision onto one or two documents is absurd: politicians frequently change their opinions & actions and there is no proof that JFK considered Dimona to be such a big deal, make-or-break of anything.

Then, Israelis would, even if this were true, be more prone too blackmail JFK- mostly about his sexual escapades, or try to, say, eliminate him in a clandestine manner (poisoning or something similar).

No, the JFK assassination was a public execution, a coup by the deep state (in modern parlance) in front of the whole world, the message being: we can do whatever we want & you can't do anything about it.

vinteuil , June 3, 2018 at 1:29 pm GMT
@Heros

This family and its satellites started the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the US war of northern aggression, the Spanish-American war, WWI, WWII, the Korean War

Hmmm – sounds like a family of winners. So how do I sign up with them?

Jon Baptist , June 3, 2018 at 1:39 pm GMT
@j2

Lansky killed Kennedy for Israel and for mob interests within the U.S. Knock off one president and reap multiple benefits. Lansky was a fanatical Zionist as well as a crime boss. The JFK hit is all about Permindex and the Lansky-Marcello connection.

The following is from 'Final Judgement' by Michael Collins Piper. "Tibor Rosenbaum was one of the godfathers of the state of Israel and the first director for finance and supply for Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad. Rosenbaum was a prime financial angel behind the Permindex corporation. His Swiss banking concern, the Banque De Credit International, also served as the chief European money laundry or the global crime syndicate of Miami-based crime chief Meyer Lansky."

Yaras, a friend of Jack Ruby, was the hitman. Oswald was heavily intertwined as well.

Lyndon Johnson must have completely known that the hit would take place because he immediately dropped all operations JFK implemented regarding Israel.

j2 , June 3, 2018 at 1:58 pm GMT
@Tono Bungay

"Given this exceptional bond between the Kennedy brothers, what is the probability that the two Kennedy assassinations were unrelated? If his reasoning is so weak and silly as this, what confidence can a reader have in anything else he might come up with?"

I do not find it silly at all. Assuming that the Kennedys were close (which is most probably true), then if JFK was worried about Israel's atom bomb program, Robert almost certainly knew about it and shared JFK's opinion. He may not have known who was behind the JFK assassination, but he would very probably have opened the case. If the case is honestly studied, it is immediately seen as a conspiracy. I confirmed it easily to myself by analyzing the Dictabelt data: more than one shooter. As the likely culprit is very probably to be found by checking what changed in the US policy (and what changed was the US attitude to the Israel bomb), the argument of the article becomes quite strong: the purpose of the second assassination was very possibly to cover the first assassination. I find it purely logical, not silly.

ChuckOrloski , June 3, 2018 at 2:11 pm GMT
@Biff

Biff wisely reflected: "I always thought the CIA was suspect, but obviously there are more angles to the story."

Hi Biff,

This article author, Laurent Guyenot, did an admirable job at attempting to distance CIA involvement from Israeli intelligence, and the killing of JFK, pursuant coup, overturning a US election.

Not so with author Peter Janney who wrote the terrific book, "Mary's Mosaic." He focused upon CIA James Jesus Angleton's Israeli-cozy career & deadly pre/post assassination undertakings prior to November 23, 1963.

F.y.i, Biff, perhaps you're aware about the Fall 1964 murder (unsolved!) of Mary Pinchot Meyer, CIA Cord Meyer Jr.' ex-wife and JFK flame?

Unfortunately, Israeli interest & involvement in JFK's killing escaped Peter Janney's survey. Nonetheless, below is Mr. Janet's very sound description about CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton's mad pursuit to locate & confiscate the diary of the dead, Mary Pinchot Meyer.

Subsequently, I do not endorse a "Rush to Judgement" that exonerates the CIA from the treasonous Kennedy murders.

Thanks a lot, Biff! Please refer to video below?

redmudhooch , June 3, 2018 at 2:21 pm GMT
They threatened to assassinate 0bama if he got out of line: Atlanta Jewish Times featured a column by its owner-publisher suggesting that U.S.-based Israeli Mossad agents might someday need to "order a hit" on the president of the United States.

On Jan. 13 the Atlanta Jewish Times featured a column by its owner-publisher suggesting that Israel might someday need to "order a hit" on the president of the United States. In the column, publisher Andrew Adler describes a scenario in which Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu would need to "give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel." The purpose? So that the vice president could then take office and dictate U.S. policies that would help the Jewish state "obliterate its enemies." Adler wrote that it is highly likely that the idea "has been discussed in Israel's most inner circles."

He threatened the fake Jews narrative on Hitler too:

http://time.com/4711687/john-f-kennedy-diary-hitler/

From JFK diary. The diary reveals that during his time in Berlin, Kennedy wrote about visiting Hitler's bunker only months after Germany surrendered in the Second World War.

"You can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived," Kennedy wrote in his diary in 1945.

"He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him," he added. "He had in him the stuff of which legends are made."

"The room where Hitler is supposed to have met his death showed scorched walls and traces of fire," he wrote. "There is no complete evidence, however, that the body that was found was Hitler's body."

"The Russians doubt that he is dead," Kennedy added. JFK was visiting Europe after a stint in the Navy.

Screwed up world we live in when these frauds are our #1 ally, according to the traitors in DC.
We shoulda destroyed them after USS Liberty incident, 9/11 and the mass murder that followed would have been prevented.

Cold N. Holefield , Website June 3, 2018 at 2:27 pm GMT
@Aardvark

He had also proposed the issuance of United States Notes backed by silver. This would have denied the FR a lot of future income.

No, he did not. Your statement is not factually incorrect. It's indefensible. It further muddies already muddied water.

Debunking the Federal Reserve
Conspiracy Theories (and other financial myths)

[MORE]

To understand exactly what Kennedy's order was trying to do, we must understand the purpose of the legislation which gave the order its underlying authority. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 (ch. 25, 48 Stat 51) to which Kennedy refers permits the President to issue silver certificates in various denominations (mostly $1, $2, $5, and $10) and in any total volume so long as the Treasury has enough silver on hand to redeem the certificates for a specific quantity and fineness of silver and that the total volume of such currency does not exceed $3 billion. The Silver Purchase Act of 1934 (ch. 674,48 Stat 1178) also grants this power to the Treasury Secretary subject to similar limitations. Nowhere in the text of the order is a quantity of money mentioned, so it is unclear how Marrs arrived at his $4.2 billion figure. Moreover, the President could not have authorized such a large issue because it would have exceeded the statutory limit.2
As economic activity grew in the fifties and sixties, the public demand for low denomination currency grew, increasing the Treasury's need for silver to back additional certificate issues and to mint new coins (dimes, quarters, half-dollars). However, during the late fifties the price of silver began to rise and reached the point that the market value of the silver contained in the coins and backing the certificates was greater than the face value of the money itself.2

To conserve the Treasury's silver needs, the Silver Purchase Act and related measures were repealed by Congress in 1963 with Public Law 88-36. Following the repeal, only the President could authorize new silver certificate issues, and no longer the Treasury Secretary. The law, signed by Kennedy himself, also permits the Federal Reserve to issue small denomination bills to replace the outgoing silver certificates (prior to the act, the Fed could only issue Federal Reserve Notes in larger denominations). The Treasury's shrinking silver stock could then be used to mint coins only and not have to back currency. The repeal left only the President with the authority to issue silver certificates, however it did permit him to delegate this authority. E.O. 11,110 does this by transferring the authority from the President to the Treasury
Secretary.2

E.O. 11,110 did not create authority to issue new silver certificates, it only affected who could give the order. The purpose of the order was to facilitate the reduction of certificates in circulation, not to increase them. In October 1964 the Treasury ceased issuing them entirely. The Coinage Act of 1965 (PL 89-81) ended the practice of using silver in most U.S. coins, and in 1968 Congress ended the redeemability of silver certificates (PL 90-29). E.O. 11,110 was never reversed by President Johnson and remained on the books until 1987 when there was a general cleaning-up of executive orders (E.O. 12,608, 9/9/87). However, by this time the remaining legislative authority behind E.O. 11,110 had been repealed by Congress with PL 97-258 in 1982.2

In summary, E.O. 11,110 did not create new authority to issue additional silver certificates. In fact, its intention was to ease the process for their removal so that small denomination Federal Reserve Notes could replace them in accordance with a law Kennedy himself signed. If Kennedy had really sought to reduce Federal Reserve power, then why did he sign a bill that gave the Fed still more power?

Tyrion 2 , June 3, 2018 at 2:31 pm GMT
@Hiram of Tyre

If I could make a parallel on the Palestinians: it's "interesting" how they always found themselves in the spotlight of major plots, killings and terror acts after the creation of the British Zionist State known as Israel.

But not 9/11 that was perpetrated by inconveniently Saudi terrorists hosted thousands of miles away from Palestine in Nowheresville, Afghanistan.

Cold N. Holefield , Website June 3, 2018 at 2:32 pm GMT
Great article. Well-researched and well-presented. It's a convincing case. It reveals the CIA was compromised in favor of Israel. That was then and this is now.No doubt the Israeli termites have completely consumed the structure. I would have to imagine at this point the CIA is a dupe division of Mossad and it's so inundated with Israeli Moles to rid the undemocratic organization of the infestation would be tantamount to playing whack-a-mole. The only option is to burn it to the ground. Destroy it, end it, and jail the majority of its members, past and present, for High Treason.
Echoes of History , June 3, 2018 at 2:35 pm GMT
Thermonuclear Blackmail.

One other purpose of Israeli nuclear weapons , not often stated, but obvious, is their "use" on the United States .

THE THIRD TEMPLE'S HOLY OF HOLIES:
ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Warner D. Farr, LTC, U.S. Army
The Counterproliferation Papers
Future Warfare Series No. 2
USAF Counterproliferation Center
Air War College
Air University
Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama
September 1999

http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/cpc-pubs/farr.htm

Hansel and Gretel, open that oven door again, before the hook-nose witch eats any more of our children.

prusmc , Website June 3, 2018 at 2:36 pm GMT
@Wizard of Oz

Johnson, IMHO, worst President in US history. HE DID MORE LASTING DAMAGE than even Obama. But the Kennedy myth is overdrawn. If JFK had lived he would have been reelected but not by a Johnsonian o landslide. Consequently, Congress would have kept him in check. If HHH had been his VP, Kennedy would have got less out of Congress than with Johnson ( who knew where the bodies were buried).
The real tragedy is not that Kennedy was so good; it was that Johnson was so bad. Had Bobby won in 1968, he would have torn the country apart worse than Johnson. There are so many loose ends in this feature it is hard to find where to start. But it is clear that this person believes that for a few years we Americans had Gods living amongst us.
The curse of the whole Kennedy family was raised by Teddy while successfully avoiding blame and guilt for Mary Jo's unfortunate accident. However, the author brings the curse to life again while seeming to reject it concerning JFK, junior's plane crash disappearance. Could pilot error by lack of experience and failure to heed weather forecast advice have had any role in this family's continuing misadventures?
Is there any explanation for anything negative happening to this clan that can not be blamed on Jews, right-wing extremists, Cosa Nostra, CIA, the Navy, military intelligence or talk radio?

Cold N. Holefield , Website June 3, 2018 at 2:41 pm GMT
@Jake

you can bet your every penny and the lives of your children, spouse, and siblings that America's WASP Deep State was behind it all.

Certainly complicit. The article does seem to give a pass to the CIA, but if the CIA is everything it's cracked up to be, it had to know about this and the author even indicates some of its more influential agents were cooperative with Mossad so in the least it was compromised and therefore complicit in High Treason. If it didn't know, the CIA should have been abolished then & there but it certainly should be abolished now.

schrub , June 3, 2018 at 2:44 pm GMT
Who hasn't been mentioned so far is the very beautiful and brilliant Mathilde Krim. Krim was LBJ's mistress in the 1960s. She also just happened to be a fanatical supporter of the interests of Israel. In the late 1940s, she had been an active promoter of the Israeli terror group The Irgun. Mathilde was also most likely a Mossad agent with long-time contacts to the highest levels of the Israeli government.

I would have loved to hear the "pillow talk" between these two total opposites: the incredibly crude, totally uncultured and flabby LBJ and the cultured, slim, sleek and highly educated Krim. You can bet that she was able to supply Israel with a constant supply of all sorts of top secret information that she was able to extract out of her bedmate. Maybe she also gave advice to LBJ about who exactly to assassinate or what transgressions by Israel for LBJ to ignore (like the USS Liberty attack).

Mathilde Krim's husband was the very wealthy Arthur Krim, one of the most powerful and active supporters of Israel in the USA. Mathilde Krim's relationship with LBJ was most likely known about by her husband but was "overlooked" by him because of its huge value to Israel as both as a source of information as well as for its potential use as blackmail. (You can bet that somewhere in Israel is a vault full of movies taken of their bedroom activities.)

The heads of MSM at the time apparently knew all about the relationship between Krim and LBJ but "wisely" chose to ignore it just as they had done for JFK and his affairs.

You can also bet that Krim dropped her boyfriend LBJ like a hot potato once he left office and was no longer of use to her friends.

Here is a highly sanitized Wikipedia entry about her: No mention is made of her "friendship" with LBJ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathilde_Krim

gsjackson , June 3, 2018 at 2:58 pm GMT
@ChuckOrloski

I've often wondered to what extent the CIA is Zionized and acting in concert with Israel, and how long it has been that way. Anecdotally: I had two students at the University of Wisconsin who interviewed with the CIA. Both were NY Jews who ardently supported Israel, and I do mean ardently. This piece was an eye opener for me. I read all about Angleton in The Devil's Chessboard, but nothing about his connection with Israel. And LBJ a Jew??

Anon [219] Disclaimer , June 3, 2018 at 3:03 pm GMT
This article is simply bizarre. If the CIA didn't do it why is it still sanitizing the files 55 years later? Surely this article (which contains numerous basic errors (for example, there were never two entry wounds seen on the front of JFK's body, only a neck wound) is either written by an ignorant hack or more likely a CIA hack's imaginative narrative designed to confuse the idiots. For a start try the Kennedy and King website hosted by Jim D'Eugenio and spend a few years getting the facts before taking this rubbish seriously.
Heros , June 3, 2018 at 3:12 pm GMT
@vinteuil

Its actually quite easy. Promise your first born and swear complete and total obeisance, and you are in the club. But remember, never refuse to partake in the ceremonies and sacrifices. And don't ever even think about backing out of your oath to give up your first born, otherwise expect the same as what happened to Heath Ledger or Kurt Kobain.

Jewaroo , June 3, 2018 at 3:25 pm GMT
When Langley wants to take that CIA smell off their official line, they use a foreign source. Guyenot's act is boilerplate disinfo, reinterpreting the obvious with double-reverse psychology.

Like, Truman's editorial, assiduously suppressed by Dulles himself, was a diabolical head-fake. And But but but no invasion of Cuba followed Kennedy's assassination!! CIA framed Cuba not to justify an immediate attack on Cuba, but to force Warren to bend over for the official story. LBJ's negotiation with Warren is a matter of historical record. He told Warren that if he didn't stick with the official bullshit story, Cuba's responsibility would lead to war entailing nuclear war with Russia.

And more standard CIA argumentum ad ignorantiam: you don't know who the CIA mastermind was, so it was Israel. You don't know who the mastermind was because CIA flouts the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act.

Guyenot applies Occam's sledghammer to prove that it wasn't the guys who had military, commercial, and criminal cutouts nationwide, extensive illegal domestic operations including blanket surveillance, arbitrary classification authority, and impunity in municipal law. It was Israel, who cleverly put one over on the dumb ol' CIA, nyuk nyuk nyuk. And CIA couldn't do nuthin' about it. This is how stupid they think you are.

JFK blah blah blah. CIA's your CHEKA. They've ruled your country since inception. They kill and torture whoever they want. What are you gonna do about it?

Sean , June 3, 2018 at 3:30 pm GMT
Did Lee Harvey Oswald kill JFK? LHO was a devotee of Casto and when he visited the Cuban Consulate in Mexico and was denied permission to travel to Cuba Oswald stormed out. The Kennedys were trying to kill Castro, and Oswald,, who had narrowly missed killing Edwin Walker months before, and found himself in a job that provided a shot on the JFK parade route, killed JFK for his anti communism. Kennedy had almost taken the world to WW3 in the Cuba crisis, which was Nikita Khrushchev's response to JFK's insane revival of Eisenhower's plan to give Germany a say in Nukes (to save the US taxpayer money basically). Perhaps it is just as well that Marine-trained rifleman Oswald put an end to Kennedy when he did.
John Gruskos , June 3, 2018 at 3:32 pm GMT

John, Robert and Ted Kennedy were all extremely friendly to Israel and extremely supportive of the interests of diaspora Jews. They led the Democratic Party away from the old-left emphasis on economic justice and peace, towards the new-left emphasis on issues of race and sex.

They weakened the labor unions with their campaign against the Teamsters, they supported tax cuts for the very wealthy, their support for increased immigration was hostile to the economic interests of the American working class, and they supported an intensification of the cold war against the Soviet Union. They even knowingly lied about an imaginary "missile gap", in order to present the Democratic Party as more hawkish than Eisenhower's Republicans.

The Kennedy brothers adopted this platform after the crucially important events of 1956-1957:

In response to the Suez Crisis, Khrushchev's Soviet Union definitively became the patron of Israel's Arab enemies. Simultaneously, Khrushchev was overseeing a Thermidorian reaction against the excesses of early Bolshevism in eastern Europe. Stalin was denounced, Matyas Rakosi was exiled, Kaganovich was purged from the Politburo, Solzhenitsyn was released from the gulags, and the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries were treated less harshly than they would have been in the days of Lenin and Trotsky. A new Bukharinite, almost semi-nationalist, form of communism developed in eastern Europe – far less deadly, and with jobs and patronage more fairly distributed among the various ethnicities.

In other words, Soviet communism was no longer "good for the Jews". No longer were millions of counter-revolutionary "antisemites" being murdered. No longer were Jews massively over-represented in positions of power and prestige. And no longer was the Soviet Union a supporter of Zionism and Israel.

Similarly, the rise of American Jews from the working class into the upper middle and wealthy classes, meant that domestically the American old-left economic policies such as progressive taxation and support for rogue unions such as the Teamsters, were no longer "good for the Jews".

In these circumstances, Eisenhower's moves towards detente with the Soviet Union, insistence on Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai, support for immigration restriction (which prevented the migration into America of the Jewish former ruling class of communist eastern Europe – Kaganovich, Rakosi and hordes of lesser-known radical Bolsheviks, commissars and secret police agents), and even his continuation of FDR-era progressive taxation and public works projects, were seen as "bad for the Jews", just as Kennedy's exact opposite platform was seen as "good for the Jews".

Perhaps more significantly, the Eisenhower-Nixon cultural conservatism (praising Robert E. Lee as the greatest American who ever lived, expressing regret for having appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, and living a chaste life of faithfulness to their wives) contrasted with the cultural radicalism of the Kennedy brothers (full support for the most radical elements of the civil rights movement, libertine personal lives filled with not-so-secret love affairs).

Compared to what came before, JFK represented an assault on the ethnic self-respect of old-stock Americans and the cultural norms of traditional Christianity – to the delight of the Jewish movements examined in Kevin MacDonald's Culture of Critique .

Whatever personal animosity may have existed, in political terms LBJ was indistinguishable from the Kennedy brothers. He too was hostile towards the Soviet bloc, a friend of Israel, and supportive of the cultural left.

Given this macro-historical background, I think the simplest explanations of the assassinations are correct, and the various convoluted conspiracy theories are incorrect.

Lee Harvey Oswald was an old-left Marxist who saw JFK as an enemy, a traitor against the "true" left.

Jack Ruby was a hyper-ethnocentric Jewish gangster who murdered Oswald to avenge the death of the Jewish people's best friend.

Sirhan Sirhan was a Palestinian nationalist.

Conspiracy theorist are typically Kennedy sycophants who don't like being reminded that their heroes were enemies of socialism, enemies of the long-suffering Palestinian people, and heroes to the likes of Jack Ruby.

They'd prefer to believe that JFK and RFK were martyrs murdered by reactionary WASPs – but that is pure fantasy.

Intelligent Dasein , Website June 3, 2018 at 3:39 pm GMT
I'm really beginning to wonder what Ron Unz is doing with his website. Last week we got that moronic article by 9/11 doucher David Lorimer, and now we are treated to a 10,000 word disquisition about how Israel assassinated the Kennedys -- both of which articles are rather baseless canards but are deeply emotionally appealing to a certain coterie of contrarians and which are sure to attract (and have attracted) the most odious collection of commenters who are both uninterested in and oblivious to the the truth about any of it. Not only is it a frustrating exercise in futility to try to discuss anything with such people (their minds are closed not only with respect to the lunacy that they themselves believe but also with respect to what they assume you believe -- they've already assigned you to a camp and will never allow you to depart from it), but also the subjects themselves have grown tiresome and tedious and are only anymore of interest to the very same propounders of revisionist idiocy who keep them alive with their siege mentality.

What purpose can there be in publishing such articles other than to fuel the febrile files of this phantasist fringe? There is nothing here in the interests of truth; this is demagoguery and obscurantism of the worst sort. Articles like this are the intellectual equivalent of a plague bacillus, winding its way through human minds, putrefying and perverting all in its course. Such foul air requires a constant nosegay of truth to ward it off, and these flowers are in very short supply around here.

I have no desire to defend the Jews, or Judaism, or Zionism, or the State of Israel, but the charges that they were involved with the Kennedy assassinations are completely without merit and ought to be repugnant to decent people. The fact that they were directly responsible for the attack on the USS Liberty is more than enough reason to despise the Israelis; they do not need to be beaten with every club or charged with every crime. To do so is vindictive and paranoid and shameful, and I cannot be sanguine about the motives of those who would whip themselves and others into such a frenzy.

Cold N. Holefield , Website June 3, 2018 at 3:50 pm GMT
Here's Mathilde Krim with a soirée of Fine Folks to include LBJ & Lady Bird. She certainly made the rounds. Definitely an Intelligence Operative considering her prodigious network of contacts. A Cancer to Humanity. It reminds me of a scene from Rosemary's Baby.
Mike P , June 3, 2018 at 3:52 pm GMT
@Bardon Kaldian

Considering that you belong to the resident Hasbara brigade, your position fits well with the hypothesis of this piece – the "limited hang-out" of the U.S. "deep state" to cover up the Israeli connection.

Dimona was clearly a major point of contention – and it is very unlikely that JFK would have aided and abetted the shenanigans surrounding the war of 1967. Israel had plenty of reason to do away with him.

Frederick V. Reed , Website June 3, 2018 at 4:09 pm GMT
"the bullet tested in laboratory to be compared to the the one extracted from Robert's brain had not been shot by Sirhan's revolver, but by another gun, with a different serial number; "

The author seems blankly ignorant of guns, apparently believing that a serial number can be determined from a bullet. He sounds as though he has some vague recollection that marking left by lands and grooves on bullets are unique to the gun firing them, and somehow confuses this with serial numbers. Amateurish research does not breed confidence in conclusions. Does he give a link to which labortory and its report?

Laurent Guyénot , June 3, 2018 at 4:13 pm GMT
@Intelligent Dasein

Do you mean you believe that Oswald killed Kennedy? Or do you mean the question is irrelevant? I'm interested to know.

Monty Ahwazi , June 3, 2018 at 4:22 pm GMT
Well researched and written article! Additional and further research is needed in the following possibilities raised by the people living outside of the US in 1960's:
1. JFK's opposition to the planning of Israelis initiating a war against the Arab states in 1967
2. Killing 2 birds with one shot by falsely accusing an Arab for killing RK before he reopens the assassination case of his brother
3. Destruction of the world media from the 1967 war to the assassination of RK
4. Involvement of LBJ in both assassinations since he is a Zionist from his mother side
Laurent Guyénot , June 3, 2018 at 4:24 pm GMT
@Bardon Kaldian

Yes, the JFK assassination was a public execution, but why would that incriminate the deep state rather than Israel? I would rather think the opposite. I think you also miss a point that you could perhaps get by reading James Douglass: JFK considered it his most important task to abolish nuclear weapons. It was possible then. So it makes sense to believe that his determination to stop Dimona was very, very strong.

Laurent Guyénot , June 3, 2018 at 4:27 pm GMT
@Frederick V. Reed

No, I am not that ignorant. Either I expressed myself poorly (English being not my native language), or you misunderstood. The serial number of the gun from which the test bullet was shot (as indicated on official report) is different from the serial number of Sirhan's gun (as indicated on another official report.

Dissident X , June 3, 2018 at 4:31 pm GMT
Thank you Laurent Guyénot. This is a long(ish) article, and obviously complex.

So, in breaking down this theory, one must first admit, in light of what is known of the Kennedy assassinations, consideration of the Torah-Pharisees-Talmud international collective as a potential prime operative, is reasonable, based on the prime-facia motives .
Specifically:
1. the intention of registering the American Zionist Council (AZC subsequently AIPAC ) as a "foreign agent" subject to the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938
2. the Kennedy's determination to stop Israel [secretly, like many things] developing its own nuclear bomb
3. Kennedy committed to support UN Resolution 194 for the right of return of Palestinian refugees

Anybody familiar with the trends of the last 200 years of the activities and well- [self]- published political motivations of Torah-Pharisees-Talmud international collective , notably pro-zionists and their leading spokes people, would be aware that each one of the listed intentions, if validated , would be considered ample justification for another political assassination, from such an extremist ideological perspective.

The thornier, but potentially more revealing issue is capability .
But one must ask oneself, who in the world, could have the capability to kill a sitting U.S. president and a leading presidential nominee?

In consideration of this question, one can greatly reduce the number of potential suspects, since the range is extremely small, and I would suggest, probably included the collaboration of several of the very few limited candidates.

For example, does anyone think that the Soviet Union could possibly have managed this alone, or even more ridiculously, Fidel Castro?!

I personally think it at least on the verge of absurd.

Capability continued

Frequently, I find myself drawn back to Gilad Atzmons excerpt from testimony, as expert witness on Jewish Identity politics, at 'hate crime" trial of Arthur Topham 20151108-20151109
Sourced originally at: http://blog.balder.org/?p=1673

"When we criticise Jewish politics (Israel, Zionism, the Lobby etc') some Jews are "racially offended" in spite of the fact that race, biology, blood or ethnicity was never mentioned. When we criticise Jewish racism some Jews hide behind the argument that we are criticizing their religion. When we occasionally criticise the religion or some obscene Jewish religious teaching we are quick to learn that Jews are hardly religious anymore (which is true by the way). The meaning of it is simple, yet devastating. The Jewish triangle makes it very difficult, or even impossible to criticise Jewish politics, ideology and racism because the Identity is set as a field with a tri-polar gravity centre. The identity morphs endlessly. The contemporary 3rd category (political) Jew is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, this is the quantum mechanics that is set to suppress any possible criticism."

But most particularly, " Jew is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, this is the quantum mechanics that is set to suppress . ""

I am also reminded of Noam Chompsky's model (explanation), as described in Manufacturing Consent for what he describes as a passive media skewing mechanism (my words), along the lines of, systemically, many slight slanted/nudged editorial decisions, which aggregated, may well completely distort an accurate picture of events.

By not being able to identify one clear, discrete actor/provocateur, the system, the way it operates, will be incapable of actually making a determination and assignment of cause.

Now, if one followed a operational model of negative sum gain gaming of systems to always gain advantage, one might have identified this weakness in the system, and employed a quantum-mechanics like distribution of a fifth column in the system to effect the political change one desired.

Cold N. Holefield , Website June 3, 2018 at 4:34 pm GMT
@Frederick V. Reed

That's a good point but it still doesn't explain how Sirhan Squared fired the fateful shot from behind Kennedy when he was always in front of Kennedy.

Fyi, I have always felt horrible for Sirhan Squared. So much so, I named my dog after him and it's a female dog. You should see the reaction when I take her to the vet and they ask her name and I say it's Sirhan Sirhan. The look is priceless. My next dog's name will be Jesus. I'm sure it will go over equally as well with the hoi polloi.

Does anyone really believe that if a POTUS decided to eradicate Israel's nuclear weapons program and cut off all funding to Israel that said POTUS wouldn't be assassinated before he/she could make it happen? Trump has been egregiously disrespectful to the Intelligence Community and yet he's still alive, but what if Trump was egregiously disrespectful to Israel instead of kissing Israel's ass as the first Jewish POTUS that he is? What if Trump ended all American aid to Israel and went to the United Nations and put forth a resolution for Israel to eliminate its nukes because if Iran and North Korea and Ted Nugent can't have them, neither can Israel. If Trump got elected on such a platform, which he never would have by the way, he would have been assassinated before he or any POTUS could implement such a plan. Israel has made it clear many times over, it will do ANYTHING & EVERYTHING it has to do to protect itself existentially and I'm sure that includes assassinating the POTUS if need be and all else fails.

Arnieus , June 3, 2018 at 4:41 pm GMT
Not Israel exactly but the banker clans that created Israel with US wealth and still own monopolies in banking, media, and drugs legal and illegal. Kennedy was put in office because they thought he was just a skirt chasing son of a bootlegger that would not interfere with the Globalist agenda. Kind of like Bill Clinton. Then he starts talking about "secret societies" and backing off the constant war agenda. And he fostered a trusting relationship with Russia, trying to really be president. He is the last one to try that.
chicken salad , June 3, 2018 at 4:48 pm GMT
Great article. Just wanted to mention that Jeff Gates' Guilt by Association corroborates the author's thesis.
Wizard of Oz , June 3, 2018 at 4:54 pm GMT
@John Gruskos

From one with no barrow to push: this is refreshingly sane.

j2 , June 3, 2018 at 4:54 pm GMT
@Wizard of Oz

"As to your Meyer Lansky point you do not indicate whether you have any serious claim to knowing anything useful about him and/or his connection to Israel but surely it is rubbish to talk of his interest in Cuban casinos being relevant. Really!? In 1963? And anyway you would only be making sense if you were asserting – with reason – that RFK felt constrained to use to his friend Schlesinger "Cubans or gangsters" as code for Israel.

Or, conceivably you think RFK didn't know what you know about the involvement of Israel but wanted a further inquiry which might have produced an embarrassing truth about Israel. Really?"

I recently bought a book about Lansky's Havana operations from Cuba. Before the revolution by Castro Lansky run the crime empire there. It is also written of his connections to Israel, which you can check even from Wikipedia. We all get our information from books and documents. This book was rather OK concerning facts. Lansky lost a lot when Castro came to power. In 1963 Lansky had a very good reason to want the USA to attack Cuba to gain his empire. Besides, he run the USA organized crime at that time and had reasons not to like Kennedys actions against organized crime.

There is no reason for "Cubans and gangsters" to be a code word for Israel as Cubans and gangsters were almost certainly involved in the JFK assassination.

I think Robert Kennedy did know of the Israel atom bomb project and he did not like it, same as JFK. Robert Kennedy probably did not know if Israel was involved in the JFK assassination but was going to investigate who was. It might have lead to Israel. There was this danger.

Wizard of Oz , June 3, 2018 at 5:05 pm GMT
@Monty Ahwazi

You lose all credibility for anything sensible you might say when you spout such tendentious rubbish as "he is[sic] a Zionist from his mother [sic] side". You presumably are confusing the Orthodox criterion for someone to be a Jew with the choice a person makes to be a Zionist (for which you don't even have to be a Jew come to think of it). It's even sillier than people saying Rupert Murdoch is a Jew because a great or great great grandmother may have been Jewish.

renfro , June 3, 2018 at 5:07 pm GMT
@Bardon Kaldian

a coup by the deep state

And who do you think the deep state is.

SunBakedSuburb , June 3, 2018 at 5:08 pm GMT
Interesting and well-researched article, but ultimately, as commenter Wizard of Oz notes, it serves the author's "confirmation bias."

Behind the JFK and RFK assassinations is the Allen Dulles gang: Richard Helms, David Atlee Phillips, and James Jesus Angleton. It is true, as the author notes, that Angleton had deep ties with Mossad. It is also true that since the end of the second world war, Israeli skullduggery in the US and Europe has been massive. But these two political murders were planned and executed by the above Dulles cabal.

Oswald was a CIA asset since his time as Marine serving at the US Atsugi base in Japan. Researcher HP Albarelli connects Oswald to right-wing Agency operative and pedophile David Ferrie as far back as the early 1950s. Oswald was also part of Angleton's false defector program, which inserted him into the USSR in the late 1950s.

The grooming and handling of Sirhan Sirhan in California in the mid 1960s speaks of a well-entrenched domestic network of CIA assets. He was picked for patsydom for a number reasons, and Angleton, again, a prince of an ally for Mossad, liked Sirhan's Palestinian background, which amped up the Arab threat, in the eyes of the US audience, to his Israeli friends. The author is correct that Thane Caesar was the real assassin of RFK. Previous to the RFK hit, Caesar work for the Hughes corporation in Burbank. The sprawling Howard Hughes business empire had served as a CIA cover since the 1950s.

Why would the Dulles gang want to murder the Kennedy brothers? JFK: revenge for the Bay of Pigs betrayal and the subsequent firing of Dulles. RFK: a man who worked closely with the Agency in the early 1960s on the Castro project. David Talbot's book Brothers, referenced by the author, makes clear that RFK had an absolutely clear conception of who killed his brother. There was no way he was going to reach the White House.

Both brothers also sought to wind down the profitable war in Vietnam. RFK was especially vocal about his goal of ending the war on the'68 campaign trail. And then there's Richard Nixon: a national security state favorite since his time as congressman during the so-called Red Scare of the early 1950s, Nixon was their favored candidate in the '68 election. RFK's death sealed the deal for Nixon. Nixon would go on to incur the wrath of his former national security state allies with his secret negotiations with China and the USSR while president. Because of his previous good works for them, a political death was arranged rather than a violent physical one.

renfro , June 3, 2018 at 5:09 pm GMT
@Jon Baptist

Lansky killed Kennedy for Israel and for mob interests within the U.S

Most likely

Intelligent Dasein , Website June 3, 2018 at 5:11 pm GMT
@Laurent Guyénot

Yes, I believe that Oswald killed Kennedy. I have no reasonable doubt that Oswald alone fired the fatal shot.

I also believe that the question, while certainly not irrelevant, is little thought of by most people today and would not affect their lives one way or the other. This is not to say that truth should not be investigated and justice done whenever possible. Falsehoods of any sort should be brought to light and expunged from the historical record, for there is no telling what damage an error may do even long after the fact. However, in the first place, I do not think that the historical record has enshrined any major errors in the case of the Kennedys; and in the second place, the fervency with which the contrarians (and they alone) continue to revive this long-buried topic does not savor of an honest pursuit of truth. I gather they would not be satisfied even if all the world were converted to their opinion.

They have some sort of an agenda. What it is varies from case to case and is not something I'm willing to speculate upon. But this sort of crusading over the meaning of an historical event is never anything but a quest for political power in the present moment, and is usually driven not by any coherent ideology but by the sheer passion for revenge. The willingness of so many revisionists to make saints out of the Kennedys -- which on any objective reading they clearly were not -- is by itself sufficient to discover the all-too-human wellsprings of their motivation. You have a beef with Israel, with the CIA, with Lyndon Johnson, with the whole American Deep State. I get that; I'm no fan of these people, either. But I'm not going to pervert my entire view of history so as to cast them in the role of the eternal villain. Self-deception is not only bad for your psychological health, it's also very politically inexpedient. You will never accomplish anything by this method. Just imagine the dismay that will come upon you if, peradventure, you happen to have a real shot at gaining some actual power and then you realize that your only friends and compatriots are the unreliable fruit loops who've been yup-yupping your articles these past years. A lot of help they're going to be.

The assertion that Israel had anything to do with assassinating either Kennedy brother is just not true. It is falsehood and lies and intellectual pollution. The reverence for such a belief belongs as a sub-genre of postmodern urban mysticism and religious occultism, along with the belief that the CIA planted explosives in the World Trade Center.

ians , June 3, 2018 at 5:15 pm GMT
@Wizard of Oz

The nonsensical assertion that it was an accidental bullet from a Secret Service man was debunked long ago.

geokat62 , June 3, 2018 at 5:18 pm GMT
@Cold N. Holefield

the first Jewish POTUS that he is?

PTI, but just wanted to make a quick observation. Is it just me or have others noticed that there have been quite a number of Presidents upon whom this honorary title has been bestowed, including:

LBJ
Ronald Reagan
Barack Obama
Donald Trump

(Bill Clinton and George W Bush should receive honorary mention).

Now, back to regularly scheduled programming.

chicken salad , June 3, 2018 at 5:22 pm GMT
@schrub

I should have mentioned that Jeff Gates goes into the LBJ/Krim relationship, NUMEC, McCain father and son, the USS Liberty, with a measure of Jeff Flake in his book. It bears rereading, now if only I can find it.

Wizard of Oz , June 3, 2018 at 5:23 pm GMT
@j2

Well you have just proved what a hopeless amateur you are as conspiracy theorist and as analyst.

What you have now shown is all you dredged up about Meyer Lansky is a million miles from proving that he had sufficient reason to murder Kennedy. To make any sense of your bizarre notion of cause and effect and of motive you would have to suppose that a US President could be expected to look after the Cuban interests of a known criminal even going to the extent of using US armed forces to do it. Specifically your barmy idea entails that Lansky had a communications conduit to LBJ and thought he had obtained assurance from Johnson that the US would go to war to overthrow Castro and restore an American criminal's casino. Pathetic.

There is indeed no need for "Cubans or gangsters" to be code for "Israel" but again you have shot yourself in the foot by your missing the point completely. My obvious point, which you managed to get confused about, was that Bobby Kennedy had no reason not to mention Israel to his confidant Schlesinger so his use of the words "Cubans" and "gangsters" meant that he didn't have Israel in mind

ians , June 3, 2018 at 5:25 pm GMT
@Sean

Garbage. Oswald was impersonated in Mexico. He didn't try to kill Walker.

Anon [257] Disclaimer , June 3, 2018 at 5:29 pm GMT
Five towns Jewish times April 11 2013

Article claims LBJ was a Jew who smuggled German Jews into the port of Galveston during the 1930s.

I'm sure this thread will be enjoyable as people post their pet theories and others jump in to debunk the theories.

Gary , June 3, 2018 at 5:30 pm GMT
The most likely scenario is of course that the assassinations met the needs of not only Israel/Mossad, but of the U.S. oligarchs/Wall Street, European oligarchs, and the U.S. deep state forces of the CIA/Pentagon. It isn't an "either/or" with the Mossad vs the CIA as to who is the culprit, but rather that everyone benefited by these assassinations. From the U.S. Joint Chiefs who wanted to end JFK's efforts to stop the Cold War, to Mossad who wanted carte blanche Israeli power in the Middle East AND the bomb, to the CIA which most definitely did not want to be "splintered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds" – you have a set of powerful interests that converge and all benefit by these deaths.

The whole debate of whether Israel is the tail wagging the dog misses the point that the very creation of Israel was all about helping the Western colonial powers maintain neo-colonial power in the Middle East as their former colonies were being liberated post-WWII.

The oligarchic power blocs in Europe, the U.S., the U.K. and Israel have all benefited from the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and the policy shifts that were then possible by their permanent removal from political office. Chasing the – "was it the Mossad, or was it the CIA"- train, leaves us grasping at phantoms like "the girl in the polka dot dress," or "the second Oswald," and simply distract from the obvious reality that all these parties not only benefited, but also knew each other's secrets and operated in coordination to make these events happen, and to sew intrigue and endless questions in their wake.

SunBakedSuburb , June 3, 2018 at 5:32 pm GMT
@Intelligent Dasein

I agree with your assessment of the author's claim of Israeli involvement in the JFK/RFK assassinations. But

" the subjects themselves have grown tiresome and tedious "

If political assassinations and shadowy conspiracies don't capture your imagination, your website must be "tiresome" and "tedious".

Laurent Guyénot , June 3, 2018 at 5:55 pm GMT
@ChuckOrloski

I did not mean to exonerate the CIA. I tried to be as brief as I could, so I didn't get into the detail of CIA involvement. CIA had to be involved to some extent in order to be blackmailed into powerlessness. My point is that CIA was not the mastermind and I wanted to point out that the mainstream media were pointing to the CIA, which is in itself very significant: it is like when the mainstream media say "the CIA controls the media". I am actually inclined to agree with Gary Wean's thesis (as Piper seemed to do) that the CIA had planned a faked failed assassination coup to force JFK into acting against Castro, but was double-crossed. This fits the scenario which I also believe for 9/11. http://rockthetruth.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-911-triple-cross.html And I liked Janney's book.

Anon [257] Disclaimer , June 3, 2018 at 6:13 pm GMT
@Wizard of Oz

I agree about the plane crash inserted into the article. It was a combination of an unusually thick fog and an inexperienced pilot. There was a thread recently in which John Jrs plane crash was discussed. A couple of pilots who flew the same Plane write that in that kind of fog with a pilot unskilled in flying by instruments it was not shot down but just happened.

Another poster write that he was in the area that night and it was one of the worst fogs he'd ever seen.

Mulegino1 , June 3, 2018 at 6:14 pm GMT
@Laurent Guyénot

Of course he does. He is part of that dwindling demographic which believes whatever they are told by the kosher mainstream media, i.e., CBS, Time Magazine, CNN, MSNBC, Newsweek, Fox, the History Channel, NBC, ABC, etc. There may be variations, but the narrative remains within the acceptable kosher parameters.

An individual who believes in the official version of 9/11 will have no trouble at all believing in the "lone nut" theory of Oswald or Sirhan. For want of a better term, I would call it "Mainstream Delusionism." It affects all of those who choose to accept the bogus liberal/conservative bifurcation of mainstream politics here in the US.

j2 , June 3, 2018 at 6:17 pm GMT
@Wizard of Oz

"What you have now shown is all you dredged up about Meyer Lansky is a million miles from proving that he had sufficient reason to murder Kennedy. To make any sense of your bizarre notion of cause and effect and of motive you would have to suppose that a US President could be expected to look after the Cuban interests of a known criminal even going to the extent of using US armed forces to do it. Specifically your barmy idea entails that Lansky had a communications conduit to LBJ and thought he had obtained assurance from Johnson that the US would go to war to overthrow Castro and restore an American criminal's casino. Pathetic."

1) The assassination of JFK was a conspiracy because there were more than one shooter. This is shown by analyzing the Audiograph and the Dictabelt, and the Zapruder film shows that one shot came from the front. You have two pdf files by me in this link

http://www.pienisalaliittotutkimus.com/2017/12/07/was-the-j-f-kennedy-assassination-a-conspiracy/

2) Next we have to look what changed in the US policy after the successful assassination, since it had to have some goal. The USA did not attack Cuba, so that was not the goal. The USA forgot Israel's nuclear bomb project, so that was the goal. (Go through the other alternatives and discard.)

3) Finally make a scenario who could have done the assassination. As the Audiograph was manipulated in 1970ies, there was someone with access, like CIA (or FBI? etc). There was Ruby, so there was a link to Jewish gangsters leading to Lansky, who was the high boss of organized crime. Much points to LBJ. So, I got this scenario:

http://www.pienisalaliittotutkimus.com/2018/04/05/jfk-lbj-lansky-dulles-and-zionists/

It is similar to Piper's argument, I read his book:

http://www.pienisalaliittotutkimus.com/2018/04/11/comments-on-michael-collins-pipers-book-the-final-judgment/

Laurent Guyénot , June 3, 2018 at 6:20 pm GMT
@Intelligent Dasein

The assertion that Oswald alone killed Kennedy is just not true. It is falsehood and lies and intellectual pollution.

Anon [257] Disclaimer , June 3, 2018 at 6:33 pm GMT
@Al Moenee

Totally agree about the Jewish role in JFKs assassination. As for Oswald, he was an avowed communist and the American communist party and all the far left groups were very, very, Jewish at the time. It was impossible to be a goyishe leftist and not meet a lot of lefty Jews at the time.

Oswald always told people he became interested in communism when he was living in NYC age 11 & 12. It was the time of the Rosenberg atomic spy trials.
"Old Jewish ladies" in his Bronx neighborhood were always handing out pamphlets defending the Rosenbergs.

niteranger , June 3, 2018 at 6:36 pm GMT
Perhaps I missed it in the article but the "manufacturer" of the single bullet theory was Jewish Senator Arlen Specter of the Warren Commission. Another point about the Kennedy's hatred of Israel .it was much greater than anyone thought especially from the old man Joe. It evidently may have had something do with business dealings both legitimate and illegitimate.

Lyndon Johnson's great-grandparents, on the maternal side, were Jewish and Johnson helped smuggle Jews legally and illegally into Texas ( http://www.5tjt.com/our-first-jewish-president-lyndon-johnson-an-update/ ). It always sounds antisemitic but rule one that is accurate about 97% of the time is that most of the political, economic or social upheaval in the world always has something to do with Jews.

Mr. Anon , June 3, 2018 at 6:37 pm GMT
The Kennedy worship on display by Mr. Guyenot, like that of Oliver Stone, is remarkable. I'm not singling him out – a lot of people share in it. But the notion that the Kennedys were some kind of unique family of righteous, justice-seeking heroes is ludicrous. They were a clan of reckless, smarmy, cynical politicians. John was probably the best of them, and he seemed to have had a few good instincts, but he was massively compromised by his libido, which opened him up to blackmail.

And the notion that John-John was killed by some kind of conspiracy is ridiculous. He was a light-weight and a dilletante. I don't imagine anyone feared his political or literary ambitions. His was another case of DWK – driving while Kennedy. Nobody in that family could be trusted behind the controls of any kind of vehicle. I wouldn't knowingly step in front of stroked-out old Joe in his wheelchair.

Sean , June 3, 2018 at 6:41 pm GMT
Clearly LBJ did not run for a second term and keep control of the investigative agencies because he could be implicated in the assassination of the Kennedy brothers. Or maybe people who think that way are spending too much time smoking hash in their mommy's basement.
Anon [194] Disclaimer , June 3, 2018 at 6:43 pm GMT
@Hiram of Tyre

I have the book " Abu Nidal Gun For Hire " that claims Nidal was anbIsraeki agent all along. No opinion on how valid the claim is.

Cloak And Dagger , June 3, 2018 at 6:52 pm GMT
@Wizard of Oz

From one with no barrow to push

LOL! Why would anyone not believe you to be a dispassionate observer without Israeli loyalties?

Anon [194] Disclaimer , June 3, 2018 at 6:53 pm GMT
@Mike Sylwester

I've read the book Nemesis that claims Onassis paid for the murder of Robert Kennedy. It also claims Onassis and Jacqueline agreed to marry on a cruise she took on Onassis' yacht a few months before JFK was killed.

The plan was when he either lost the 64 election or was re elected and his Presidency ended in January 69, she would divorce JFK for his numerous adulteries and marry Onassis. Who knows? It's all enjoyable reading anyway.

My favorite genres are political, spy, detective, financial corruption and historical thrillers. So I enjoy all the Kennedy conspiracy books.

gsjackson , June 3, 2018 at 7:01 pm GMT
@Sean

Every Marine is considered a "rifleman," even those who fail to qualify with the rifle. At the end of his tour Oswald tested on the low end of 'marksman,' which is the lowest of three qualifying categories. Which means he wasn't a particularly good shot.

Iris , June 3, 2018 at 7:08 pm GMT
Thanks for this intelligent, insightful and courageous article. It is exceptionally interesting and well-researched, and simply outstanding, considering the intellectual decadence and cowardice of thoughts we have been dragged into. Thanks also for the sensitivity of your conclusion: John and Robert Kennedy's memory is cherished throughout the world. They died because they wanted to make the world a better place for humankind. They will never be forgotten.
Bardon Kaldian , June 3, 2018 at 7:11 pm GMT
@Laurent Guyénot

Because local Jews & pro-Israel bunch are not equivalent to "deep state". It is true that Zionist Jews are now more influential than ever, but they do not "own" US nor direct most currents of US policy. Being 2% of US population, Jews are perhaps 20-25% among American elites (which, evidently, is not the majority), and most of them are liberals who are not involved in shaping of American middle east politics. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld . were/are American imperialists, and not some Jewish puppets.

As regards Kennedy, it is true that he had strong positions re nuclear weapons, but, having in mind huge arsenals of US & Soviet Union, and smaller ones of Britain, China..- Israel's nuclear program was not considered to be something spectacularly important, especially at that stage. It is bizarre to consider that Israelis would even think of, let alone try to execute US president, just because he gave them slap on the wrist at some point.

And, in 1963, Zionist Jews (and all US Jews) were much less influential then today, after 5 decades that have, beginning with counter-cultural 60s, multiculturalism & Vietnam war, transformed US beyond recognition. Back in 50s/early 60s they had just wanted to assimilate into society as quickly as possible & minimize traces of their ethnic identity, while Israel was a schnorrer, beggar economy trying to survive & keep a low profile.

That Golda Meir or Ben Gurion would even contemplate anything similar is simply weird: https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-golda-meir-had-doubts-on-kennedy-death-1.5292291

renfro , June 3, 2018 at 7:11 pm GMT
@Intelligent Dasein

The assertion that Israel had anything to do with assassinating either Kennedy brother is just not true. It is falsehood and lies and intellectual pollution

No one but a Jew and/or Israel supporter would make that statement.

renfro , June 3, 2018 at 7:30 pm GMT
Only Israel had anything to gain from Kennedy's murder and they used some Jewish organized crime members to set it up. Only our Israeli occupied congress, not the CIA, could have "controlled' the investigation to ensure it produced the conclusion it fed to the public.

In his book, The Passionate Attachment, former Undersecretary of State George Ball summarized the results of Johnson's Middle East policies:

  1. First, the Johnson administration put America in the position of being Israel's principal arms supplier and sole unqualified backer.
  2. "Second, by assuring the Israelis that the United States would always provide them with a military edge over the Arabs, Johnson guaranteed the 'escalation of an arms race
  3. Third, by refusing to follow the advice of his aides that America make its delivery of nuclear-capable F-4 Phantoms conditional on Israel's signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Johnson gave the Israelis the impression that America had no fundamental objection to Israel's nuclear program.
  4. "Fourth, by permitting a cover-up of Israel's attack on the Liberty, President Johnson told the Israelis in effect that nothing they did would induce American politicians to refuse their bidding.

From that time forth, the Israelis began to act as if they had an inalienable right to American aid and backing."

As Stephen Green concluded in his discussion of the incredible changes in U.S. policy toward Israel that took place during the Johnson era in 'Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With A Militant Israel': "By June of 1967, for a variety of reasons that prominently included 'domestic political considerations,' Lyndon Johnson and his team of foreign-policy advisors had completely revised U.S.-Israeli relations. To all intents and purposes, Israel had become the 51st state."

This was the exact opposite of what Kennedy's attitude toward Israel was and had he lived we would probably have a different relationship with Israel today.'

Former high-ranking U.S. diplomat Richard H. Curtiss, writing in 'A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute', elaborated on Kennedy's attitude toward the Middle East controversy. In a chapter appropriately titled: "President Kennedy and Good Intentions Deferred Too Long," Curtiss comments:

"It is surprising to realize, with the benefit of hindsight, that from the time Kennedy entered office as the narrowly-elected candidate of a party heavily dependent upon Jewish support, he was planning to take a whole new look at U.S. Mideast policy.

"He obviously could not turn the clock back and undo the work of President Truman, his Democratic predecessor, in making the establishment of Israel possible. Nor, perhaps, would he have wanted to.

"Kennedy was determined, however, to develop good new personal relationships with individual Arab leaders, including those with whom the previous administration's relations had deteriorated.

Soon after Kennedy assumed office, Israel and its American lobby began to understand the import of Kennedy's positioning in regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel was not happy – to say the very least – and began putting heat on the White House through its supporters in Congress, many of whom relied upon support from the Israeli lobby for campaign contributions and political leverage.

By mid-1963 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion hated Kennedy with a passion. In fact, he considered JFK a threat to the very survival of the Jewish State .

Kennedy according to Curtiss cited four areas causing a strain in U.S.-Israel relations: 1) Israel's diversion-from the Arab States-of the Jordan River waters; 2) Israel's retaliatory raids against Arab forces in border areas; 3) Israel's pivotal role in the Palestinian refugee problem; and 4) Israel's insistence that the United States sell advanced Hawk missiles to Israel.

"The President outlined to Mrs. Meir what has come to be called the Kennedy Doctrine. Kennedy told Meir that U.S. interests and Israel's interests were not always the same.

The Talbot memorandum described Kennedy's forthright stance: "We know, "that Israel faces enormous security problems, but we do too. We came almost to a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union last spring and again recently in Cuba. Because we have taken on wide security responsibilities we always have the potential of becoming involved in a major crisis not of our own making.

"Our security problems are, therefore, just as great as Israel's. We have to concern ourself with the whole Middle East. We would like Israeli recognition that this partnership which we have with it produces strains for the United States in the Middle East when Israel takes such action as it did last spring when Israel launched a raid into Syria, resulting in a condemnation by the UN Security Council. Whether right or wrong, those actions involve not just Israel but also the United States."

According to Seymour Hersh: "Israel's bomb, and what to do about it, became a White House fixation – part of the secret presidential agenda that would remain hidden for the next thirty years."

In March, 1963, Sherman Kent, the Chairman of the Board of National Estimates at the CIA, wrote an extended memorandum to the CIA's Director on the highly controversial subject entitled "Consequences of Israeli Acquisition of Nuclear Capability."

According to Stephen Green, for the purposes of this internal memorandum, Kent defined "acquisition" by Israel as either (a) a detonation of a nuclear device with or without the possession of actual nuclear weapons, or (b) an announcement by Israel that it possessed nuclear weapons, even without testing. Kent's primary conclusion was that an Israeli bomb would cause 'substantial damage to the U.S. and Western position in the Arab world.

According to Green, "The memorandum was very strong and decidedly negative in its conclusions" which were as follows:
"Even though Israel already enjoys a clear military superiority over its Arab adversaries, singly or combined, acquisition of a nuclear capability would greatly enhance Israel's sense of security. In this circumstance, some Israelis might be inclined to adopt a moderate and conciliatory posture

"We believe it much more likely, however, that Israel's policy toward its neighbors would become more rather than less tough. Israel would seek to exploit the psychological advantages of its nuclear capability to intimidate the Arabs and to prevent them from making trouble on the frontiers."

In dealing with the United States, the CIA analyst estimated, a nuclear Israel would "make the most of the almost inevitable Arab tendency to look to the Soviet Bloc for assistance against the added Israel threat, arguing that in terms of both strength and reliability Israel was clearly the only worthwhile friend of the U.S. in the area.

"Israel," in Kent's analysis, "would use all the means at its command to persuade the U.S. to acquiesce in, and even to support, its possession of nuclear capability."

In short, Israel would use its immense political power – especially through its lobby in Washington – to force the United States to accede to Israel's nuclear intentions.

Stephen Green believes that Kennedy's position vis-a-vis Israel was an important stand: "It was a remarkable exchange, and the last time in many, many years in which an American president precisely distinguished for the government of Israel the differences between U.S. and Israeli national security interests."

Thus it was that John F. Kennedy informed Israel, in no uncertain terms, that he intended – first and foremost – to place America's interests – not Israel's interests – at the center of U.S. Middle East policy.

Kennedy's friendly overtures to the Arab states were only a public aspect of what ultimately developed into an all-out 'secret war' between Kennedy and Israel.

Another part of the all secret war between Kennedy and Israel according to Hersh was Ben-Gurion's hated Kennedy because he consider his father an anti semite and Hitler supporter. Hersh wrote, "The Israeli prime minister, in subsequent private communications to the White House, began to refer to the President as 'young man.' Kennedy made clear to associates that he found the letters to be offensive."
Kennedy himself told his close friend, Charles Bartlett, that he was getting fed up with the fact that the Israeli "sons of bitches lie to me constantly about their nuclear capability."

Obviously, to say the very least, there was no love lost between the two leaders. The U.S.-Israeli relationship was at an ever-growing and disastrous impasse, although virtually nothing was known about this to the American public at the time." .Green

renfro , June 3, 2018 at 7:33 pm GMT
@Bardon Kaldian

Pro-Israel jews are the "deep state" and their headquarters is the US congress.

Bardon Kaldian , June 3, 2018 at 7:34 pm GMT
@Intelligent Dasein

Yes, I believe that Oswald killed Kennedy. I have no reasonable doubt that Oswald alone fired the fatal shot.

Very, very unlikely. It is doubtful that he fired any shot.

republic , June 3, 2018 at 7:39 pm GMT
@Anon

There seem to be a lot of small plane crashes which involve controversial politicians such as, JFK ,Jr, Ron Brown, Wellstone, John Towers, Michael Connell, (Bush campaign it expert) to name but a few.

There use to be detailed analysis of the Martha's Vineyard crash on the web, but these seem To have been scrubbed lately and only official MSM versions are easily available. An exception to that rule is the book, Ron Brown's body: how one man's death saved The Clinton Presidency.

ChuckOrloski , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 7:42 pm GMT
@Laurent Guyénot

Hi Laurent,

Am very gratified when busy U.R. authors engage comments corresponding to their articles. Thank you!

Comment # 80, you wrote: "I did not mean to exonerate the CIA."

Above, I knew such was impossible since your mentioning having read James Douglass's classic, "JFK and the Unspeakable."

Also you wrote:. My point is that CIA was not the mastermind "

Above, so it appears you believe that CIA depended upon the Israeli intelligence Lowerarchy as the JFK assassination planning / operational "mastermind?"

Had he come squeaky clean, I intuit CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton might support such a view as yours.

Such smacks of how the ZUS military (Gitmo-based) tribunal deceptively presented Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) as the 9/11 terror attack "mastermind."

To conclude, am very pleased to have read this sentence: "And I liked Janney's book."

F.y.i., just last month while attending a Delaware Valley High School varsity baseball game, while in the stands, I spoke with three (3) mother's who lived in nearby, Milford, Pa. One lady taught public school.

Regrettably, no one had any knowledge about Mary Pinchot Meyer's JFK affair, brutal murder on the Georgetown canal-trail, and her Milford, Pa burial @ the Gifford Pinchot estate.

Thanks very much, Laurent Guyenot!
Continue to be honestly unflappable.

Iris , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 7:47 pm GMT
@Mr. Anon

"They were a clan of reckless, smarmy, cynical politicians "

Their eldest, Joe Kennedy, died for his country in secret WW2 mission. https://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/The-Kennedy-Family/Joseph-P-Kennedy-Jr.aspx

There is nothing cynical about such ultimate patriotic sacrifice; the pompous Zionist posting on this thread could not even start to comprehend the adjective "patriotic".

Sean , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 7:51 pm GMT
@gsjackson

He was a Texan (like Audie Murphy) and familiar with rifles from an early age. He was a trained rifleman who though not an expert shot scored 49 hits and one miss at a target 200 yards away. LHO was seen practicing at a rifle range before Dallas, and at a range of under 100 yards his performance in getting one fatal shot on Kennedy was good, not exceptional, even for a rusty and mediocre shot (which he was not).

Charles Wittman was a Texan too, as was Chris Kyle.

renfro , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 7:56 pm GMT
I just have to say this about the Jew hasbara who insist people believe that the CIA is the 'deep state' when in fact the CIA and the FBI are the ONLY gov arms that aggressively go after Israel and the Jew fifth column in the US ..and it is ONLY Congress and/or the WH that has stopped them and interfered in their investigation time after time. As for the other retards who promote this -- -you're are dangerously stupid .so stupid you dont even know who the real deep state is.

Here's just one example of the CIA trying to clean out the jewish Israeli agents at the CIA. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/355/661/500422/

On December 13, 1999, Ciralsky was terminated from his job as a lawyer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). On July 19, 2000, Ciralsky filed suit against the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and nine of their employees and agents, alleging that he had been "interrogated, harassed, surveilled and terminated from his employment with the CIA solely because he is a Jew and practices the Jewish religion."

689 F. Supp. 2d 141 (2010)
Adam CIRALSKY, Plaintiff,
v.
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, et al., Defendants.
Civil Action No. 00-1709-JDS.
United States District Court, District of Columbia.
February 26, 2010

Shortly after he began working at the CIA, the Agency initiated a reinvestigation of Plaintiff's security clearance, administering a series of polygraph examinations and interviews to evaluate his fitness. On August 19, 1997, Plaintiff failed a polygraph examination. In the month following this polygraph session, various CIA employees interviewed Plaintiff on four separate occasions. At one of these interviews on September 11, 1997, Plaintiff was given a laptop computer and told to use it to document and explain issues arising out of the failed polygraph session of August 19, 1997. Plaintiff returned this laptop to the CIA on September 29, 1997. The veracity of Plaintiff's declarations in these interviews was tested through another polygraph examination on October 3, 1997.

Following the reinvestigation, the CIA advanced the process of revoking Plaintiff's security clearance. On October 20, 1997, the CIA placed Plaintiff on administrative leave and informed him that an employee review panel ("ERP") would reconsider his access to classified information. After Plaintiff submitted a memorandum defending himself, the ERP met on or about November 21, 1997, and recommended that the CIA revoke Plaintiff's security clearance and terminate his employment. After reviewing two additional memoranda submitted by Plaintiff in response to certain damaging information, the ERP maintained its initial recommendation when it reconsidered the matter on March 6, 1998. Records of both ERP meetings describe the panel's concern to be Plaintiff's failure to disclose information about and lack of candor regarding several contacts that were or may have been involved in the Israeli security establishment. See Pl.'s Mot. for Disc. Attach. 1 and 2 (official summaries of ERP meetings).

There are more .peruse this very informative thread on an article for more examples of the CIA and FBI efforts .. http://mondoweiss.net/2013/03/convicted-suggests-israeli/

j2 , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 7:58 pm GMT
@Sean

"The UK also developed nuclear weapons, as did France. The incredibility of America blowing its own brains out by getting into a nuclear exchange to defend Britain, France or Israel meant that those countries having their own nuclear deterrent suited America."

As the article we are commenting mentions, JFK wanted inspections on Israel nuclear weapon program, which unlike those of UK and France, was secret and denied. Israel was not yet the best friend of the USA. JFK had to ponder what should be the US-Arab relations. Trump is now against North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons, yet he is not opposing British and French nuclear weapons. So, we know JFK was trying to stop the Israel nuclear weapon program and probably would have offered US protection instead.

JFK was killed by somebody. This somebody had power to modify Audiograph data in 1970ies. This data was available to CIA, FBI and the Warren Commission members, maybe also to others. CIA had dealings with mafia concerning assassination of Castro. The mafia that had been in Havana was Lansky's mafia. Thus, CIA had dealings with Lansky's gangsters. Dulles, LBJ and Angleton did not like JFK's policies, especially towards Israel. Israel was weak at that time, but had friends in the US, like Lansky, Angleton, LBJ, Dulles. Together these might have pulled the assassination, but even together they could not make the coverup by media. There had to be media and the US media has a tendency to silence one topic only. No President can control the media, the CIA can influence, but not control, mafia cannot control media. Only one power can do it and does it.

We do not need to know if the reason for the assassination was the Israel atomic bomb program (though it is likely and a sufficient reason). We only need to know who could coverup the issue and especially cover it up in media.

I looked at this JFK stuff after accidentally watching a video by Donald B. Thomas, where he explained his echo analysis of the Dictabelt. His paper was refuted by former members of the Warren Commission. I checked, did not fully agree with Thomas but got more or less similar conclusions, I think I did it more correctly being much closer to the field than Thomas. The response by these Warren Commission members was false, in my opinion intentionally, so I checked what might be their backgrounds. This showed that echo analysis must always be done.

Cloak And Dagger , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 8:00 pm GMT
@renfro

Great stuff, renfro! Thank you!

(((They))) Live , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 8:04 pm GMT
@Anon

I doubt Oswald was a genuine Communist, he knew David Ferrie (who was hated Communism) in the 1950s, it may have been Ferrie who got him involved in the CIA, and I suspect it was the CIA that sent Oswald to the USSR

Once he returned from the USSR and got involved with pro Castro groups in the US he was the perfect fall goy in the plot to murder Kennedy

An interesting fact, when his car made the turn past the book depository LBJ ducked down to tie his shoe laces just as the shooting started, strangely he also wanted Connolly to travel in his car not with JFK

There was at least one other plot to assassinate Kennedy, in the Chicago plot the patsy was to be another former Marine called Thomas Vallee

j2 , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 8:05 pm GMT
@j2

Sorry, they were not Warren Commission members, they were members of a scientific panel, which refuted the House Select Committee of Assassinations findings. Anyway, I checked their backgrounds as their paper was strangely wrong when there were Nobelists in the group.()

Frederick V. Reed , Website Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 8:08 pm GMT
The author made the point to me that English is not his first language, though he certainly writes it well, and that his mention of serial numbers may have been misleading. It was, at least for me. In any event I retract my criticism.
Robjil , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 8:15 pm GMT
@Anon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vehk03v23y4 This documentary goes into great detail about the many strange things going on the day of the JFK Jr's crash.
The missing seat, flying instructor's seat – taken out of the plane ? How long it took to find the plane? JFK jr was another Kennedy assassination.

Anon [257] Disclaimer , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 8:19 pm GMT
@John Gruskos

I totally agree with you. That's my take. Oswald the pro Castro life long communist worked right on the Kennedy parade route.

Sirhan's bother was killed by an Israeli bombing of a crowded intersection. His father was fired from a 25 year job with the City of Jerusalem with no pension. Family rental property was confiscated with no compensation

When Sirhan was 4 armed Israeli soldiers invaded the family home and gave the family 1 hour to leave. No compensation of course. Family moved from a nice 10 room house to a pilgrims hostel run by the Greek Orthodox Church to which they belonged.

Family ended up in Pasadena Ca. Summer of 1967 the papers were full of RFK's promises to Israel. Sirhan believed those articles. So he shot that supreme scum bag RFK.

RFK was absolutely into the Democrat party War on Whites. He was marching with Cesear Chavez and worshipped MLK. He persecuted, not prosecuted the White male Teamsters Union. Had he been elected he would have enforced affirmative action and pro Hispanic & pro black activism as eagerly as 2 other anti White Presidents, Johnson and Nixon did. RFK was pro black from the day his brother became president

Personally, I don't give a rats ass about who killed the pro Hispanic pro black enemy of Whites, RFK.

Iris , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 9:03 pm GMT
Just a side note: there is a surviving witness of the Robert Kennedy assassination , Paul Schrade.

He attended Sirhan's parole bid in 2016, and told the panel that he believed Sirhan shot him at the hotel, but that an unidentified second shooter killed Mr Kennedy.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/11/robert-f-kennedys-killer-loses-15th-parole-bid-as-witness-says-its-my-fault

Interestingly, even hard core MSM report the inconsistencies within the official inquiry:
" But the autopsy showed the candidate was shot from behind, with evidence that indicated he was hit at close range . "

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5796895/Robert-Kennedys-daughter-backs-brothers-call-new-investigation-fathers-death.html

Anon [257] Disclaimer , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 9:04 pm GMT
@Wizard of Oz

Murdoch's maternal grandfather was a Rabbi. That makes him and his mother Jewish. And I doubt a rabbi's daughter would raise her children completely no Jewish whether religuous or tribal ethnic Jewish.

Anon [257] Disclaimer , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 9:15 pm GMT
@SunBakedSuburb

Red Scare?? If you can't read any of the numerous books written about the Verona Papers and Soviet KGB archives opened after 1990, at least ask Mr. Google about them.

Both archives reveal that the HUAC and McCarthy & FBI investigations show that there were many, many more Soviet spies entrenched in the federal government during and after the FDR administration that the HUAC & McCarthy investigations ever revealed.

Anon [257] Disclaimer , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 9:21 pm GMT
@Intelligent Dasein

Does your post have anything to do with your disbelief in Darwin and evolution and the Bible history that goes back to God's creation of the world 6,000 years ago?

Iris , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 9:32 pm GMT
@schrub

Thanks for highlighting this: same old methods.

A less sanitized page about the Zionist Mata-Hari:

http://michaelsantomauro.blogspot.com/2011/09/servicing-commander-in-chief.html

Mike Sylwester , Website Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 9:38 pm GMT
@Mike Sylwester

[It's not good commenting policy to produce a continuing series of lengthy totally unsourced excerpts, spread over series of different comments, which makes it difficult for others to avoid them. They have now been consolidated, but you should stop this sort of bad behavior.]

Anon [257] Disclaimer , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 9:39 pm GMT
@republic

You're right. But there's also a lot of small plane ceashes that involve entertainment people especially musicians on tour.

Could it be that politicians musicians some businessmen and wealthier than average people use small planes more than the rest of us who just drive and use airlines when traveling?

Anon [257] Disclaimer , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 9:48 pm GMT
@Robjil

I don't watch YouTubes. If someone can't get it together enough to write a coherent account of their theories it's worthless.

There's a dozen YouTubes and internet articles about Kennedy's lack of instrument certification and the unusual fog of the century that night.

If anyone killed him it would be Hildabeast. You Kennedy worshipers do realize that Joe Kennedy created a massive Kennedy worshipful PR machines back in the 1920s and it's more powerful now than ever or do you?

joe Kennedy 3 is running for President. He is the one who nearly died of a heroin overdose on a plane trip. He is raising questions about his father s death as a means of getting publicity and sympathy for his campaign from all the old baby boomers who remember the Kennedy deaths

Anon [425] Disclaimer , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 9:49 pm GMT
We can always connect the dots to match anything with anyone.

But the only smoking gun on JFK is Oswald did it. And the only smoking gun on RFK is Sirhan did it.

Remember Wallace got shot too. And there was a plot on Ford. And Reagan nearly got killed.

Now, given Deep State behavior in recent times, I can believe there are scumbags who are capable of anything.

Still, we need something more than connect-the-dots. And this article is mostly conjecture and speculation.

Anon [257] Disclaimer , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 9:51 pm GMT
@Iris

RFK was not shot from behind. There was one shot right at his ear which is on the side, not back if the head. The rest were in the front

Anon [425] Disclaimer , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 9:52 pm GMT
@Anon

Both archives reveal that the HUAC and McCarthy & FBI investigations show that there were many, many more Soviet spies entrenched in the federal government during and after the FDR administration that the HUAC & McCarthy investigations ever revealed.

Yes, but McCarthy played it badly by going after too many people with tenuous connections with communists and radicals. Just because your side is right doesn't mean your side should give into hysteria.

Also, by McCarthy came on the scene, most of the spies had been captured and Soviet intelligence had effectively been ended in the US. So, McCarthy just kept looking for more and more suspects, and it got a bit ridiculous.

We saw the same problem after 9/11. Yes, the government had been lax in security and there needed to be more vigilance. But Bush II and Co. over-played their hand and even used 9/11 as hysteria for war with Iraq.

Modified limited variant hangout , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 9:56 pm GMT
Funny how RFK's kid comes out and acknowledges the obvious, that CIA whacked his family, and all of a sudden this frog Guyenot shows up in multiple alt media with his Orientalism shtik saying, oh wait, it was the Zionazis.

https://alethonews.com/2018/06/02/robert-f-kennedy-jr-is-roiling-the-assassination-waters/

You see, CIA was just kidding about murdering Kennedy but those crafty Jews got away from them and really did it, Oops! Just like all those incompetent pilots got away from CIA on 9/11 and really did what CIA only pretended they could do so we could catch them red-handed. Oops!

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-blatant-conspiracy-behind-senator-robert-f-kennedys-assassination/5642125

Cracks me up, CIA's still trying to shit you even though they're so utterly, hopelessly busted that they have to blame it on the Jewish State, the most despised shithole on earth. CIA's running out of people who are more despicable and full of crap than them.

prusmc , Website Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 9:57 pm GMT
@Sean

Interesting. When Oswald was in boot camp he scored as sharp-shooter between 210 and 219 points out of 250. HE would fire 10 rounds slow fire from the off-hand (standing) position from 200 yards. Then later he would fire 10 rounds rapid fire in 60 seconds from the standing to sitting position. So this hitting 49 of 50 rounds from 200 yards is a cock and bull story.
What is not a cock and bull story is a beer drinking session in spring 1959 with Sergeants Dean Nelson from Arkansas, Leroy Alsbury and another Sergeant Dorsey from Illinois at enlisted club MCAS El Toro, California. Topic turned to a Marine who was at a near by station called LTA. They knew him from Japan and said he was frequently in trouble and he was convinced that the US was corrupt for among other things "using germ warfare in Korea". They said he was called Ossie Rabbit.

Anon [425] Disclaimer , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 10:02 pm GMT
@(((They))) Live

I doubt Oswald was a genuine Communist, he knew David Ferrie (who was hated Communism) in the 1950s, it may have been Ferrie who got him involved in the CIA, and I suspect it was the CIA that sent Oswald to the USSR. Once he returned from the USSR and got involved with pro Castro groups in the US he was the perfect fall goy in the plot to murder Kennedy.

Oswald needed some kind of Ism to give meaning to his marginal life. Playing Marxist radical gave his life meaning. It was more about personality than ideology.

He hung around anti-communist types because he saw himself as a brilliant agent-provocateur who would play all sides in a 5D chess. He was seriously deluded as a mover and shaker of history when he was a total non-entity. The fact is no one gave a damn about him. Even Russians found him useless and didn't want him. When he defected to Russia, he thought he would be accepted as a great hero. Russians just sent him to a factory to work. Back in the US, he wanted attention, but no one gave it to him. Radical and Marxist groups had no use for him. He was too low, too un-intellectual.
So, he created his own Narrative as a man who would rub shoulders with all sides to make something happen. So, it was disingenuous for him to bitch that he was just a 'patsy'. He put himself in places to play the role of 'patsy' to all sides. It's what he relished as he wanted to be where the action is. But he was useless as a patsy.

So, he finally decided to do something big and kill JFK. But he didn't even have the guts to say he did it. He ran like a chicken and killed a cop.

I suspect Ruby was sent by the Mafia to kill Oswald. Why? Even though mafia didn't order the hit, it feared that Oswald would blab about the mafia because the idiot met some mafia types when he was dillydallying with anti-Castro factions.

ChuckOrloski , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 10:08 pm GMT
@renfro

renfro insightfully wrote:
"By mid-1963 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion hated Kennedy with a passion. In fact, he considered JFK a threat to the very survival of the Jewish State."

Hi renfro,

In contrast, & as you may might know, Ben-Gurion loved GOP, Richard M. Nixon, who became the 1st sitting-USrael president to visit Israel!

F.y.i., On comeback trail, RMN wrote an interesting book titled "Leaders" in which David Ben-Gurion is deified.

Thanks for such thoughtful posts, renfro.

P.S.:
Below is a work of political-satire which was also posted by "The Smirking Chimp" web site, & afterward, the concerned editor badgered me for anti-semitism, & subsequently, I became the Smirking Chimp's U-peel Shrimp!

https://www.uncommonthought.com/mtblog/archives/2017/02/17/prime-minister-netanyahus-crazy-negevist-bedroom-enterprise.php

LondonBob , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 10:10 pm GMT
@Anon

Yes but I read a mobster's autobiography, Chauncey Holt, and he said tinkering with a guy's plane was a great way to off someone. As you note plane crashes happen.

Dissident X , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 10:11 pm GMT
@renfro

Renfro:

Despite my reservations about the statement, "Only Israel had anything to gain from Kennedy's murder." , I find this comment be very well organized and persuasive.

While I don't think intent to somehow disrupt the zionist occupier of Palestine lands acquiring nuclear weapons capability and actual armaments as the only potential disposition of JFK, which would have made him a target of the Torah-Pharisees-Talmud global collective , I agree that even by itself, it would have.

[See my post: http://www.unz.com/article/did-israel-kill-the-kennedies/#comment-2357245 above, if you care to, and haven't already.]

Thank you for your contribution; I appreciate it.

chicken salad , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 10:21 pm GMT
@John Gruskos

Well, I agree with Wiz and Anon, that your post is sane . What is obvious, however, is that you either haven't done your homework or are a sophisticated troll. James Douglas' JFK and the Unspeakable , which sums up decades of research is a good place to start. Peter Dale Scott's Deep Politics and the Death of JFK is also essential to get a sense of some of the moving parts and the need for humility, in approaching the matter.

Them Guys , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 10:22 pm GMT
@Cold N. Holefield

I agree. And have come to the conclusion that, once one gets very jewized up and comprehends just how involved international jewry and its current political offspring of Zionists are, in so many events. That they really do represent also a true misfortune for the entire world of non jewish goyim.

And furthermore, I have concluded that due to so many bad, wrong, evil ongoing events that are headed by or consist of an huge number of jews involved within them. That at this late date point in time, it would almost be better when discussing various past and current and even likely future events, as far as jewish involvments, to instead ask the question of

What Is there that history has proven as evil or wrong within such events, that jews have Not been involved in or with eh?

Because the deeper you go into such events and infos, and ergo the longer back in past times one delves into such issues The more one learns of a constant jewish involvement throughout history going back at least 3,500 yrs ago! ..35-Centuries so far, with most times each century getting worse and more evil due to their insidious craving of remaining stiff necked and stubborn, and always unwilling to repent or change period.

And yes yes I know there are a few so called good jews But imho those good types number very very few when compared to jewry as a whole. For I consider their huge silent bunch of tribe members as willing accomplices, and based upon the ever ongoing group silence we see no matter which jews do wrongs and no matter how bad those wrongs are. No other logic nor sane conclusion can be had.

And for immediate proof examples of how their majority tribe members always cover for, deny wrongs, toss out straw men, or simply revert to the time tested method of Fully ignore all presented facts, and begin to use vile slanderous name calls of "Nazis" and "Antisemite" etc. One only need read any of the many articles here on This forum, as well as all other website forums that have become infested with Zionist jews and hasbara agents.

And for these reasons one must also conclude is the main reason that every time jews get booted from another host nation, the entire bunch bar none get booted out. Yes that means those few good jews also get booted out, which some can argue is unfair But after 109 host nations and around a total of 300+ boot outs since about 1800 yrs ago Well one can also understand why a host nation, having no good method to determine accurately which are the few good ones, always ends up giving the big boot out to them all eh.

And also one can conclude that most everything jews have complained about for that entire 3,500 years and still do today, has been caused by jews themselves by their own disgusting ways and traits and evil criminalities etc ..There simply would be zero so called antisemitism if there were zero jews within a nation period. But good luck in attempting to convince any jews of such truths.

One of the very best and most accurate descriptions yet I have read or heard of regarding jewry and why they have been so despised by so many distinctly different groups of gentiles, and in so many different locations and in so many eras of time has to be what the new testament verses about them states (Paraphraseing here) "For they are the adversaries of God and of All of Mankind"!

That single short verse speaks volumes of past and present truths.

Iris , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 10:26 pm GMT
@Modified limited variant hangout

Laurent Guyenot is not trying to cover for the CIA.

He is a highly-educated professional engineer, who never needed to get involved in political writing in the first place.

http://www.voltairenet.org/auteur125605.html?lang=en

He has been consistently debunking political manipulation over the last 10 years. He does so with objectivity and measure, and thanks to his hard work and erudition. He tries to avoid baiting into easy and stupid conspiracy theories, such as the ones promoted by Michael Moore and Alex Jones.

Mr Guyenot has loyal and long-standing readers within the French-speaking world, where he is highly respected (and ignored by MSM, which is a badge of honour).
He mostly publishes on a right-wing, populist website that attracts readers from all political shades, thanks to their more honest and overt positions.

https://www.egaliteetreconciliation.fr/

bj , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 10:28 pm GMT
I just read from Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land ..and Clash Of Civilizations. The book is an excellent history of the nefarious role played by Jews in the cycle of civilizations for thousands of years up to the JFK assassination and 9/11 which feature Jews in supporting and initiating roles. These two mentioned events are arguably the endgame of the Anglo-Zionist Empire. The destroyers indeed!

The JFK assassination and 9/11 featured Jews documenting the event for celebration and narrative control. The dancing Israelis and Abraham Zapruder were on site at the exact moment of the mortal event. What a coincidence the Jew Chorus shouts! I would like to know more about Abraham Zapruder, born in the Ukraine in 1905. Did he know the Zionist founders of the apartheid state?

https://www.amazon.com/Yahweh-Zion-Jealous-Promised-Civilizations/dp/0996143041

chicken salad , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 10:41 pm GMT
What I want to say that is that your macroscopic perspective and desire for the simple explanation does not obviate the facts of the case.
David In TN , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 11:11 pm GMT
@gsjackson

A friend of mine visited the Book Depository and was struck by how close Oswald was. It was an easy shot.

The question the conspiracy idiots don't consider is: If the "deep state" wanted to get rid of him, why not expose JFK in a sex scandal forcing his resignation?

It would be (a lot) safer than a "conspiracy" composed of the entire government. A forced resignation from a sex scandal would make Kennedy a laughing stock and totally disgrace him. The assassination made him a martyr, causing the passage of every measure he had favored.

The fallout concerning the East German woman from Bobby Baker's stable whom JFK had consorted with was still bubbling on November 22, 1963.

Art , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 11:14 pm GMT
We see more and more articles about "the Jews killed the Kennedys." True or not, this is not good for the Jews. This opens the floodgates to "the Jews did 9/11."

Defending 9/11 is problematic for the Jews. There are many many angles that are impossible to defend.

Think Peace -- Art

Monty Ahwazi , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 11:21 pm GMT
@Wizard of Oz

Wiz of Oz,
Are you a troll or a Zionist sympathizer? Giving birth by a Zionist the child is a Zionist or Zionist sympathizer even if he or she doesn't acknowledge it! This can go back as far as 7 generations if you really like to know!
Your comments are worthless indicating you have nothing to say or to add to the subject matter! Bye!

David In TN , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 11:26 pm GMT
@Anon

RFK was NOT going to win the presidency in 1968. A few weeks before his death, he lost the Oregon primary to Eugene McCarthy. RFK couldn't get enough votes beyond his black base to win a general election. A poll in late May 1968 had him running 10 points behind Nixon. Robert Kennedy was about as out of touch with Middle America as George McGovern would be for years later.

Hubert Humphrey was way ahead in delegates and in those days the "bosses" still had control. Humphrey was better liked than Bobby withing the party. The New York primary was going to give Bobby a poor result for his "home state."

Although, RFK won the California primary, his 46-42 margin was 3-4 points lower than expected and was due to a heavy black and Mexican vote. Bobby still didn't do well enough with white voters.

utu , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 11:41 pm GMT
If we reject the official versions of JFK and RFK assassinations and assume they were results of conspiracies with Oswald and Sirhan as active players or patsies then we must go by the qui bono, cui prodest, cuius bonum legal principle which certainly will not prove who were the conspirators but will point to the most likely conspirators.

In case of JFK it is pretty obvious that Israel was the greatest beneficiary of his death because of JFK determination to stop Israel's nuclear program. Some correspondence of JFK with PM's of Israel is available on line. Israel defense doctrine was formulate to be based on what later was called Samson Option. In 1963 Israel still cooperated with France on its secret nuclear program.

JFK definitively was set on stopping Israel nuclear program which Israel was conducting in secret cooperation with France. After strong letter on May 18, 163 letter PM Ben Gurion preferred to resign than to answer the letter:

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/When-Ben-Gurion-said-no-to-JFK
Finally, Kennedy had enough, and in a personal letter dated May 18, 1963, the president warned that unless American inspectors were allowed into Dimona (meaning the end of any military activities), Israel would find itself totally isolated. Rather than answering, Ben-Gurion abruptly resigned. Kennedy's repeated emphasis on America's "deep commitment to the security of Israel" was all well and good, but, as seen after Egypt's sudden expulsion of UN peacekeepers in 1967, Israel could not depend on anyone – even the US.

Ben-Gurion's successor, Levi Eshkol received Kennedy's next letter, which upped the pressure, warning that the American commitment and support of Israel "could be seriously jeopardized."

At the same time RFK as AG was considering forcing pro Israel lobbies to register as Foreign Agents. The last before JFK death communication from DOJ was on 10/11/1963: DOJ Demanded for AZC Registration "the Department expects a response from you within 72 hours with regard to this matter." Six days later

http://www.israellobby.org/azcdoj/
"Judge Rifkind then made a plea for no registration, stating it was the opinion of most of the persons affiliated with the Council that such registration would be so publicized by the American Council on Judaism that it would eventually destroy the Zionist movement he did not believe his clients would file any papers or sign any papers indicating that the organization was an agent of a foreign principal. I told him that any such information or material that is supplied on that basis would be made part of the Department's public files available for inspection by the public "

In DOJ internal memo on 4/30/1964 before replacing RFK as AG with Nicholas Katzenbach the following was stated: "This is the most blatant stall we have encountered. Do you mind suggesting what we do next because all of us here would call their records before a grand jury." RFK resigns as AG in September 1964. When Katzenbach became acting AG and then AG exchanges between Jewish lobby and DOJ continued but no action was taken by DOJ. Eventually on n 11/27/1967, four years and five days after JFK's death AIPAC applies for a federal tax exemption. The lobby has won.

As far as RFK is concerned the conspirators could not allow him to become president, period. His assassination is predicated on conspiracy of JFK assassination and subsequent cover up. If we assume that Sirhan was indeed hypnotized patsy conspirators seem to overdid the cover story and the created legend (though it worked for most people who bought the story) by trying to bring attention to Palestinians who were allegedly upset with RFK's strong pro-Israel stance. The problem with the story is that RFK did not demonstrate that he had strong pro-Israeli position. Anyway, most people got a message that RFK got killed because he was pro-Israel, so certainly Israel was off the suspect list, right?

Since the two assassinations dozens of theories were floated, including the most ridiculous ones, like that Onassis was behind it, which got public exposure often in MSM. The only theory that can't get any traction in MSM is the one linking Israel.

Beefcake the Mighty , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 11:45 pm GMT
@Bardon Kaldian

The Tribe has spoken.

Beefcake the Mighty , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 11:47 pm GMT
@Tyrion 2

A great place to run such an operation, no?

anon [228] Disclaimer , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 11:47 pm GMT
@Modified limited variant hangout

JKF's wife believed it was LBJ who killed her husband.. LBJ was in the pocket of the Jews.

Beefcake the Mighty , Next New Comment June 3, 2018 at 11:56 pm GMT
@Intelligent Dasein

"Yes, I believe that Oswald killed Kennedy. I have no reasonable doubt that Oswald alone fired the fatal shot."

You mean the magic bullet?

Beefcake the Mighty , Next New Comment June 4, 2018 at 12:19 am GMT
@John Gruskos

Although this is actually an insightful comment, you overlook the fact that Organized Jewry has no problem turning on former acolytes (even fellow Jews) who are not completely lockstep with the party line.

Anon [257] Disclaimer , Next New Comment June 4, 2018 at 12:37 am GMT
@Anon

The tenuous connections were not all that tenuous. For instance Owen Latimore was indeed a soviet agent who influenced many state department operatives.

The real reasons McCarthy was brought down was that the entire communist operation was so heavily Jewish. It's really a wonder that the Rosenbergs were arrested and found guilty.

Anon [257] Disclaimer , Next New Comment June 4, 2018 at 12:45 am GMT
@Modified limited variant hangout

I read that silly RFK the dead messiah would have cured the problems thing you posted. What a crock.

JFK MLK RFK the holy trinity what a load.

Robert Kennedy jr is running for president. He just wants to get his name in the papers and the internet and get votes from all the baby boomers who grow up when the media was so worshipful of the Kennedys and MLK.

James N. Kennett , Next New Comment June 4, 2018 at 12:48 am GMT
@Intelligent Dasein

I'm really beginning to wonder what Ron Unz is doing with his website. Last week we got that moronic article by 9/11 doucher David Lorimer, and now we are treated to a 10,000 word disquisition about how Israel assassinated the Kennedys -- both of which articles are rather baseless canards but are deeply emotionally appealing to a certain coterie of contrarians and which are sure to attract (and have attracted) the most odious collection of commenters who are both uninterested in and oblivious to the the truth about any of it.

I would be disappointed if all the articles on unz.com were like this one; but it is better to have some articles that we might consider moronic, than to expect Ron Unz to personally arbitrate between fact and fiction on readers' behalf – as the NYT and WP do.

There will always be boundaries on what can be published, and IMHO in most media the boundaries are far too narrow. It is better if the boundaries are over-broad than over-narrow. A possible downside with over-broad boundaries is that bad stories might "taint" good ones, by association; on the other hand, a narrow scope might be taken to imply that the publisher endorses each article.

The same with commenters: IMHO it is better to have some that are odious, than to give moderators the job of removing any comments that could reasonably be considered offensive. It is not difficult to scan the comments and skip past the ones that are not informative.

On the article itself, it did make us think about the headline question for half an hour – even if most of us agree that Betteridge's Law Of Headlines applies in this case. I looked up the JFK Jr case again, remembering the official story that his plane crashed into the sea during very heavy rain – only to find that this is not the official story at all (JFK Jr was supposedly disoriented by conditions that were merely hazy). So who spread the "heavy rain" story and why? And if the Israelis killed JFK Jr, should we remove his name from the "Clinton body count"?

Nowadays we accept that Israel, India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. It is worth remembering that in the sixties the Israeli nuclear weapons program was a shocking secret, and it remained so until 1986 when Mordechai Vananu told the story. JFK's opposition to Dimona, and the possible Israeli reaction to it, must be seen in this context.

Robjil , Next New Comment June 4, 2018 at 12:54 am GMT
@Anon

Michael Rivero has examined the many clues that JFK JR was assassinated. Here are some of clues that he found. We don't have a "free" press in our MSM. Investigating or questioning the narratives given to us by our "free controlled press" is considered "conspiracy theories".

Having established that the government and the media have a prior (and quite deplorable) record of deliberate lies to the public, let us look at how the official story of the crash of John F. Kennedy Jr's plane evolved, and why it is suspect.

As first reported by United Press International, John F. Kennedy Jr. on approach to Martha's Vineyard in 8 mile visibility, was in radio contact with the ground, calmly informing them of his intentions to drop off a passenger before proceeding to Hyannis airport. Then, according to ABC News, JFK Jr's plane went into a steep dive, and crashed.

However, even before the wreckage was found, the story being put out in the media began to change. Gone was the previously reported radio conversation a calm JFK Jr. had with ground personnel just before the plane fell out of the sky, replaced by a declaration from the NTSB that JFK Jr. had not used his radio at all as he approached Martha's Vineyard. Gone also was the originally reported 8 mile visibility while the media began to hammer home the claim that Martha's Vineyard had been totally blanketed with a haze so heavy that pilots in the air would have been blind.

No sooner were the various stories put out but they quickly fell apart.

Here are some examples.
PROPAGANDA: JFK Jr. was lost.
FACT: When JFK Jr. radioed controllers on the Cape (as reported on Boston TV News) to announce his approach to Martha's Vineyard, radar showed him to be just where he stated he was and at the correct altitude for the approach.
PROPAGANDA: JK Jr. was in "over his head".
FACT: JFK Jr's conversational tone on the radio reveals that he was calm. He was not disoriented. He didn't ask for directions. He didn't indicate he had any problem at all. He clearly was confident he was going to find the airport and land.
PROPAGANDA: JFK Jr. stalled the plane.
FACT: The radar track shows that he was well above stall speed.
PROPAGANDA: JFK Jr. went into a steep turn and lost his horizon.
FACT: There is no reason for JFK Jr. to have been in any turn at all at that point on the flight path leading into the airport. He was already lined up with the main runway at Martha's Vineyard airport.
PROPAGANDA: JFK Jr. didn't know his altitude and simply "flew into the ocean".
FACT: The radar track shows him flying at the proper altitude, then (as ABC News put it) "falling out of the sky".
PROPAGANDA: JFK Jr. lost his instruments, and that is why he could not handle the dark and hazy (?) conditions
FACT: The fact that the radar was getting good data from his encoding altimeter proves his instruments were operating.
PROPAGANDA: JFK Jr. would have lost his artificial horizon if the vacuum pump failed in the aircraft.
FACT: MSNBC is the only media outlet to have tried to hype this one, using a self-proclaimed "aviation expert". His claim is also false, as there is a backup vacuum system in the pitot assembly of that aircraft.
PROPAGANDA JFK Jr. was a reckless pilot.
FACT: This claim was planted everywhere in the media, always attributed to an "unnamed source". One reporter, Cindy Adams at the New York Post, later had cause to suspect she had been lied to. So did Andrew Goldman at the New York Observer. Interviews with individuals directly familier with JFK Jr's flying ability shown on Inside Edition confirmed that he was a highly skilled and careful pilot.
PROPAGANDA JFK Jr's wife was afraid to fly with him.
FACT: Again a story attributed to "unnamed sources", and again debunked by the interviews shown on Inside Edition. JFK Jr's wife had no problem flying with JFK Jr. and flew with him often.
PROPAGANDA JFK Jr. had only 40 hours experience.
FACT: He had 40 hours in that one aircraft. His total experience was about 300 hours, more than enough to qualify him for a commercial pilot's license. According to FAA statistics, 300 hours made him a more careful and safer pilot than one with 1000 hours, who is more complacent.
PROPAGANDA The weather was very hazy.
FACT: The FAA issued VFR weather conditions that night, and the weather report (mentioned in the UPI story) called for 8 mile visibility. One witness on shore reported that there was very little haze and that standing on the shore, he could see airplanes out over the ocean on approach to the island, proof that airplanes on the approach could see the shore. This claim is backed up not only by the weather report of 8 mile visibility, but by a weather radar image taken at about the time of the crash. This radar image is showing haze and fog along New York and Long Island (if this radar image were of clouds, the FAA would not have declared VFR flying conditions that night) but none at all at Martha's Vineyard. On the morning after the crash, CNN reported that weather could be ruled out as a factor in the crash!
PROPAGANDA: Martha's Vineyard is very dark and won't show through the haze.
FACT: That may have been true only a few months ago. However, as evidenced by a Letter to the Editor of the Martha's Vineyard Times just days after the JFK Jr. crash, new lights installed on the island, lights that point up in the sky, are so bright they are drawing complaints from island residents.
That the Kennedy family has been the target of political assassination is a part of the American political landscape. It's a given.
That cover-ups surrounded the deaths of Kennedys is also a given.
That our government lies to us, with the media's help, is a given.
There is good cause to assume we are being lied to yet again.

Read more: John F. Kennedy Jr.: Evidence Of A Cover up | WHAT REALLY HAPPENED http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/CRASH/JFK_JR/jj.php#ixzz5HPd8Ta8x

redmudhooch , Next New Comment June 4, 2018 at 12:56 am GMT
During that same 1962-63 period Senator William J. Fulbright of Arkansas, Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, convened hearings on the legal status of the American Zionist Council (AZC). The Committee uncovered evidence that the Jewish Agency, a predecessor to the state of Israel, operated a massive network of financial "conduits" which funnelled funds to U.S. Israel lobby groups. As a result, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) ordered the AZC to openly register and disclose all of its foreign funded lobbying activity in the United States. The attempt was subsequently thwarted first by the Israel lobby itself and then by the death of President Kennedy which lead to growing concerns regarding the impact of the ever-growing Zionist influence on U.S. policy making decisions. On April 15, 1973, Fulbright -- who lost his Senate seat the following year -- had no qualms about boldly announcing on CBS Face the Nation that : "Israel controls the U.S. Senate. The Senate is subservient, much too much; we should be more concerned about U.S. interests rather than doing the bidding of Israel. The great majority of the Senate of the U.S. -- somewhere around 80% -- is completely in support of Israel; anything Israel wants; Israel gets. This has been demonstrated time and again, and this has made [foreign policy] difficult for our government."

AIPAC eludes US law, part of international lobby for Israel

https://israelpalestinenews.org/aipac-eludes-us-law-part-international-lobby-israel/

The most powerful and effective foreign-government lobby in Washington is so dominant that it has been able to avoid registering for the past 55 years. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was last confronted by FARA when its predecessor organization the American Zionist Council was pressured by John F. Kennedy's Justice Department in 1962 and 1963. Kennedy's death stopped that effort -- and ended White House attempts to hold Israel accountable for the development of its secret nuclear weapons program (which depended on nuclear material removed illegally from the United States with the connivance of a company located in Pennsylvania called NUMEC).

A Jewish Defector Warns America:
Benjamin H. Freedman Speaks on Zionism

Wally , Next New Comment June 4, 2018 at 12:56 am GMT
@David In TN

And no doubt your 'friend' could have fired the "magic bullet" as well. "Sex scandal"? LOL. That would have taken years to have had any impact, if at all. And since when do sex scandals force Presidents to retire. Given your logic, a sex scandal could have been used against Lincoln, therefore John Wilkes Booth is innocent.

Anon [257] Disclaimer , Next New Comment June 4, 2018 at 1:01 am GMT
@David In TN

I visited the Book depository when I was in Dallas for a week and noted that the distance was short, the window was way above the street and it would have been an easy shot. I doubt a Marine would have missed.

What's really silly is the way people who've never held any type of gun in their lives keep insisting that Oswald's score on the Marine marksman test proves he was a bad shot. Just because he didn't get the highest score doesn't mean he wasn't capable of firing the shot that killed Kennedy.

redmudhooch , Next New Comment June 4, 2018 at 1:12 am GMT
@Them Guys

Fun article . I wonder why these countries are "antisemetic" ???? Hmmmm . what could it be?????

ADL Poll of Over 100 Countries Finds More Than One-Quarter of Those Surveyed Infected With Anti-Semitic Attitudes

https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-global-100-poll

The top countries/territories in the ADL 100 Global Index are:

West Bank and Gaza – 93 percent of the adult population holds anti-Semitic views
Iraq – 92 percent
Yemen – 88 percent
Algeria – 87 percent
Libya – 87 percent
Tunisia – 86 percent
Kuwait – 82 percent
Bahrain – 81 percent
Jordan – 81 percent

Modified limited variant hangout , June 4, 2018 at 1:15 am GMT
@Iris

Thanks for your perspective! I have read some of M. Guanot's work with interest.

While it is quite plausible that the Zionist entity and the CIA regime have congruent criminal interests, this is not what Guyanot theorizes. He imagines a CIA that sets up all the preconditions for a coup, without actually meaning to go through with it, and a foreign devil that unexpectedly takes it all and runs with it. That's idiotic. It also happens to be CIA's boilerplate excuse for all their grave crimes. There's nothing new up there. What's worse, it's plagiarized from Langley fops and jarheads. It's not just stupid, but stupid in a telltale way.

An engineer is highly trained, not highly educated. That might be why he applies bog standard old-fashioned Orientalism, which originally applied to Jews, then didn't, and now does again – and voila, we've got a suspect that isn't CIA! Guyanot's Orientalism is interesting because it highlights the Israeli state's exploitation of biblical myth as pretext for genocidal ideology. But he's over his head when trying to re-interpret the documented conduct of the US command structure. Perhaps that's how he falls into the CIA's propaganda line. Let's hope so.

[Jun 03, 2018] Real Assassin Arrested In Staged Kiev Hit Linked To Ukrainian Intelligence As Official Story Unravels Zero Hedge

Jun 03, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:15 37 SHARES

The Ukrainian government's staged assassination of anti-Putin journalist Arkady Babachenko has taken an even stranger turn, as evidence has emerged that his would-be "Russia-ordered" assassin and the man who supposedly hired him, both say they worked for Ukrainian counterintelligence, casting serious doubt on the official story.

To review, Ukrainian authorities announced last Tuesday that Babachenko had been assassinated after returning home from the store. On Wednesday, Babachenko appeared at a press conference with Ukrainian authorities who said that the faked assassination was an elaborate sting to bust an actual hit planned by Russia .

me title=

Only now we find that the hitman, Oleksiy Tsimbalyuk , is an outspoken critic of Russia who says he worked for Ukrainian counterintelligence - a claim Ukraine initially denied but later admitted to be true . Meanwhile the guy who supposedly hired Tsimbalyuk, Boris L. German, 50, also says he worked for Ukrainian counter-intelligence, a claim Ukraine denies as its immediately destroys the carefully scripted, if rapidly imploding, Ukrainian narrative meant to scapegoat Russia for what has been a "fake news" story of epic proportions, emerging from the one nation that not only was the biggest foreign donor to the Clinton foundation , but has made fake news propaganda into an art form.

Supposed "hitman" Oleksiy Tsimbalyuk
Boris German, suspected of organizing an attempted hit on anti-Putin Russian journalist Arkady Babachenko sits in a cage during trial in Kiev, Ukraine

The New York Times reports that Tsimbalyuk - a former Russia-hating priest was featured in a 10-minute documentary in January 2017 in which " he called killing members of the Russian-backed militias in eastern Ukraine "an act of mercy" , further calling into question why Russia would hire him for the supposed assassination in the first place.

Facebook pictures also reveal Tsimbalyuk wearing a Ukrainian ultranationalist uniform from "Right Sector," a group deemed to be neo-Nazis.

As even the Russophobic NY Times puts it:

Given such strong and publicly avowed enmity toward Russia, it is odd to say the least that Mr. Tsimbalyuk would be selected to carry out the contract killing of a prominent Kremlin critic .

German claims he took orders from Moscow businessman Vyacheslav Pivovarnik - who he says works for one of Putin's personal foundations.

Ukrainian officials also claim that German has a list of another 30 targets which Moscow wants to wipe out - something he claims he has since passed onto Kyiv.

Prosecutors claimed German had been given a down payment of $15,000, half what he was promised for carrying out the hit.

German said: 'I got a call from a longtime acquaintance who lives in Moscow, and in the process of communicating with him it turned out that he works for a Putin foundation precisely to orchestrate destabilization in Ukraine.' - Daily Mail

" Six months ago, my old acquaintance contacted me, an ex-citizen of Ukraine, now living in Moscow ," German told a Ukrainian court, adding " He works in a personal foundation of Putin's - and is in charge of organizing riots in Ukraine and planned acts of terror at the next presidential elections. He is called Vyacheslav Pivovarnik. This is not a fairy tale, there's nothing mystical here, everything has been proved."

German's lawyer Eugene Solodko wrote on Facebook that his client was an executive director of Ukrainian-German firm Schmeisser - the only non-state owned arms producer in the country.

Russia has denied German's claim, with a Putin spokesman saying "No such foundation exists in Russia. Any allegations about Russia's possible complicity in this staging is just mudslinging. They do not correspond to reality."

Meanwhile, senior Ukraine officials have been on the defensive since Wednesday, when the head of security services announced they had staged the death of Babchenko so they could track his would-be killers to Russian intelligence, a story the International Federation of Journalists slammed as idiotic, nonsensical and completely undermining Ukraine's credibility.

Comments Vote up! 12 Vote down! 0

StheNine Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:20 Permalink

So arrest a guy for a hit that didn't happen that was hyped with a fake death. Ok....

https://youtu.be/MpShLA-Y2AQ

LetThemEatRand -> StheNine Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:23 Permalink

In defense of the Ukranians, the bar has proven to be pretty low in terms of what the public will believe.

BlindMonkey -> LetThemEatRand Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:29 Permalink

I'm sure there is some dude in Langley pulling his hair out yelling "you fucking idiots! I taught you better than this!"

Leakanthrophy -> BlindMonkey Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:51 Permalink

Victoria Nuland must be having multiple orgasms.

The cookie trained ukies did well.

el buitre -> Leakanthrophy Sat, 06/02/2018 - 23:06 Permalink

I think that the Ukonazis must have been inspired by their friends at MI6's and their brilliant execution of the Skripal father and daughter hit. They needed Jihadi John Brennan to organize things for them, but he seems to be tied up at the moment. And the Thai Torturer is still getting comfortable in her new saddle. But I am confident that she will be able to execute both fake and real assassinations shortly.

MozartIII -> el buitre Sat, 06/02/2018 - 23:19 Permalink

Just when you thought that the US had become a banana republic. The Ukrainian government, screws shit up as a US puppet that is beyond belief. Putin is laughing so hard that he won't sleep for days. Your right about Britain, they have been so influenced by Soros that they screw everything up as well.

Is this the year that the left falls into the bottomless pit? How can you screw everything up so bad and still live. Look at the left in the US, failure upon failure. Their media proclaims victory, yet know one believes them about anything. The corporations are keeping them afloat. Not for long!

Oh regional Indian -> MozartIII Sun, 06/03/2018 - 00:04 Permalink

The global comedy circus rolls on.

It's true though, the jews never were really creative in the first place (that is why there is no true innovation in the world, these fuckers hold tight purse strings).

It shows in their terribly scripted narratives...

gregga777 -> BlindMonkey Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:51 Permalink

Say, how much was that so-called journalist paid to participate in the Ukro-Nazi's sheeit show?

RationalLuddite -> gregga777 Sat, 06/02/2018 - 23:48 Permalink

2 World Cup tickets. Not front row though as that could be too close for the next FF event's shrapnel ...

Jballsquared -> LetThemEatRand Sat, 06/02/2018 - 23:39 Permalink

Dear Sam Bee,

i found your feckless cunts. They're in Ukraine with all the clintons dirty money.

Crimeans must be really bummed they aren't represented by these shitbags anymore.

bshirley1968 -> StheNine Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:27 Permalink

The arrest is an attempt to try and bring some legitimacy and damage control to a hilarious fiasco.

WTFUD -> bshirley1968 Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:29 Permalink

Never let a good fiasco go to waste!

RationalLuddite -> bshirley1968 Sat, 06/02/2018 - 23:52 Permalink

Inspector Clouseau is looking positively aspirational at this point for the cabal proxy operatives ... Geeez Louise

Blue Steel 309 -> StheNine Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:38 Permalink

It's difficult to tell who is jewing who here. If anything these are all Mossad assets.

BarkingCat -> Blue Steel 309 Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:59 Permalink

I am pretty sure that the guy named German is neither Russian nor Ukrainian and probably not German. His lineage is probably (((german))).

Blue Steel 309 -> BarkingCat Sat, 06/02/2018 - 23:13 Permalink

All 3 in that top picture are confirmed chosenites.

LetThemEatRand Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:21 Permalink

The Ukranians' big mistake was not leaving the bad guy's passport at the fake murder site.

WTFUD -> LetThemEatRand Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:27 Permalink

This charade has all the hallmarks of a joint GCHQ/Ukraine Operation.

BlindMonkey -> WTFUD Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:30 Permalink

I thought this was CIA but I think you're right. This is a UK op by the same cracking team that gave you "I can't believe it's not Novichok!"

WTFUD -> BlindMonkey Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:34 Permalink

Yes, the level of incompetence is a huge tell.

khnum -> WTFUD Sat, 06/02/2018 - 23:13 Permalink

or a Pink Panther movie

bh2 Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:24 Permalink

Why are so many people so desperately trying to make Russia look bad and managing only to make themselves look like morons?

BarnacleBill -> bh2 Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:44 Permalink

To be fair, I don't think they meant to make themselves look like morons...

gregga777 -> bh2 Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:47 Permalink

Why are so many people so desperately trying to make Russia look bad and managing only to make themselves look like morons?

Uh, could it be because they are all maroons?

True Blue -> bh2 Sat, 06/02/2018 - 22:48 Permalink

Because they are morons. The short-bus crowd seems to think that every person on earth is as stupid as they; and that these are really smart, fiendishly clever plots that in reality are Scooby-Do level theatrics at best.

Wouldn't shock me if some Ken doll™ wearing a blue ascot tore off this guy's rubber mask to reveal Old Man Joe Biden who's scheme to set his idiot kid up with the biggest Porsche dealership in Europe was foiled by 'those damn kids.'

el buitre -> bh2 Sat, 06/02/2018 - 23:09 Permalink

I think its the fluoride in the water.

AGuy -> bh2 Sat, 06/02/2018 - 23:16 Permalink

"Why are so many people so desperately trying to make Russia look bad and managing only to make themselves look like morons?"

Public is even dumber. Just ask any joe or jane on the street. They think all this non-sense is caused by the Russians, Assad uses chemical weapons, etc

[Jun 03, 2018] Ukraine - The Babchenko Hoax Was Part Of A Corporate Raid

Jun 03, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Ukraine - The Babchenko Hoax Was Part Of A Corporate Raid

The case of the death and resurrection of the Russian journalist Babchenko in Kiev is even more surreal than it seemed so far. According to Ukrainian sources and court documents the whole hoax was part of an attempt to raid and take over a private company.

Babchenko himself and the man who was hired to "kill" him had cooperated with the main branch of the Ukrainian national security service (SBU). The "operator", who is accused of having hired the "killer" for Russia, appeared in court. He claimed to have cooperated with the Ukrainian counter intelligence agency, which is side branch of the national security service. The accused "operator" is an executive of a private joint venture and has been under pressure over claims against his company. There are indications that the whole stunt may have been staged to get him "out of the way" to then take over the company he leads.

The suggestion is that high levels of the Ukrainian security services staged the whole affair not only to blame Russia but also for someone's personal gain.

In 2017 Arkady Babchenko, despised in Russia for his open hostility against its people , came via Israel to the Ukraine. He was welcome in Kiev for his anti-Russian position. Babchenko found a job with ATR , a Crimean Tatar TV station. The fine-print on the ATR website says that it "was supported by the Media Development Fund of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine".

On May 29 the Ukrainian government claimed that Babchenko had been assassinated. As usual the death of a journalist hostile to Russia was used by NATO aligned media to blame Russia, the Kremlin and Putin. That there was zero evidence that Russia was involved did not matter at all. A photo of the allegedly killed Babchenko laying in his blood emerged.


Crisis actor Arkady Babchenko - bigger

The very next day the General Prosecutor of the Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko and the head of the National Security Service (SBU) Vasyl Grytsak (also written as Hrytsak) held a press conference and presented a very alive and happy Arkady Babchenko. He had not been shot at all. The whole hoax, it was explained, was launched to find the people behind an alleged assassination campaign originating in Russia. In this official version the Russians hired some Ukrainian "operator" who then hired the "killer" to assassinate Babchenko. The hired killer told the police about it and the hoax of Babchenko's death was staged to find the culprits behind the plot.

All those western "journalists" who had believed Ukrainian government claims without any evidence and wrote unfounded accusations against Russia were not amused. The Ukrainian government exposed them as the mere propaganda tools and fools they are. The "journalist" Babchenko himself, interviewed by Bloomberg's Leonid Bershidsky, comes off as a naive and rather dim light.

Yesterday the "hired killer", one Alexey Tsymbalyuk, went public . He is a Ukrainian nationalist who had fought against the the Russia supported entities in eastern Ukraine. He has since become an orthodox priest.

Cont. reading: Ukraine - The Babchenko Hoax Was Part Of A Corporate Raid


Den Lille Abe , Jun 1, 2018 12:48:46 PM | 1

Well done b, how the fok did you see that angle?
Nevertheless, the whole story defies imagination, I mean the scrips are wilder than a 3rd rate Hollywood flick, but maybe the Ukrainian Idiot unservices watch.
Ukraine has debased itself (Further) with this, the already known connections to the vile scumbag at Bellincat, Elliot Higgins, made people wary. Now they are not wary, but fully aware of the lies.
If we keep on being bombarded like this, eventually I will doubt who I am.
the pair , Jun 1, 2018 1:46:23 PM | 2
funny how the US/UK-established vassal puppet regime in ukraine closely resembles the ones in africa and south america. i guess you can export sociopathic ayn rand thinking anywhere and have it turn out roughly the same.

good work. it's always fun to be reminded what actual journalism looks like.

james , Jun 1, 2018 1:49:35 PM | 3
thanks b... that is pretty impressive how insane and whacked out all of these ukrainian nationals are, not to mention how they have succeeded in providing another example of how the msm at present is a real joke... i am sure the reporters are not impressed though.. the fact this story is as convoluted as it is tells me how messed up ukraine and the west are at this point.. all there attempts to smear and frame russia are looking very unstable at this point.. add this to the pile of bs that includes the white helmets, syrian defense, moderate headchoppers, and etc. etc.. i think the point is already passed where ordinary people don't trust the media as they might have in the past.. this story helps in that regard..
jsn , Jun 1, 2018 2:00:43 PM | 4
I don't believe a word of it, this is Banderastan Orthodox Easter.
Virgile , Jun 1, 2018 2:20:44 PM | 5
It is also possible that the Russian intelligence have cynically organized the fake murder affair with the aim of ridiculing and discrediting the western media and the western intelligence and their impatient leaders.
It could be Russia's revenge on the Skripal affair.
dh , Jun 1, 2018 2:21:27 PM | 6
The EU should get serious about admitting Ukraine to the club. It would mean much less paperwork for lonely European bachelors and there would be an immediate boom in the camouflage clothing and partially used military equipment business.

If only Poland could be a bit more reasonable about Galicia.

mbur , Jun 1, 2018 2:49:37 PM | 7
Am a bit confused. Was it Boris Herman the German who headed the joint venture who is referred to as 'German' in the following text? His fellow victims being SBU head Grytsak and the Prosecutor General Lutsenko? The bad guys being unnamed creditors..?
xor , Jun 1, 2018 2:51:43 PM | 8
Some insignificant imperfections:
line 5: ... As usual the death of a journalist hostile to Russia ...
line 27: ... the German (the count r y) company Schmeisser ...
line 45: ... was on l y one aspect ...

Other than that, another fine piece of investigative reporting!

Brendan , Jun 1, 2018 2:54:19 PM | 9

Another photo of Tsymbalyuk, posted by a Bellingcat guy. Even he's not hiding Tsymbalyuk's "Ukrainian nationalist" background .
https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1002223184769437697/photo/1
karlof1 , Jun 1, 2018 2:54:41 PM | 10
What an excellent B movie plot! Turn it all into a screenplay and make some money b!
Rusty Pipes , Jun 1, 2018 3:18:06 PM | 11
b, perhaps you mean: "The SBU, he alleges, shook German down for some $70,000."
andrew , Jun 1, 2018 3:32:15 PM | 12
Virgile, it is hard to imagine how the Russians would have been able to involve the Ukrainian president, the head of the SBU and the prime minister among others. Those people made those choices themselves. If those people are all plants of the Russian SVR (foreign secret service) then they'd be mad to burn them in such a small scale plot and certainly not all at once.
et Al , Jun 1, 2018 3:56:53 PM | 13
Wheels within wheels? Yet more evidence that Ukraine has not left the 1990s unfortunately.

Meanwhile, Airbus is palming off old CHC H225 helicopters (that oil workers refuse to fly in after two catastrophic crashes killing everyone aboard) to the Ukraine.

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/ukraine-signs-55-unit-deal-with-airbus-helicopters-449103/

On the plus side, they will be used by ' ...a variety of security agencies, including the national police and border guard service.. ' so if they crash they'll mostly kill scum. Pardon my French. Who's paying for it?

b , Jun 1, 2018 3:57:57 PM | 14
@mbur Am a bit confused. Was it Boris Herman the German who headed the joint venture who is referred to as 'German' in the following text? His fellow victims being SBU head Grytsak and the Prosecutor General Lutsenko? The bad guys being unnamed creditors..?

Herman/German is the name of Boris (H and G are often interchangeable in translations from Russian). Boris is Ukrainian, not German (the country).

The SBU head seems to be on the side opposed to Boris German.

But I admit that I am not totally sure of that. I do not even know who is the bad guy here.

Who is really raiding the company? Boris, who is the executive who leads the company, or the former founder/creditor and his companions?

The case is confusing, the stories (not all are quoted above) contradict each other as do the various people telling them.

It seems clear the Boris German has been under SBU pressure for some time over the company and credit issue. Now he gets framed as a Russian asset by the SBU while he claims to have worked for the Ukrainian counter espionage department which is nominally part of the SBU but still a sort of separate service.

Here is a long, just published piece (in Russian) about his court appearance and what he said.
https://www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/2018/06/01/76667-organizator

If the SBU wanted him "off the street" to let someone else take over the company they got their wish fulfilled. The judge put him under 60 days pre-trial custody.

Mark2 , Jun 1, 2018 4:11:44 PM | 15
No thanks I 'm good! Think i'l sit this one out and Google Yemen.
radiator , Jun 1, 2018 4:50:24 PM | 16
@6 dh
The EU should get serious about admitting Ukraine to the club.

Definitely. An agreement like "full membership for a guaranteed intake/redistribution of 100.000 refuges per annum" would be my favourite option. Only for the fun of it, of course.

Jen , Jun 1, 2018 5:01:58 PM | 17
I am not sure that we can take Meduza.io's reporting all that seriously as its agenda is anti-Russian and, like Arkady Babchenko's Crimean Tatar TV station employer, receives some funding from the US or a US agency. Although I suppose that like the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Meduza journalists do tell the truth occasionally so as to not to compete with the BBC as a complete propaganda nutcase outfit.

Whether the publicity given to the Babchenko hoax murder in deceiving a gullible Western news media will translate into success for the SBU in court is another thing. Boris Gherman may be in pre-trial detention (perhaps for his own safety) but if the court finds in his favour then what other stunt will the SBU try to pull off to shake him down? They can only pull off a successful hoax murder stunt once or twice before everyone outside Ukraine becomes suspicious and cynical.

Meanwhile real Russian journalists working in Ukraine, whether they support or don't support Russia, probably just found their jobs and their lives more endangered by the SBU than before.

Ukraine must be in really desperate straits to seize modest-sized industrial assets in the tens of thousands of US dollars, Mafia-style. It can't be long now before the country's economy and finances are put under direct control of the IMF if that organisation is to recover its loans.

ben , Jun 1, 2018 5:12:09 PM | 18
What's up with the second photo? A toy ray-gun, and a toy shotgun. WTF!!

What a circus, oh well, fits the times we live in.

Jen , Jun 1, 2018 5:13:40 PM | 19
et Al @ 13: It will be fun watching Nazis trying to fly those helioopters and crashing them. The downside is that if they crash in eastern Ukraine or near the border with Russia, you know who will get the blame.

EU taxpayers will probably have to foot the bill.

dh , Jun 1, 2018 5:31:52 PM | 20
@16 Something like that might be acceptable but it should include a clause whereby NATO agrees to get the Moskals out of Donbass.

The Babchenko story needs a new twist soon before it fades away like the Skripals.

And where is Victoria Nuland Kagan these days? Perhaps she has a plan.

Lochearn , Jun 1, 2018 6:11:30 PM | 21
Britain appears to be the must Russophobic country at the moment, while at least some of the U.S. elites appear to be more concerned about China. Guardian journalists Shaun Walker and Luke Harding have conducted a vicious campaign spanning years, and one suspects both are close to British intelligence (if you can call what they do intelligence). We know that English hatred of Russia goes back centuries, but there must be something else. Any opinions?
Jen , Jun 1, 2018 6:41:39 PM | 22
Radiator @ 16: You mean Ukraine should agree to accept Jabhat al Nusra, ISIS and other headchoppers currently holed up in Idlib once the Syrian Arab Army starts squeezing them into Turkey and Turkey in turn squeezes them into Europe?

Should be fun watching the Nazis and jihadis fight each other when they're supposed to be fighting the Donbass fighters.

Breadonwaters , Jun 1, 2018 6:48:51 PM | 23
Slightly off topic ( i apologize, but the various spellings and pronounciations of the actors in this storey are far too difficult for my poor Newfoundlander's tongue) ...i have been curious the last few years to find out:
"Who , if anyone, oversees the 'City of London'? I understand it has a special place due to history of england ....and it seems to me that all of the Financial whoremongers of the world set up shop in the 'City of London' to do their nefarious evil deeds ....but ...is there anyone actually in control of the 'City of London', other than the 'COL' itself?
PLease , anyone?
Piotr Berman , Jun 1, 2018 6:55:03 PM | 24
Ukraine must be in really desperate straits to seize modest-sized industrial assets in the tens of thousands of US dollars, Mafia-style. Posted by: Jen | Jun 1, 2018 5:01:58 PM | 17

We have tall tales explaining what happen, and the reality is too bizarre for some sensible explanation. Nevertheless, the mechanism behind "sizing modest-sized industrial assets" is not some nation-level policy, or even "SBU leadership", but most probably some personal feud. In a classic novel "Dead Souls" that take place "somewhere in Malorossia", written by Ukrainian born Gogol, the main character participated in a successful corrupt shakedown that unravelled wh one partner call another "popovich" = a son of Orthodox clergyman; the insult was probably in doubting membership to dvoryanstvo, the noble estate.

Corruption fosters something like feudal lord-vassal system, with patrons and clients, an insult to a client shows ill will to the patron, so disputes concerning smallish enterprises can percolate toward the top.

fast freddy , Jun 1, 2018 7:04:42 PM | 25
Very Good, well-reasoned and logical explanation, Piotr. Sounds about right for this caper.
Jack , Jun 1, 2018 7:04:58 PM | 26
Ha ha Shakespear comes to ming here.
What a load of plonkers.
Jack , Jun 1, 2018 7:08:13 PM | 27
So who were the real snipers in the Domain ???????????
uncle tungsten , Jun 1, 2018 8:05:42 PM | 28
Thank you b for a great morning read and laugh. Cynical laugh, that is.
@jen #17: "It can't be long now before the country's economy and finances are put under direct control of the IMF if that organisation is to recover its loans."

Thanks jen I appreciate your input here. The IMF is the mafia and they are in control in that they 'issue the permit' to minor oligarchs to steal in return for guaranteed arms purchases from the IMF primary backers. This is a deeply corrupted system and it is truly alarming.

I never did see a story on how those two enormous arms depots were destroyed in Ukraine but it must have seriously damaged the Ukrainian economy as they were all likely headed to the 'anti isis' fake war games in Africa or the ME.

Debsisdead , Jun 1, 2018 8:48:44 PM | 29
Oh well any people 40 and under or thereabouts who use this site would be smart to pick their corporation now, because this will be SOP if the evil arseholes prevail. Sovereign entities in the form of geographically defined nation states will take a back seat as Google goes to war with Instagram, snapchat with facebook in the hope that the former FB monolith can be separated from it's now dominant overlord, instagram .
Of course the fact that Google shareholders may have neighbors in their gated community whose hedge fund is big in Instagram will make everything piquant for the un-allied masses who like their grandparents never got around to 'registering' with any of the pr1cks.
WorldBLee , Jun 1, 2018 8:54:43 PM | 30
Not sure if these new assertions are credible or not, but either way this escapade is full up on crazy. When the west says that Ukraine has 'western values,' is this what they mean?
Pft , Jun 1, 2018 9:29:02 PM | 31
Breadonwaters.

City of London is run by a corporation of the same name and headed by the Lord Mayor who is elected by the corporations in the city

psychohistorian , Jun 1, 2018 9:45:59 PM | 32
@ Breadonwaters asking about the City of London

Pft's answer is as good as any.

Does Newfoundland support Trust Funds or their like? Ask yourself why there is not public reporting of the largest trust funds in our Western world....maybe the same reason you don't know who pulls the strings behind the COL curtain.

To the subject of this posting by b, I think about how many other "two-bit players" the elite have groomed for disruption of this, that or whatever is needed....public manipulation by any means and morals are for weaklings sort of attitude.

librul , Jun 1, 2018 10:19:22 PM | 33
"Dig a deeper hole" or "Go for the Big Lie"?

Which is more apropos?

'We found Russian hit-list of 47 people', Ukraine tells allies'

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-russia-journalist/we-found-russian-hit-list-of-47-people-ukraine-tells-allies-idUSKCN1IX5SO


KIEV (Reuters) - Ukraine, seeking to reassure its Western allies after faking the murder of a Russian dissident to thwart what it said was a plot on his life, told them on Friday its ruse led to the discovery of a hit-list of 47 people whom Russia planned to kill abroad.

Can we laugh yet?

Palloy , Jun 1, 2018 11:31:32 PM | 34
That article needs a 1 paragraph who-what-when-why-where overview before the detailed analysis starts, especially when the details are all so dubious.
S , Jun 1, 2018 11:55:27 PM | 35
In the video linked to by b, Poroshenko says:
Знаєш, просто серце сжимається, коли бачиш, як в редакціях телеканалів, як в офісах -- сьогодні я бачив реакцію -- я ж про це все знав, а ніхто в адміністрації про це не знав.

You know, it pained my heart when I saw how in the TV channels' newsrooms, in the offices -- I saw the reaction today -- you see, I knew everything about it, but nobody in the administration knew about it.

Brian , Jun 2, 2018 12:14:45 AM | 36
Acquaintance from Moscow who works for a 'Putin foundation'?!
Does that even make any sense ?
Jen , Jun 2, 2018 1:28:53 AM | 37
Breadonwaters @ 23:

You could always contact the City of London municipal government directly:
https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/about-the-city/about-us/Pages/how-to-find-us.aspx

or you could read Nicolas Shaxson's book "Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World"
http://treasureislands.org/the-book/

Uncle Tungsten @ 28:

My guess is that those army depots were deliberately allowed to deteriorate to the point where the munitions "spontaneously" combusted. The Ukrainians are probably treating them as write-offs, figuring that these can be replaced by free ammunition from the US, Canada or other countries if they (the Ukrainians, that is) jump up and down often enough and loudly enough about the encroaching Russian "menace".

Ross , Jun 2, 2018 4:58:49 AM | 38
@Breadonwaters | Jun 1, 2018 6:48:51 PM | 23

The earlier answers were not correct. The Corporation of the City of London is controlled by its 13 man (naturally!) board. This is known as 'The Crown'. People naturally assume that term applies to the monarch but this is not the case, it is one of the many passive deceptions played out on us. The Lord Mayor of the City is a ceremonial role rotated on an annual basis.

To show who is really in charge consider this. Once a year the Queen turns up at one of the City gates dressed in her ordinary clothes. She awaits the Mayor who comes out in his full ceremonial regalia including chain of office. The Queen bows, thens begs permission to enter the City. So who is sovereign there?

So there was not 'a' British empire as such, but two concurrent empires as the 'Crown colonies' were all directly owned by the City and not by 'Britain'.

There are many layers of deception played out on us by these evil entities, and the status of the City is one of them. It is an epicentre of evil in this world. Unsurprisingly we are not taught any of this stuff at school, and there has never been a BBC documentary on the matter.

I don't think I want to comment more on this ridiculous farce. It must be obvious to even the daftest Brexiteer (They are uniquely stupid) that Ukrainistan is "FAIL !!"
Even a bachelor myself :) I say thank you but NO! Off course there are decent people in Ukraine, as there are in the US, we just can't hear them. I have met people from all parts of the world and you can divide them in two: Arseholes and non-arseholes.
The arseholes we just send to Coventry, the non-arseholes are maybe not aligned with your political opinion, way of life etc. but they always are respectful about their non-alignment, as you should be to them.
I am a socialist, no a Socialist, and I have conservative friends, it is not a problem, to me at least.
But Ukraine, sigh, what to do.... Well there is a nice place, where there is nature in abundance, it is called Pripyat, so if we can export the remaining xx million neo-nazis to the US and Canada, it can all be a nature reserve, under joint EU-Russian control.
And the US and Canada will be happy, their people have come home, maybe even Israel could be persuaded to the same trick...
Imagine the Zio's would have free reign on a continent, they can fight or hold marches together.

Posted by: Den Lille Abe , Jun 2, 2018 5:43:45 AM | 39

I don't think I want to comment more on this ridiculous farce. It must be obvious to even the daftest Brexiteer (They are uniquely stupid) that Ukrainistan is "FAIL !!"
Even a bachelor myself :) I say thank you but NO! Off course there are decent people in Ukraine, as there are in the US, we just can't hear them. I have met people from all parts of the world and you can divide them in two: Arseholes and non-arseholes.
The arseholes we just send to Coventry, the non-arseholes are maybe not aligned with your political opinion, way of life etc. but they always are respectful about their non-alignment, as you should be to them.
I am a socialist, no a Socialist, and I have conservative friends, it is not a problem, to me at least.
But Ukraine, sigh, what to do.... Well there is a nice place, where there is nature in abundance, it is called Pripyat, so if we can export the remaining xx million neo-nazis to the US and Canada, it can all be a nature reserve, under joint EU-Russian control.
And the US and Canada will be happy, their people have come home, maybe even Israel could be persuaded to the same trick...
Imagine the Zio's would have free reign on a continent, they can fight or hold marches together.

Posted by: Den Lille Abe | Jun 2, 2018 5:43:45 AM | 39 /div

Den Lille Abe , Jun 2, 2018 5:51:29 AM | 40
On another note:
Denmark has had a May month with more than 350 hours of sun and almost warmest ever. Several counties prohibited garden watering.
Malmoe town in Sweden cautioning people not to use sprinklers on their lawns, the waterworks cant keep up in production. (Sweden has immense freshwater reserves, like Finland) and is a large country with only 10 million.
And Orangeturd in the WH says climate change is a hoax... I hope to see his Florida Trumpland in the swells of the Atlantic.
somebody , Jun 2, 2018 5:55:37 AM | 41
Posted by: Lochearn | Jun 1, 2018 6:11:30 PM | 21

Bill Browder will be one of the reasons.

Another Russian oligarchs made by neoliberal reforms in the 1990s Thomas Piketty

According to our estimates, the offshore assets alone held by wealthy Russians exceed one year of GDP, or the equivalent of the entirety of the official financial assets held by Russian households. In other words, the natural wealth of the country, (which, let it be said in passing, would have done better to remain in the ground to limit global warming) has been massively exported abroad to sustain opaque structures enabling a minority to hold huge Russian and international financial assets. These rich Russians live between London, Monaco and Moscow: some have never left Russia and control their country via offshore entities. Numerous intermediaries and Western firms have also recouped large crumbs on the way and continue to do so today in sport and the media (sometimes this is referred to as philanthropy). The extent of the misappropriation of funds has no equal in history.

There has been an attempt to turn Russian emigres against Russia by threatening their capital - the sanctions basically warn oligarchs " not to be close to Putin ".

The case of oligarchs' "closeness to Putin" is less obvious. Any discussion of it should start with the term "oligarch," which, when it came into broad usage in Russia in the mid-1990s, referred to a group of people who had succeeded at state capture. The reason the Putin-era elite rejects the term is that the state turned the tables on those particular people. Essentially, it captured their assets without confiscating them.

Britains main industry is financial services. Of course they have the main problem if Russia is not playing by "the rules".

Over all, Russia is disappointing Western investors.

Like this

Western oil majors have been attempting to gain access to Russia's enormous oil reserves since the break-up of the Soviet Union, but have often found themselves stymied by local oligarchs and domestic politics.

Germany is different as they are not so much interested in financial services but business. And that business is seriously hit by sanctions not by the Russian state.

Rhisiart Gwilym , Jun 2, 2018 6:23:32 AM | 42
Regarding the City of London corruption cesspit: It's more apt to say that it runs Britain, rather then the British government controlling it. Think of it as the traditional world-looting centre of what's left of the English empire, still going strong, although the empire is just a fag-end of what it was, and the imperial military machine is a shrunken joke compared to its hey-day - but still killing people and destroying things overseas, and operating as an assistant attack-dog for the Anglozionist empire in its global looting operations, even now.

The City appears to operate as a handy top-of-the-range monetary and financial swindling and laundering centre for the USukiznato-axis powers (and indeed for freebooter gangsters from anywhere in the world, as long as they come with large sums of money in their hands; a leading centre for laundering global drugs-trade money, for example); with Frankfurt as a possible competitor, I suppose. It clarifies matters if you think of the City as a continuing loot-source for the small English-raj class, who are still the entrenched controllers of most of what goes or doesn't go in Britain; and think of the Conservative party in Paedominster (the London parliament) as the political-wing of the raj, in the 'democratic' politics theatre carried on there, solely to serve the rajistas' perceived interests.

The British tories and their various me-too clones in the other parties loathe like poison any hint of real, popular, glasnostic democracy, of course, and are in politics to make sure that it never takes hold in The Isles (Dáil Éireann in Eire being a rather unwelcome growth in that respect, especially as the island of Eire slides slowly towards re-unification; with the other rival national parliaments in The Isles, weak though they are currently, being seen as further irritating thorns in the English-raj class's flesh). One reason that Jeremy Corbyn and the grassroots support that he attracts are so loathed and so virulently traduced currently is because they represent a genuine upsetting threat to this centuries-old traditional arrangement. If JC makes it to Downing Street, expect to see coup d'etat scams set going to neutralise him one way or another, including lots of CoL shenanigans - though of course all done in the style of 'A Very British Coup' (qv).

Rancid , Jun 2, 2018 7:51:03 AM | 43
Dear oh dear, seems the Keystone Cops are still alive and well in the Ukraine. Excellent forensics on this latest insult to the intelligence, well for the minority in any case. I suppose Ukraine still has a ways to go to get as smooth as the West in its false flags, but we should in all fairness give a newcomer time to get up to speed. No doubt they will soon be BS-ing with the best of them.
Den Lille Abe , Jun 2, 2018 10:15:08 AM | 44
The British defending the free world: According to the Independent (prolly a lie) the Royal nave sent a destroyer and a heli to "escort" a Russian "naval" vessel through the Channel... WTF!!!!
The Channel, last I remembered is International Waterway, like the belts in Denmark, and everybody can pass. Russian need no foking escort or to be harassed, they have the right like anybody, to pass through.
The British are getting increasingly annoying, maybe I should ask my European MEP if they have found a final solution to "The British Problem" namely tell them to fok off.
They are continuously trying to set of Europe in another conflict it does not want. I say we go fighting, invade and start killing civvies in Birmingham and Chelsea and central London. We will start at Westminster.
These guys are mad they will get us in another war. Which we abhor.
Foking Tory dimwits, when is the people going to wake up? Their beer is thin, their women ugly, their climate awful, what makes them so docile?
Zanon , Jun 2, 2018 10:31:06 AM | 45
Den Lille Abe

Of course its true, they always does this of some dumb reason,
this is from 2016 for example,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKWThC9DsiY

V , Jun 2, 2018 10:31:19 AM | 46
Den Lille Abe | Jun 2, 2018 10:15:08 AM | 44
Their beer is thin, their women ugly, their climate awful, what makes them so docile?

Ignorance and a lack of critical thinking ability...

Petri Krohn , Jun 2, 2018 10:35:03 AM | 47
SUPPOSE SBU DID NOT SHOOT DOWN MH17

Would they still create fake video evidence just to "catch the real Russian BUK"?

Bob Ford , Jun 2, 2018 10:44:37 AM | 48
I can't wait to see the movie. This story has twists and turns worthy of a suspense thriller. For comic relief, we have the western "news" media, behaving like dunces in the midst of all this intrigue.
b , Jun 2, 2018 11:29:46 AM | 49
@jen @17 - I am not sure that we can take Meduza.io's reporting all that seriously as its agenda is anti-Russian

I am well aware that Meduza has an agenda but they do also provide valid news. I recently mused about this problem: On Sources And Information - The Syrian Observatory For Human Rights .

I have counterchecked the Meduza piece I quoted. It is basically a copy of an Interfax report. The English Meduza version was simply easier to quote. The facts in it are also confirmed by the longer piece I linked in comment 14.

@BreadonWaters @23 - is there anyone actually in control of the 'City of London', other than the 'COL' itself?
PLease , anyone?

In 2011 George Monbiot (who is now basically an asshole) wrote an explanation of the 'City of London' status. A bunch of banks who actually can impose their will on Britain:
The medieval, unaccountable Corporation of London is ripe for protest

The City of London is the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority. In one respect at least the Corporation acts as the superior body: it imposes on the House of Commons a figure called the remembrancer: an official lobbyist who sits behind the Speaker's chair and ensures that, whatever our elected representatives might think, the City's rights and privileges are protected. The mayor of London's mandate stops at the boundaries of the Square Mile. There are, as if in a novel by China Miéville, two cities, one of which must unsee the other.

Several governments have tried to democratise the City of London but all, threatened by its financial might, have failed. As Clement Attlee lamented, "over and over again we have seen that there is in this country another power than that which has its seat at Westminster." The City has exploited this remarkable position to establish itself as a kind of offshore state, a secrecy jurisdiction which controls the network of tax havens housed in the UK's crown dependencies and overseas territories.

@Piotr @24 - an excellent explanation.

@Palloy - That article needs a 1 paragraph who-what-when-why-where overview before the detailed analysis starts, especially when the details are all so dubious.

I have added a bit at the top but I am not sure it helps. This stuff is so unbelievably crazy that is difficult to summarize.

J Rob , Jun 2, 2018 11:35:23 AM | 50
Mark @ 15:
It's also spelled 'Hoogle'.
Mark2 , Jun 2, 2018 11:38:50 AM | 51
Den Lille Abe
You just described the fall of the Roman Empire and most other empires in history!
Ah there's hope yet! Cheered us all up no end. I'm with you bro.
Jihadi Colin , Jun 2, 2018 11:41:47 AM | 52
Here's my contribution to the discussion:

https://ragheadthefiendlyterrorist.wordpress.com/2018/06/02/one-fakers-death-in-ukranazistan/

Probably not too helpful, but I had fun drawing it.

Humbaba , Jun 2, 2018 11:45:01 AM | 53
The German company Schmeisser has denied that it has anything to do with the Ukrainian company Schmyser.
Winston , Jun 2, 2018 12:21:39 PM | 54
Corporation is old English for council,it used to be slang for working for the
council.It was the first enterprise zone in modern parlance to develop the core of London.
The original six Worshipfull Companies, or Trade Guilds own the CoL corporation.
It owns all the land within the CoL boundaries, its a landlord to the Banking scum,
not the scum itself.
As a member of one of the six Companies attending meetings at Guild Hall, its a combo
of a property managers conference/royal tea party.Hardly SPECTRE.
james , Jun 2, 2018 12:52:50 PM | 55
interesting how the conversation has spun over to the city of london.. i agree with the brief history @41 somebody offers.. also @42 Rhisiart Gwilym and Den Lille Abe's comments on this as well..

@52 jihadi.. nice artwork on the topic... thanks.

hopehely , Jun 2, 2018 1:03:10 PM | 56
Posted by: Winston | Jun 2, 2018 12:21:39 PM | 54
Corporation is old English for council,it used to be slang for working for the
council.

And council in Russian is soviet.
The original six Worshipfull Companies, or Trade Guilds own the CoL corporation.

The union of councils, eh? ;-)
Mark2 , Jun 2, 2018 4:43:26 PM | 57
In the interest of networking, useful ground roots reporting and being less dependent on this one fantastic site-Moa I'd suggest googling- '
Winter Oak Press. Totally different but heart in the right place !!!
Jen , Jun 2, 2018 5:49:59 PM | 58
B @ 49: Thanks for clarifying the source of Meduza.io's report.

Interestingly RT.com, quoting Ukranews.com, offers a different view: that Boris Gherman was framed for plotting a hit on Babchenko after he refused an offer of lenient treatment by law enforcement officers (for whatever he may have done or not done in the past, including the recent past) in return for testifying against someone else.
https://www.rt.com/news/428392-ukraine-fake-falling-appart/

"... According to ukranews.com, German was offered a deal by the investigators, who offered him leniency in exchange of testifying against a person who was not named by the officials. The source said he rejected the offer and also said the businessman works with arms procurement for the Ukrainian army.

Strana.ua said its source confirmed that German had connections in the arms business. It also added that he was apparently framed by the Ukrainian law enforcement, which offered him to take part in a sting operation.

"It was a clear set up, a provocation. Now the man, who came to him with the suggestion, has disappeared and the SBU claims he was working for the Russian intelligence, but they don't have any clear evidence to prove it," the source is cited as saying ..."

Ash , Jun 2, 2018 6:12:12 PM | 59
It was bad enough to have read the vile comments of the toxic troll calling itself 'Den Lille Abe' above, full of hateful, racist, mysogynist, terroristic and wannabe mass-murdering bile. Bad enough that he wants to massacre me and countless other civilians in Britain (actually we already have the UK state-backed ISIS trying to do that, thanks) but to see a whooping chorus of approval from many other posters was just too much to stomach.

It's bad enough to have to put up with a sinister cabal of warmongering scumbags running the West, with their corrupt and blackmailed presstitutes blaring out their lies, but when one of the few places I had hoped to hear a credible and intelligent opposition is sinking to this level I just despair. I really do.

How should I continue to persuade my countrymen to question the bellicosity of their rulers? By showing them the vicious poison of Den Lille Abe and its cheerleaders and saying "hey, these are my pals who are also opposing the empire?".

This creature and his supporters are as bad as the headchoppers themselves and their powerful sponsors. The pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm.

With a mass sentiment like this proudly on display I cannot continue to recommend this site to anyone, or link to it. I realise that the internet is full of repulsive cretins like Den Lille Abe, and that site owners are not responsible for some of the trash that is written under their articles, but filth like that surely can only harm the excellent work Mr B does (assuming he does not also agree with their position, and if he does I would be wracked with guilt for having financially supported him).

james , Jun 2, 2018 6:30:21 PM | 60
@59 ash.. i am curious.. what was the most challenging comment that den lille abe said that motivated you to say all this?
Mark2 , Jun 2, 2018 6:40:16 PM | 61
It's called empathy! It seems OK to distroy other people's country but not our own?
Self defence is not violence.
Tens of millions killed by the west. But when someone hypathticly points out a picture of your city being distroyed you suddenly wake up! You just got caught out. We are all equally important in this world. So please stay and help stop the madness.
dh , Jun 2, 2018 6:44:03 PM | 62
@59 I assume you are referring to Den Lille Abe's rather ignorant comment "Their beer is thin, their women ugly, their climate awful, what makes them so docile?".

I don't see a 'whooping chorus of approval'. I thought it was pretty stupid myself but anti-British sentiment runs deep here for some reason. I know a lot of people in the UK are very unhappy about the state of things. I guess they just aren't sure what to do about it. Perhaps DLA does have a point about docility but he could apply the same standard to Scandinavia.

Mark2 , Jun 2, 2018 6:44:44 PM | 63
Also may I ask your view on your own gov?and how you propose to stop there violence ?
hopehely , Jun 2, 2018 6:51:47 PM | 64
Posted by: dh | Jun 2, 2018 6:44:03 PM | 62
I don't see a 'whooping chorus of approval'.

Of course not. IMO their beer is not thin at all. It is actually pretty good.
dh , Jun 2, 2018 6:56:31 PM | 65
@62 The beer isn't bad at all and they import a lot anyway for fussy drinkers. The women do tend to run a little on the heavy side these days. And the climate can be awful which is why so many of them moved to Spain. That said I think DLA needs to reflect on his opinion.
Daniel , Jun 2, 2018 9:57:38 PM | 66
Off-Guardian has an excellent article, What if Babchenko had decided to stay "dead"?

A few quotes from it with my comments.

" at its deepest level, consensual reality is a fragile thing that can very easily have nothing to do with truth or fact or actual reality."

At its best - when no" special interests" are manipulating an entry - this describes Wikipedia.

" the issue was going to be "who did it?" not "was it even done?"

Not even. The whodoneit was already "answered" in the very unveiling of the "news." The issue was going to be "how are we - who are all goodness and light and truth and freedom - going to "bring justice" to the perp?"

"See how little it occurred to any of us, even those who make a habit of interrogating narratives, to ask whether or not it really happened."

And this is why I have been saying I have no reason to believe that the Skirpal poisoning ever really happened.

If they were meant to be dead, they'd almost certainly be dead.

If they were meant to survive, then why take the chance of actually poisoning them, regardless of what agent was allegedly used?

"Question More."

V , Jun 2, 2018 10:56:45 PM | 67
The west's grasp of reality is but a gossamer of what's real.
b does a pretty good job of keeping us grounded.
Walk barefoot on grass and dirt...
psychohistorian , Jun 2, 2018 11:53:24 PM | 68
ZH has a posting up now shown in the link below and followed with a couple of quotes....the writer likes "meanwhile..."

"Real" Assassin Arrested In Staged Kiev Hit Linked To Ukrainian Intelligence As Official Story Unravels

"
Meanwhile the guy who supposedly hired Tsimbalyuk, Boris L. German, 50, also says he worked for Ukrainian counter-intelligence, a claim Ukraine denies as its immediately destroys the carefully scripted, if rapidly imploding, Ukrainian narrative meant to scapegoat Russia for what has been a "fake news" story of epic proportions, emerging from the one nation that not only was the biggest foreign donor to the Clinton foundation , but has made fake news propaganda into an art form.
"
"
Meanwhile, senior Ukraine officials have been on the defensive since Wednesday, when the head of security services announced they had staged the death of Babchenko so they could track his would-be killers to Russian intelligence, a story the International Federation of Journalists slammed as idiotic, nonsensical and completely undermining Ukraine's credibility.
"

Debsisdead , Jun 3, 2018 12:50:40 AM | 69
Hiya it is a grey sunday afternoon here with the view out my back window over the back paddock obscured by a drizzle haze which is atypical for these parts where the weather at this time of year is either wet in a absolutely p1ssing down but warmish way, or dry, sunny and pink bits-shriveling cold.
I dunno what's up with that but the break from usual sunday arvo routines has given me time between the weekly family catch ups via voip to try and learn what howlingpixel a site I have been using in lieu of wikipedia is about.

I have learned sfa since a net search has only the site's own 'about' page which I will not consider; being as I never trust that sorta self serving nfo sharing.

Does anyone know any of howlingpixel's history - who runs it, pays for it etc?

V , Jun 3, 2018 1:17:51 AM | 70
Debsisdead | Jun 3, 2018 12:50:40 AM | 69

Never heard of it; but found this;

https://www.easycounter.com/report/howlingpixel.com

Cortes , Jun 3, 2018 3:13:15 AM | 71
Debsisdead @29

The corporate nightmare you outline has been depicted in the classic

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants

by Kornbluth and Pohl. The sequel, by Pohl alone, is logical.

Debsisdead , Jun 3, 2018 5:30:03 AM | 72
Posted by: V | Jun 3, 2018 1:17:51 AM | 70
Thanks V I had seen that as one of the few non howlingpixel references to howlingpixel I could find - it appears to be some sort of net traffic counter website.

Posted by: Cortes | Jun 3, 2018 3:13:15 AM | 71
There is nothing new under the sun eh. Although must give Pohl his due, the whimper that humankind seems likely to expire with, was much less predictable in 1953 than it is in 2018.
I'm still a little hopeful that the lack of common geographic proximity will make corporate entities more difficult to unite mugs behind than nation states have found when cranking up jingoism.

somebody , Jun 3, 2018 6:08:10 AM | 73
72
According to Wikipedia Howling Pixel is the mobile version of Wikipedia.

see Wikipedia mirrors and forks

V , Jun 3, 2018 6:13:13 AM | 74
somebody | Jun 3, 2018 6:08:10 AM | 73

That would be a good reason to steer clear of both sites, IMO.

craigsummers , Jun 3, 2018 8:50:13 AM | 75
In 2017 Arkady Babchenko, despised in Russia for his open hostility against its people, came via Israel to the Ukraine. He was welcome in Kiev for his anti-Russian position.

You mean he was adversarial to the Russian government. That hardly makes him "hostile" to the Russian people, but that does put his life in danger. Just ask the six journalists from Novaya Gazeta murdered during Putin's rein.

Don Karlos , Jun 3, 2018 9:45:41 AM | 76
@craigsummers 75

Yes and no.

There is a major logical fallacy in using past criminal cases in justifying present fakes.

PS:

*Babchenko in Vilnus, 'Open Russia', 12 April 2018 "...the one who is responsible is not Putin's regime, but Russia", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaGeiabB6kM , 4:50 and 9:00

*Just ask the six journalists, -who?
Anna Politkovskaya (well known/look up), Yury Shchekochikhin (illness and suspected poisoning, 'open verdict'); Baburova (journalist) and Markelov (lawyer, not journalist), killed by a neo-Nazi couple who were caught and sentenced for life; Estemirova, run into problems, kidnapped and killed in Chechnya. And number 6 is ?

Charles R , Jun 3, 2018 9:56:53 AM | 77
Why would the suspect have hired the same hitman all at once to carry out multiple crimes that were so different?

Ukraine's National Security Agency says Boris German (who was named the suspect in Babchenko's case on May 31) was instructed to do even more than have 30 people killed: he was also supposed to stockpile secret weapons caches throughout Ukraine. German's lawyer says his client is the executive director of the Ukrainian-German company "Schmeisser" -- the only private arms manufacturer in Ukraine.

This might explain why Boris German would have been selected to arrange the secret weapons caches, but it remains unclear why he would have been the man to entrust with the organization of 30 murders. These two crimes -- the murders and the secret weapons caches -- appear to be two separate projects.

From a Meduza piece suggested after the Meduza article b linked above (the 'went' link).

Has anyone seen more information about these weapons caches? Is it true that Schmeisser is the only 'private' arms manufacturer in the Ukraine?

If b's right that the interior logic of the assassination hoax is about ownership/control of the company, what is the point of the weapons caches accusation? Perhaps this also gives SBU cover to either "find" these weapons in the wrong hands or cover over/disavow past trades they don't want acknowledged. (Makes me think about Paddock in Vegas or the kid caught with all those guns in California who claimed to be with Omar Mateen and also set up... )

Or maybe this gives 'legal' cover to raid other places in search of those secreted weapons?

Charles R , Jun 3, 2018 10:07:25 AM | 78
Also, in the Zerohedge piece psychohistorian (~@68) linked, one picture shows Tsymbalyuk wearing a top with an embroidered swastika. The NYT article b linked above (the Russophobic link) is only willing to say that "some portray" Right Sector as neo-nazi.
Den Lille Abe , Jun 3, 2018 10:13:22 AM | 79
So Denmark now erects fences to keep swine fewer out of Denmark. Cool and good. (Germans are lax) but Trump is arriwing in London this summer? WTF Is fat piece of garbage to come in via the idiot British regulations ? He is....
Had he been my pig we would have had him this Christmas, he is growing stale now and too fat, only winter food is he good for. Gule ærter, Brunkål and so. Any pig will do for those courses.
Den Lille Abe , Jun 3, 2018 10:24:58 AM | 80
At Dh generally @ blah-blah

I don not live in the "paradise" called England, I live in Scandinavia. We are quite well off thank you. We have not got much room for you English serfs. :) There you got it. We do not respect you, because you have always voted "out". No foking go and die in obscurity.
Your idiot public shall bear the consequences as the Germans did in 1945, England is reduced to a two bit whore, I rejoice personally, as I have ancestors who died at Brit hands 200 years ago-and no repentance!! Germany paid repentance at least morally.
So please fok off. Accordinf to stats you will soon anyway. You are just taking up oxygen needed by other living stuff, snails etc.

Debsisdead , Jun 3, 2018 10:25:59 AM | 81
Posted by: somebody | Jun 3, 2018 6:08:10 AM | 73

It actually says " Like mobile version of Wikipedia" Then wikipedia rates it 'low/none'. It appears to be one of those reference sites which scrapes some wikipedia pages as well as other sources. I'm going to use it in preference to wikipedia esp for non-controversial stuff eg it had a list of cabinet members of the June 1 Italian Government before anywhere else (how I stumbled across it from a yandex search) until I know one way or another how objective it is. I don't wanna give wikipedia any page clicks at all after the Phillip Cross bizzo. If Howling Pixel is just as biased towards western propaganda I shall look for another source. We still don't know who funds it. I use an ad blocker so I dunno if it tries to pop at me - if it does, it doesn't whinge about the blocker.
In the end a reference source is still essential for background info.

Noirette , Jun 3, 2018 10:45:26 AM | 82
Ha ha, great exposé b. - it all just gets nuttier. one couldn't make this up and put it in a movie, no way.

Ukraine was the country that 'suffered' the most from the USSR dissolution. In terms of GDP per capita, population, health, 'democratic advances' (depending on definition some are no good etc.), schooling, flourishing culture, etc.

Why exactly idk, nor does anybody else imho, as there are dozens of partial explanations.

I favor the happenstance of a collection of particularly crazed and rapacious oligarchs; being 'rich and large' (thus a prey), and pehaps the East-West thing, in the sense that a partition into two federated quasi-states might have saved it. Ukr. was color-revolutionized Orange in 2004, a failure, always does great harm, and no doubt the failure infuriated the W powers.

Since then it has been mad-cap downhill, its territory subject to carving. Crimea retuned to Russia (ok), and in other circs. all would have been no prob. The Donbass is now a separate territory (subject to the foreign-directed GWOT from Kiev), terrible situation, in limbo, Russia cannot take it over and Kiev cannot re-integrate it, and it cannot become independent without *massive* outside support which nobody will provide. Galicia seems to be out of control of the Center as well. (Look up news articles.) In short, Ukraine provides a terrain for 'proxy wars' as it is large and rich.

and to date US and Germany (>..EU) have lost in Ukr. - Crimea and de facto the Donbass.

Bombing Yugoslavia, destroying and breaking it up sucessfully can't be repeated in Ukraine. Which leads to anger, disdain, and victim blaming, and in fine stasis for a while, and then abandonment. The IMF will continue to 'support' but they hate it.

bevin , Jun 3, 2018 1:42:26 PM | 83
"You mean he was adversarial to the Russian government. That hardly makes him "hostile" to the Russian people, but that does put his life in danger."craigsummers@75

He appears to have made himself unpopular by dancing on the graves of the Choir which was killed, en route to Syria, in a plane crash. Unpopular, that is, with most Russians, Putin and decent people everywhere.

"Just ask the six journalists from Novaya Gazeta murdered during Putin's rein."
Are they the source of your information?
How many dozens of journalists were killed, every month, when the US, through Yeltsin reined in Russia? In the past month we have seen three journalists and several medicos killed by Israel in Gaza, with the enthusiastic support of the US government.

[May 27, 2018] The Code Name Crossfire Hurricane Undermines The FBI s Russia Story by Lee Smith

So Strzok was involved with this part of the story too. Strzokgate now has distinct British accent and probably was coordinated by CIA and MI6.
Harper was definitely acted like an "agent provocateur", whose job was to ask leading questions to get Trump campaign advisers to say things that would corroborate-or seem to corroborate-evidence that the FBI believed it already had in hand. It looks like among other things Halper was tasked with the attempt elaborate on the claims made in Steele's September 14 dossier memo: "Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and considering disseminating it."
London was the perfect place for such dirty games -- the territory where the agent knew he could operate safely.
"Halper's fishing expedition therefore came up with nothing to suggest the Steele dossier was true. The real story is therefore the continuing attempt to assert that the dossier, or key parts of it, are true, after large-scale investigations by the FBI, and now by special counsel Robert Mueller, have failed to turn up any evidence of a plot hatched between Trump and Vladimir Putin to take over the White House."
"... So, how many "informants" targeted the Trump campaign? Were they being paid by the U.S. government? What are their names? What were they doing? ..."
Notable quotes:
"... The New York Times' ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... So, how many "informants" targeted the Trump campaign? Were they being paid by the U.S. government? What are their names? What were they doing? ..."
"... Under whose authority were they spying on a political campaign? Did FBI and DOJ leadership sign off? Did FBI director James Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch know about it? What about other senior Obama administration officials? CIA Director John Brennan? Did President Obama know the FBI was spying on a presidential campaign? Did Hillary Clinton know? What about Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta? ..."
May 27, 2018 | thefederalist.com

The New York Times' 4,000-word report last week on the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign's possible ties to Russia revealed for the first time that the investigation was called "Crossfire Hurricane."

The name, explains the paper, refers to the Rolling Stones lyric "I was born in a crossfire hurricane," from the 1968 hit "Jumpin' Jack Flash." Mick Jagger, one of the songwriters, said the song was a "metaphor" for psychedelic-drug induced states. The other, Keith Richards, said it "refers to his being born amid the bombing and air raid sirens of Dartford, England, in 1943 during World War II."

Investigation names, say senior U.S. law enforcement officials, are designed to refer to facts, ideas, or people related to the investigation. Sometimes they're explicit, and other times playful or even allusive. So what did the Russia investigation have to do with World War II, psychedelic drugs, or Keith's childhood?

The answer may be found in the 1986 Penny Marshall film named after the song, "Jumpin' Jack Flash." In the Cold War-era comedy, a quirky bank officer played by Whoopi Goldberg comes to the aid of Jonathan Pryce, who plays a British spy being chased by the KGB.

The code name "Crossfire Hurricane" is therefore most likely a reference to the former British spy whose allegedly Russian-sourced reports on the Trump team's alleged ties to Russia were used as evidence to secure a Foreign Intelligence Service Act secret warrant on Trump adviser Carter Page in October 2016: ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele.

Helping Spin a New Origin Story

It is hardly surprising that the Times refrained from exploring the meaning of the code name. The paper of record has apparently joined a campaign, spearheaded by the Department of Justice, FBI, and political operatives pushing the Trump-Russia collusion story, to minimize Steele's role in the Russia investigation.

After an October news report showed his dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, facts that further challenged the credibility of Steele's research, the FBI investigation's origin story shifted.

In December, The New York Times published a "scoop " on the new origin story. In the revised narrative, the probe didn't start with the Steele dossier at all. Rather, it began with an April 2016 meeting between Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud. The professor informed him that "he had just learned from high-level Russian officials in Moscow that the Russians had 'dirt' on Mrs. Clinton in the form of 'thousands of emails.'"

Weeks later, Papadopoulos boasted to the Australian ambassador to London, Alexander Downer, that he was told the Russians had Clinton-related emails. Two months later, according to the Times , the Australians reported Papadopoulos' boasts to the FBI, and on July 31, 2016, the bureau began its investigation.

Further reinforcement of the new origin story came from congressional Democrats. A January 29 memo written by House Intelligence Committee minority staff under ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff further distances Steele from the opening of the investigation. "Christopher Steele's raw reporting did not inform the FBI's decision to initiate its counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016. In fact, the FBI's closely-held investigative team only received Steele's reporting in mid-September."

Last week's major Times article echoes the Schiff memo. Steele's reports, according to the paper, reached the "Crossfire Hurricane team" "in mid-September."

Yet the new account of how the government spying campaign against Trump started is highly unlikely. According to the thousands of favorable press reports asserting his credibility, Steele was well-respected at the FBI for his work on a 2015 case that helped win indictments of more than a dozen officials working for soccer's international governing body, FIFA. In July 2016, Steele met with the agent he worked with on the FIFA case to show his early findings on the Trump team's ties to Russia.

The FBI took Steele's reporting on Trump's ties to Russia so seriously it was later used as evidence to monitor the electronic communications of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But, according to Schiff and the Times , the FBI somehow lost track of reports from a "credible" source who claimed to have information showing that the Republican candidate for president was compromised by a foreign government. That makes no sense.

The code name "Crossfire Hurricane" is further evidence that the FBI's cover story is absurd. A reference to a movie about a British spy evading Russian spies behind enemy lines suggests the Steele dossier was always the core of the bureau's investigation into the Trump campaign.

Was Halper an Informant, Spy, Or Agent Provocateur?

Taken together with the other significant revelation from last Times story, the purpose and structure of Crossfire Hurricane may be coming into clearer focus. According to the Times story: "At least one government informant met several times with [Trump campaign advisers Carter] Page and [George] Papadopoulos, current and former officials said."

As we now know, the informant is Stefan Halper, a former classmate of Bill Clinton's at Oxford University who worked in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations. Halper is known for his good connections in intelligence circles. His father-in-law was Ray Cline , former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Halper is also reported to have led the 1980 Ronald Reagan campaign team that collected intelligence on sitting U.S. President Jimmy Carter's foreign policy.

So what was Halper doing in this instance? He wasn't really a spy (a person who is generally tasked with stealing secrets) or an informant (a person who provides information about criminal activities from the inside). Rather, it seems he was more like an agent provocateur, whose job was to ask leading questions to get Trump campaign advisers to say things that would corroborate -- or seem to corroborate -- evidence that the bureau believed it already had in hand.

It appears Halper's job was to induce inexperienced Trump campaign figures to say things.

Halper met with at least three Trump campaign advisers: Sam Clovis, Page, and George Papadopoulos. The latter two he met with in London, where Halper had reason to feel comfortable operating.

Halper's close contacts in the intelligence world weren't limited to the CIA. They also include foreign intelligence officials like Richard Dearlove , the former head of the United Kingdom's foreign intelligence service, MI6. According to a Washington Times report , Halper and Dearlove are partners in a UK consulting firm, Cambridge Security Initiative.

Dearlove is also close to Steele. According to the Washington Post , Dearlove met with Steele in the early fall of 2016, when his former charge shared his "worries" about what he'd found on the Trump campaign and "asked for his guidance."

London was therefore the perfect place for Halper to spring a trap -- outside the direct purview of the FBI, but on territory where he knew he could operate safely. It appears Halper's job was to induce inexperienced Trump campaign figures to say things that corroborated the 35-page series of memos written by Steele -- the centerpiece of the Russiagate investigation -- in order to license a broader campaign of government spying against Trump and his associates in the middle of a presidential election.

Halper Reached Out to Trump Campaign Members

Chuck Ross's reporting in The Daily Caller provides invaluable details and insight. As Ross explained in The Daily Caller back in March, Halper emailed Papadopoulos on September 2, 2016 with an invitation to write a research paper, for which he'd be paid $3,000, and a paid trip to London. According to Ross, "Papadopoulos and Halper met several times during the London trip," with one meeting scheduled for September 13 and another two days later.

Ross writes: "According to a source with knowledge of the meeting, Halper asked Papadopoulos: 'George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?' Papadopoulos told Halper he didn't know anything about emails or Russian hacking." It seems Halper was looking to elaborate on the claims made in Steele's September 14 dossier memo : "Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and considering disseminating it."

Halper's fishing expedition therefore came up with nothing to suggest the Steele dossier was true.

Had Papadopoulos confirmed that a shadowy Maltese academic had told him in April about Russians holding Clinton-related emails, presumably that would have entered the dossier as something like, "Trump campaign adviser PAPADOPOULOS confirms knowledge of Russian 'kompromat.'"

Another Trump campaign adviser Halper contacted was Page. They first met in Cambridge, England at a July 11, 2016 symposium. Halper's partner Dearlove spoke at the conference, which was held just days after Page had delivered a widely reported speech at the New Economic School in Moscow. According to another Ross article reporting on Page and Halper's interactions, the Trump adviser "recalls nothing of substance being discussed other than Halper's passing mention that he knew then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort."

Page and Manafort both figure prominently in the Steele dossier's July 19 memos. According to the document , Manafort "was using foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE, and others as intermediaries." Page had also, according to the dossier, met with senior Kremlin officials -- a charge he later denied in his November 2, 2017 testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. Evidently, he also gave Halper nothing to use in verifying the charges made against him.

Halper's fishing expedition therefore came up with nothing to suggest the Steele dossier was true. The real story is therefore the continuing attempt to assert that the dossier, or key parts of it, are true, after large-scale investigations by the FBI, and now by special counsel Robert Mueller, have failed to turn up any evidence of a plot hatched between Trump and Vladimir Putin to take over the White House.

Using Spy Powers on Political Opponents Is a Big Problem

That portions of the American national security apparatus would put their considerable powers -- surveillance, spying, legal pressure -- at the service of a partisan political campaign is a sign that something very big is broken in Washington. Our Founding Fathers would not be surprised to learn that the post-9/11 surveillance and spying apparatus built to protect Americans from al-Qaeda has now become a political tool that targets Americans for partisan purposes. That the rest of us are surprised is a sign that we have stopped taking the U.S. Constitution as seriously as we should.

The damage done to the American press is equally large. Since the November 2016 presidential election, a financially imperiled media industry gambled its remaining prestige on Russiagate. Yet after nearly a year and a half filled with thousands of stories feeding the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy, last week still represented a landmark moment in American journalism. The New York Times , which proudly published the Pentagon Papers, provided cover for an espionage operation against a presidential campaign.

The New York Times , which proudly published the Pentagon Papers, provided cover for an espionage operation against a presidential campaign.

There are significant errors and misrepresentations in the article that the Times could've easily checked, if it weren't in such a hurry to hide the FBI and DOJ's crimes and abuses. Perhaps most significantly, the Times avoided asking the key questions that the article raised with its revelation that "at least one government informant" met with Trump campaign figures.

So, how many "informants" targeted the Trump campaign? Were they being paid by the U.S. government? What are their names? What were they doing?

Under whose authority were they spying on a political campaign? Did FBI and DOJ leadership sign off? Did FBI director James Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch know about it? What about other senior Obama administration officials? CIA Director John Brennan? Did President Obama know the FBI was spying on a presidential campaign? Did Hillary Clinton know? What about Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta?

These questions are sure to be asked. What we know already is that the Times reporters did not ask them, because they do not bother to indicate that the officials interviewed for the story had declined to answer. That they did not ask these questions is evidence the Times is no longer a newspaper that sees its job as reporting the truth or holding high government officials responsible for their crimes. Lee Smith is the media columnist at Tablet.

[May 18, 2018] WSJ Asks Was Trump s Campaign Set Up

Notable quotes:
"... Back in Dec., NYT assured us it was the Papadopoulos-Downer convo that inspired FBI to launch official counterintelligence operation on July 31, 2016. Which was convenient, since it diminished the role of the dossier. However . . . ..."
"... Now NYT tells us FBI didn't debrief Downer until August 2nd. And Nunes says no "official intelligence" from allies was delivered to FBI about that convo prior to July 31. So how did FBI get Downer details? (Political actors?) And what really did inspire the CI investigation? ..."
"... House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes appeared on "Fox & Friends" Tuesday, where he provided a potentially explosive hint at what's driving his demand to see documents related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Trump-Russia probe. "If the campaign was somehow set up," he told the hosts, "I think that would be a problem." ..."
"... government "officials" acknowledged that the bureau had used "at least one" human "informant" to spy on both Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. ..."
"... Think of the 2016 Trump-Russia narrative as two parallel strands -- one politics, one law enforcement. The political side involves the actions of Fusion GPS, the Hillary Clinton campaign and Obama officials -- all of whom were focused on destroying Donald Trump. The law-enforcement strand involves the FBI -- and what methods and evidence it used in its Trump investigation. At some point these strands intersected -- and one crucial question is how early that happened. ..."
"... Which brings us to timing. It's long been known that Mr. Steele went to the FBI in early July to talk about the dossier, and that's the first known intersection of the strands. But given the oddity and timing of those U.K. interactions concerning Messrs. Page and Papadopoulos, and given the history of some of the people involved in arranging them, some wonder if the two strands were converging earlier than anyone has admitted. The Intelligence Committee subpoena is designed to sort all this out: Who was pulling the strings, and what was the goal? Information? Or entrapment? ..."
"... Whatever the answer-whether it is straightforward, or whether it involves political chicanery-Congress and the public have a right to know. And a Justice Department willing to leak details of its "top secret" source to friendly media can have no excuse for not sharing with the duly elected members of Congress. ..."
"... Thanks for stopping by, Bob. Before you ask me your questions I need you to answer a few of mine: ..."
"... You have had a full year to investigate the allegations that my campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in our election. Has anyone obstructed you from doing this job to the best of your ability? If so, who have you notified of this and what corrective action have you taken or requested be taken? ..."
"... Have you found any evidence that I personally committed any crime involving collusion with the Russians to interfere with the election? ..."
"... Have you found any evidence that any member of my campaign committed any crime involving collusion with the Russians to interfere with the election? ..."
May 18, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

The Wall Street Journal continues to counter the liberal mainstream media's anti-Trump-ness with Kimberly Strassel leading the charge , dropping uncomfortable truth-bombs in a forum that is hard for the establishment to shrug off as 'Alt-Right' or 'Nazi' or be 'punished' by search- and social-media-giants.

Earlier in the week, with Trump now calling out the debacle as "possible bigger than Watergate," Strassel tweet-stormed some key points that everyone - leftist and right - should consider ... (that's wishful thinking)...

1. So a few important points on that new NYT "Hurricane Crossfire" piece. A story that, BTW, all of us following this knew had to be coming. This is DOJ/FBI leakers' attempt to get in front of the facts Nunes is forcing out, to make it not sound so bad. Don't buy it. It's bad.

2. Biggest takeaway: Govt "sources" admit that, indeed, the Obama DOJ and FBI spied on the Trump campaign. Spied . (Tho NYT kindly calls spy an "informant.") NYT slips in confirmation far down in story, and makes it out like it isn't a big deal. It is a very big deal.

3. In self-serving desire to get a sympathetic story about its actions, DOJ/FBI leakers are willing to provide yet more details about that "top secret" source (namely, that spying was aimed at Page/Papadopoulos) -- making all more likely/certain source will be outed. That's on them

4. DOJ/FBI (and its leakers) have shredded what little credibility they have in claiming they cannot comply with subpoena . They are willing to provide details to friendly media, but not Congress? Willing to risk very source they claim to need to protect?

5. Back in Dec., NYT assured us it was the Papadopoulos-Downer convo that inspired FBI to launch official counterintelligence operation on July 31, 2016. Which was convenient, since it diminished the role of the dossier. However . . .

6. Now NYT tells us FBI didn't debrief Downer until August 2nd. And Nunes says no "official intelligence" from allies was delivered to FBI about that convo prior to July 31. So how did FBI get Downer details? (Political actors?) And what really did inspire the CI investigation?

7. As for whether to believe line that FBI operated soberly/carefully/judiciously in 2016, a main source for this judgment is, um . . .uh . . . Sally Yates. Who was in middle of it all. A bit like asking Putin to reassure that Russia didn't meddle in our election.

8. On that, if u r wondering who narrated this story, note paragraphs that assure everybody that hardly anybody in DOJ knew about probe. Oh, and Comey also was given few details. Nobody knew nothin'! (Cuz when u require whole story saying u behaved, it means u know you didn't.)

And now Strassel is asking "Was Trump's Campaign 'Set Up'?" At some point, the Russia investigation became political. How early was it?

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes appeared on "Fox & Friends" Tuesday, where he provided a potentially explosive hint at what's driving his demand to see documents related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Trump-Russia probe. "If the campaign was somehow set up," he told the hosts, "I think that would be a problem."

Or an understatement. Mr. Nunes is still getting stiff-armed by the Justice Department over his subpoena, but this week his efforts did force the stunning admission that the FBI had indeed spied on the Trump campaign. This came in the form of a Thursday New York Times apologia in which government "officials" acknowledged that the bureau had used "at least one" human "informant" to spy on both Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. The Times slipped this mind-bending fact into the middle of an otherwise glowing profile of the noble bureau -- and dismissed it as no big deal.

But there's more to be revealed here, and Mr. Nunes's "set up" comment points in a certain direction. Getting to the conclusion requires thinking more broadly about events beyond the FBI's actions.

Think of the 2016 Trump-Russia narrative as two parallel strands -- one politics, one law enforcement. The political side involves the actions of Fusion GPS, the Hillary Clinton campaign and Obama officials -- all of whom were focused on destroying Donald Trump. The law-enforcement strand involves the FBI -- and what methods and evidence it used in its Trump investigation. At some point these strands intersected -- and one crucial question is how early that happened.

What may well have kicked off both, however, is a key if overlooked moment detailed in the House Intelligence Committee's recent Russia report .

In "late spring" of 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey briefed White House "National Security Council Principals" that the FBI had counterintelligence concerns about the Trump campaign. Carter Page was announced as a campaign adviser on March 21, and Paul Manafort joined the campaign March 29. The briefing likely referenced both men, since both had previously been on the radar of law enforcement. But here's what matters: With this briefing, Mr. Comey officially notified senior political operators on Team Obama that the bureau had eyes on Donald Trump and Russia. Imagine what might be done in these partisan times with such explosive information.

And what do you know? Sometime in April, the law firm Perkins Coie (on behalf the Clinton campaign) hired Fusion GPS, and Fusion turned its attention to Trump-Russia connections. The job of any good swamp operator is to gin up a fatal October surprise for the opposition candidate. And what could be more devastating than to paint a picture of Trump-Russia collusion that would provoke a full-fledged FBI investigation?

We already know of at least one way Fusion went about that project, with wild success. It hired former British spy Christopher Steele to compile that infamous dossier. In July, Mr. Steele wrote a memo that leveled spectacular conspiracy theories against two particular Trump campaign members -- Messrs. Manafort and Page. For an FBI that already had suspicions about the duo, those allegations might prove huge -- right? That is, if the FBI were to ever see them. Though, lucky for Mrs. Clinton, July is when the Fusion team decided it was a matter of urgent national security for Mr. Steele to play off his credentials and to take this political opposition research to the FBI.

The question Mr. Nunes's committee seems to be investigating is what other moments -- if any -- were engineered in the spring, summer or fall of 2016 to cast suspicion on Team Trump. The conservative press has produced some intriguing stories about a handful of odd invitations and meetings that were arranged for Messrs. Page and Papadopoulos starting in the spring -- all emanating from the United Kingdom. On one hand, that country is home to the well-connected Mr. Steele, which could mean the political actors with whom he was working were involved. On the other hand, the Justice Department has admitted it was spying on both men, which could mean government was involved. Or maybe . . . both.

Which brings us to timing. It's long been known that Mr. Steele went to the FBI in early July to talk about the dossier, and that's the first known intersection of the strands. But given the oddity and timing of those U.K. interactions concerning Messrs. Page and Papadopoulos, and given the history of some of the people involved in arranging them, some wonder if the two strands were converging earlier than anyone has admitted. The Intelligence Committee subpoena is designed to sort all this out: Who was pulling the strings, and what was the goal? Information? Or entrapment?

Whatever the answer-whether it is straightforward, or whether it involves political chicanery-Congress and the public have a right to know. And a Justice Department willing to leak details of its "top secret" source to friendly media can have no excuse for not sharing with the duly elected members of Congress.

bowie28 -> One of We Permalink

Thanks for stopping by, Bob. Before you ask me your questions I need you to answer a few of mine:

You have had a full year to investigate the allegations that my campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in our election. Has anyone obstructed you from doing this job to the best of your ability? If so, who have you notified of this and what corrective action have you taken or requested be taken?

Have you found any evidence that I personally committed any crime involving collusion with the Russians to interfere with the election?

Have you found any evidence that any member of my campaign committed any crime involving collusion with the Russians to interfere with the election?

Assuming the answers to all 3 are "No" (which they likely are or such evidence would have already leaked to CNN via Clapper) or if he refuses to answer, inform Muller the meeting and his investigation are over. He is will be escorted to his office to turn over all records gathered in the investigation to the appropriate DOJ officials, debrief them on his findings and then is fired and all security clearances revoked.

Let the MSM and Dems bitch and cry all they want. You had a year to find evidence for your phony allegations with your top investigator on the job, access to millions of documents and millions of taxpayer dollars. You failed because there was no crime committed. Time to move on.

Of course this is assuming the Mueller investigation is actually what it is purported to be which I have serious doubts about. I think it's more likely Mueller cut an immunity deal for himself when he met with Trump the day before being appointed as SC and this whole thing was nothing but a charade to keep Trump's enemies believing Mueller is their guy. This way they put all their attention and energy into this investigation only to have it blow up in their faces just before the midterms when Trump is fully vindicated by the guy all his enemies said was above reproach. If that happens watch how fast they all turn on Mueller and every MSM outlet starts running hit pieces on him the next morning.

The First Rule -> bowie28 Permalink

And no real justice is going to come until Trump cleans house at our corrupt and out of control DOJ; starting with Sessions and Rosenstein.

beemasters Richard Chesler

Has anyone seen or heard from Comey lately? May want to keep an eye out for him dangling from some branches somewhere...

Baron von Bud

Mollie Hemingway's piece on a similar vein in The Federalist. Cunts leak like a sieve to their collusional media scum, but woe-betied Congress getting access. Fuckers should be hanging from lamposts.

[Apr 29, 2018] Is the CIA Running a Defamation Campaign Against Putin by The Saker

Notable quotes:
"... ( Editors Note : Operation Mockingbird was a CIA program started in the 1950s to influence the US media, which was gradually exposed by investigative journalists starting in the late 60s, culminating in sensational televised congressional hearings in 1975 which shocked the nation, forcing the program's termination. Critics maintain that the same tactics have continued since, under different programs. Wikipedia ) ..."
"... nowadays a reporter is either unemployed or a prostitute ..."
Apr 29, 2018 | russia-insider.com

The latest hot topic in the Russian media. Russian politicians are talking about it. Historical precedent and behavior of Western media suggests that they are. The Saker Fri, Apr 22, 2016 | 52,080 195 MORE: Politics A major topic in the Russian media is mystification with how Putin is portrayed in the Western media.

Wildly popular at home, and seen as a decent, modest, an admirable person, and Russians don't understand how there can be such a disconnect with Western impressions.

Recently, leading Russian commentators and politicians have been suggesting that this can only be explained by a deliberate campaign to defame Putin, by governments or other groups.

Yesterday, at a briefing to foreign journalists, Sergey Ivanov, Putin's chief of staff, arguably the 2nd most powerful man in Russia, spoke of an "information war" consisting of "personal attacks" on Putin.

The western media hit a new low...
The day before another member of Putin's inner circle, Vyasheslav Volodin, made similar remarks , telling foreign journalists "an attack on Putin is an attack on Russia." The logic, they argue, is that by defaming the leader of a country, you weaken his power domestically by undermining popular support for him, and internationally, by rallying popular opinion to support policies against that country. The ultimate goal, they argue, is to weaken the country itself. They also talk about regime change. They argue that if one looks at the facts, that there is evidence of ongoing character assassination which cannot be explained by a vague popular zeitgeist in the West, but is more likely the result of a dedicated effort to introduce this defamation into the news flow.
Newsweek has been one of the most virulent Putin-bashers for years
The issue of manipulation of news by intelligence services has been in the news recently with revelations that the CIA and German Secret Service (GSS) have long-running programs to influence how media executives and top journalists convey and interpret the news, including direct cash payments. Here are some examples they point to: RI sat down with The Saker , a leading analyst of Russia in international affairs, and asked him what he thinks:

-----------------------------------

So, is there any credence to this line of thinking, or is this conspiracy theorists running wild?

There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the US is waging a major psyop war against Russia, although not a shooting war, for now, and that what we are seeing is a targeted campaign to discredit Putin and achieve "regime change" in Russia or, should that fail, at the very least "regime weakening" and "Russia weakening".

And the Economist has been the very worst of them all...

So this is a US government program?

Yes, Putin is absolutely hated by certain factions in the US government two main reasons:

1. He partially, but not fully, restored Russia's sovereignty which under Gorbachev and Yeltsin had been totally lost Russia then was a US colony like Ukraine is today and,

2. He dared to openly defy the USA and its civilizational model.

a free and sovereign Russia is perceived by the US "deep state" as an existential threat which has to be crushed. this is a full-scale political assault on Russia and Putin personally.

So what the Russians are saying, that the constant personal attacks against Putin in the global media are partly the result of deliberate efforts by US intelligence services, basically, planted stories

Yes, absolutely

It seems like "Operation Mockingbird" all over again Are you aware of other instances aimed at Putin?

( Editors Note : Operation Mockingbird was a CIA program started in the 1950s to influence the US media, which was gradually exposed by investigative journalists starting in the late 60s, culminating in sensational televised congressional hearings in 1975 which shocked the nation, forcing the program's termination. Critics maintain that the same tactics have continued since, under different programs. Wikipedia )

Yes, of course. Since this defamation has very little traction with the Russian public Putin's popularity is higher than ever before .., there is an organized campaign to convince them that Putin is "selling out" Novorussia, that he is a puppet of oligarchs who are making deals with Ukrainian oligarchs to back-stab the Novorussian resistance

So far, Putin's policies in the Ukraine have enjoyed very strong support from the Russian people who still oppose an overt military intervention

but if Kiev attacks Novorussia again - which appears very likely - and if such an attack is successful - which is less likely but always possible - then Putin will be blamed for having given the Ukrainians the time to regroup and reorganize.

Warm and fuzzy...

So you are saying that if the Ukrainian military strengthens its position enough to deliver a serious blow to the East Ukrainians, the US can use this as a method to strike at Putin's support base

Yes, that's right ... t here are a lot of "fake patriots" in Russia and abroad who will reject any negotiated solution and who will present any compromise as a "betrayal". They are the "useful idiots" used by western special services to smear and undermine Putin.

Is it limited to government special ops, or are there other groups who might have an interest in doing this?

Yes, well here is something that most people in the west don't appreciate there is a major behind-the scenes struggle among Russian elites between what I call the "Eurasian Sovereignists" (basically, those who support Putin) and what I call the "Atlantic Integrationists" (those whom Putin refers to as the "5th column).

The western media talks about this as the struggle between Russian liberals and conservatives, reformers and reactionaries, right?

Well its sort of like that, but not exactly

The former see Russia's future in the Russian North and East and want to turn Russia towards Asia, Latin America and the rest of the world, while the latter want Russia to become part of the "North Atlantic" power configuration.

The Atlantic Integrationists are now too weak to openly challenge Putin - whose real power base is his immense popular support - but they are quietly sabotaging his efforts to reform Russia while supporting anti-Putin campaigns.

Regarding the revelations of CIA activities in Germany, do you think this is going on in other countries, in the US?

I am sure that this is happening in most countries worldwide. The very nature of the modern corporate media is such that it makes journalists corrupt.

As the French philosopher Alain Soral says " nowadays a reporter is either unemployed or a prostitute ". There are, of course, a few exceptions, but by and large this is true.

This is not to say that most journalists are on the take. In the West this is mostly done in a more subtle way - by making it clear which ideas do or do not pass the editorial control, by lavishly rewarding those journalists who 'get it' and by quietly turning away those who don't.

If a journalist or reporter commits the crime of "crimethink" he or she will be sidelined and soon out of work.

There is no real pluralism in the West where the boundaries of what can be said or not are very strictly fixed.

Ok, but is it like what has been revealed in Germany, similar specific operational programs in France, the UK, Italy, Latin America, etc.

Yes, one has to assume so – it is in their interests to have them and there is no reason for them not to.

As for the CIA, it de-facto controls enough of the corporate media to "set the tone". As somebody who in the past used to read the Soviet press for a living, I can sincerely say that it was far more honest and more pluralistic than the press in the USA or EU today.

Joseph Goebbels or Edward Bernays could not have imagined the degree of sophistication of modern propaganda machines.

If the US is doing it, can't one assume other governments are too? Are the Russians doing it against western leaders?

I think that all governments try to do that kind of stuff. However, what makes the US so unique it a combination of truly phenomenal arrogance and multi-billion dollar budgets.

The US "deep state" owns the western corporate media which is by far the most powerful media on the planet. Most governments can only do that inside their own country ... to smear a political opponent or discredit a public figure, but they simply do not have the resources to mount an international strategic psyop campaign. This is something only the US can do.

So foreign governments are at a great disadvantage in this arena vis-a-vis the US?

Absolutely. MORE:


Johnpd Guest 4 years ago ,

Excellent. Another point to grasp is that the Banksters do not want a true capitalism, where inefficiency fails, & competition trims profits.
They want what we now have in the West : a crony corporatist state, where ever fewer giant globalist multinationals dominate both commerce & countries, pay no taxes, to the benefit of their CEOs , shareholders & their banksters.
In short, effectively, a Fascism.
Book : Pawns in the Game, by William Guy Carr. See where those "Atlantic Integrationists" came from.

FullDisclosure Guest 4 years ago ,

Russia today is the only power standing up to the world oligarchy. If Russia falls then we will all be living as slaves behind a barb wired fence, with chips under our skin, etc. etc.

Webbily Guest 4 years ago ,

Yes, and Russia has actually been making efforts to keep the dollar afloat, because they know the US hegemons will get even nastier of their precious dollar becomes worthless. Their goal isn't to integrate Ukraine into the EU. They want to create a failed state on Russia's border, and also hopefully engage them militarily in Syria and in places like Chechnya.

spin to win Guest 3 years ago ,

I've heard tell...Russia's central banking institution does not belong to the state. Does this sound familiar? I do not believe that the international banking system give two turds about the affairs of Russia, unless...Russia moves to control it's own central bank, then there would be real war.
Bankers have no allegiance except to money

Yonatan spin to win 2 years ago ,

It is headed by Chicago-school wannabes who follow the dictates of a banking system aimed at preversving the US banks at the expense of their onw country's economy.

Nabuliana (sp ?), the head of the Russian CB, knows she is on borrowed time but still keep favoring the US over Russia.

dixi3150 Guest 3 years ago ,

The say a rat that is cornered can be very viscous, that's the US.

AMHants dixi3150 2 years ago ,

What is it they also say about dying Empires. The US did not retain Empire status for long, when you look at Russia and China, they are just a toddler on the block?

Incredulously Yours, dixi3150 2 years ago ,

Oh? Violent too....

Иван Guest 3 years ago ,

Very interesting perspective.
I'm very curious to hear western comments on Russian conspiracy theories that Fed already owns Russia and current straggle is a straggle for independence. It seems wild but for people who view Federal Reserve Bank as a direct enemy of humanity it doesn't seem very far-fetched.

sixpack Иван 2 years ago ,

WHEN PUTIN WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT of Russia in 2000, Russia was bankrupt. The nation owed $16.6 billion to the Rothschild-run International Monetary Fund while its foreign debt to the Rothschild-controlled Paris & London Club Of Creditors was over 36 billion dollars.

But Putin took advantage of the current boom in world oil prices by redirecting a portion of the profits of Russia's largest oil producer Gazprom so as to pay off the country's debt. The continual surge in oil prices greatly accelerated Russia's capacity to restore financial sovereignty.

By 2006 Putin had paid off Russia's debt to the Rothschilds. Russia's financial dependence on the Mafia financiers was now over. I doubt they've gotten another hold since then.

wilmers13 Guest a year ago ,

You need to understand that President Putin's divorce is a private matter. In the Anglo World they stick their nose into these private matters but in Russia they do not. Who knows; there have been people who got divorced so the spouse would not cop it in the event of big problems. They even got married again later on. The Anglo World is also dumb, always behaving as if the removal of ONE man would cure something, e.g. Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad - nah. Or take Myanmar; if only the lady (whose name I cannot spell) would rule the country, everything would be fine. Nah - she's extremely racist and will not utter the name of one tribe 'Rohingyas'.

There is definitely a campaign against Russia and President Putin. For Germany it's the

Atlantik-Brücke which steers the press, in Australia the Australia-American Leadership Dialogue, something else in the other countries, just like the late Brian Crozier masqueraded as a journalist but was CIA funded. The campaign needs to be ignored although it is really peculiar that Bush Sr. was fine as CIA chief, and Putin as KGB officer was not. I'ts just the usual American double standards.

Shahna Guest 2 years ago ,

(I think) .... Putin's divorce is not yours to wonder about or criticise.
'Sides, he said, at his last Q&A, he gets on better with his ex now than he did when he was married. That should be good enough for you.

teddyfromcd Guest 2 years ago ,

I THINK the time has come for RUSSIA to play HARDBALL with teh us gov and cia, nsa. etc...

and that is to OPENLY , REPEATEDLY -- RIGHT AT THE LEVEL OF UN AND INTERNATIONAL FORUMS - RIGHT INTO any ''talks" between EU/WEST/ and relations with other nations

always INCLUDE , INSERT -- part of discussions -- teh CIA/US GOV /ENTITIES

attempts against russia.

MAKE IT very prominent that it can NOT be ignored no matter what the USA TRIES...

in order to puit FRONT AND CENTER in the world the attention on THE CIA.

don't let it remain ''incidental" topic to ''major issues"

rather -- make it A CENTRAL topic in every instance and keep throwing t at the USA so that all international meetings ALWAYS bring up

\
USA/CIA - USA,/CIA -- sabotage -- oh yet again another CIA operation in macedonia, oh another one in cnetral asia...etc....

let us remember --

2 cia emplyed ''pschiatrist/psychologists" who took care of the ''methodology" of CIA TORTURE are right now being sued in a US court that is forced to open hearings -- on the suit by former tortured detainees...

the PORTUGUESE AMERICAN woman - SOUSA -- is ordered to appear in an ITALIAN COURT to face her charges for conspiracy to kidnap, rendition , torture the arab/italian citizen

more and more will come, that is inevitable and the CIA ought to be BROUGHT BEYOND just ''topic of discussion" --but as the DEEP STATE that it is -- out into the open -- calling out, searchng out its operatives, officers, policy makers, amerifcan officials -- that' sort of thing...and the only way to do that is make it a WORLD GLOBAL CAUSE TO BRING UP in all matters of international governance and relations -- in press conferences...assemblies, treaties, etc...

Guest • 4 years ago ,

I just want to point out that German media is worst, because Germans need the most convincing to go to war with Russia. The western media now has to combat the anti-war tendencies they propagated onto Germans ever since the end of WW2. If you read the comments on all these anti-Putin propaganda articles, you can tell that Germans hate their own media for doing so.

Lisa Guest 3 years ago ,

Hey, I`m from Germany (Stuttgart), and i can definitely say, that we Germans hate our media and get the informations we need from the Internet. Angela Merkel do what Obama says to her and we can do nothing. if we go to the street and make a Demonstration they say we are nazi or the media say nothing. many People (the old People) in Germany hate Putin and belive the lies from the media, but we, the young people dont belive the lies. We love Putin and wish Angela Merkel will be a little bit like Putin.

dixi3150 Lisa 3 years ago ,

I'm also German (Lahr, Schwartzwald) and totally agree. NEVER watch German TV. It is like for imbeciles. Cooking, singing, festivals everything to keep us from thinking for ourselves. I also get all my info from sites like this one and many others. Love Putin and think Ouma Merkel sold out to the US.

Martin Alfven Haider dixi3150 3 years ago ,

Sounds like American tv. But without all the series about serial killers, violence and perversion. What they have done to us and our collective psyche here is sick, and demonic.

teddyfromcd Martin Alfven Haider 2 years ago ,

but this is not just a problem IN america -- germane TV as some of our friends here have said - getng shallower -- IS A PART of the ''influence" of american ''way\" ..

to bring up mostly and primarily shallow past-times...that takes up LIFE HOURS...when you really count it,,,

ONE shallow pastime after another...the WORST imo,,,apart from these silly ''reality shows\" (which ARE copied throughout the world unfortunately in that desire to be ''more american" -- even in CHINA ) -

are these ''game shows" -- trivia shows..that used to be just CHILD'S play n the backyard and really is where they OUGHT to stay so children can be children...

but NATIONAL CULTURE? trivia shows? give me a BREAK!

but that's exactly what americana brings to societies..the HIGHLIGHTING AND GLORIFICATION OF SILLINESS and SHALLOWNESS as a NATIONAL ETHOS.

and a sure-fire way of turning out , reshaping and ''winning hearts and minds" by making them exposed - without choice really -- to ''the only games in town"

SILLY LITTLE GAMES that 'TRAIN the mind to become STUPID".

this - THIS is the great TRIUMPH of the american society over the world. where everything -- even WAR -- is now ''entertainment" - to be ''packaged" - promoted sold, and switched around like cotton candy by the powers that be...and deeper critical thought -- or honest simplicity of thought and discourse is ''NOT ALLOWED".

Seán Murphy dixi3150 a month ago ,

You should see the satellite TV aimed at Britain and Ireland....

[Apr 29, 2018] How False Flag Operations Are Carried Out Today

Notable quotes:
"... ruse de guerre ..."
"... Today's false flag operations are generally carried out by intelligence agencies and non-government actors including terrorist groups, but they are only considered successful if the true attribution of an action remains secret. ..."
"... That means that when the media is trumpeting news reports that the Russians or Chinese hacked into U.S. government websites or the sites of major corporations, it could actually have been the CIA carrying out the intrusion and making it look like it originated in Moscow or Beijing. Given that capability, there has been considerable speculation in the alternative media that it was actually the CIA that interfered in the 2016 national elections in the United States. ..."
Apr 29, 2018 | russia-insider.com

How False Flag Operations Are Carried Out Today "The lesson that should be learned from Syria and Skripal is that if "an incident" looks like it has no obvious motive behind it, there is a high probability that it is a false flag"

-- take it from Philip Giraldi, a veteran of the CIA of 20 years Philip Giraldi Sat, Apr 28, 2018 | 4,379 146 MORE: Politics False Flag is a concept that goes back centuries. It was considered to be a legitimate ploy by the Greeks and Romans, where a military force would pretend to be friendly to get close to an enemy before dropping the pretense and raising its banners to reveal its own affiliation just before launching an attack. In the sea battles of the eighteenth century among Spain, France and Britain hoisting an enemy flag instead of one's own to confuse the opponent was considered to be a legitimate ruse de guerre , but it was only "honorable" if one reverted to one's own flag before engaging in combat.

Today's false flag operations are generally carried out by intelligence agencies and non-government actors including terrorist groups, but they are only considered successful if the true attribution of an action remains secret. There is nothing honorable about them as their intention is to blame an innocent party for something that it did not do. There has been a lot of such activity lately and it was interesting to learn by way of a leak that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has developed a capability to mimic the internet fingerprints of other foreign intelligence services. That means that when the media is trumpeting news reports that the Russians or Chinese hacked into U.S. government websites or the sites of major corporations, it could actually have been the CIA carrying out the intrusion and making it look like it originated in Moscow or Beijing. Given that capability, there has been considerable speculation in the alternative media that it was actually the CIA that interfered in the 2016 national elections in the United States.

False flags can be involved in other sorts of activity as well. The past year's two major alleged chemical attacks carried out against Syrian civilians that resulted in President Donald Trump and associates launching 160 cruise missiles are pretty clearly false flag operations carried out by the rebels and terrorist groups that controlled the affected areas at the time. The most recent reported attack on April 7 th might not have occurred at all according to doctors and other witnesses who were actually in Douma. Because the rebels succeeded in convincing much of the world that the Syrian government had carried out the attacks, one might consider their false flag efforts to have been extremely successful.

The remedy against false flag operations such as the recent one in Syria is, of course, to avoid taking the bait and instead waiting until a thorough and objective inspection of the evidence has taken place. The United States, Britain and France did not do that, preferring instead to respond to hysterical press reports by "doing something." If the U.N. investigation of the alleged attack turns up nothing, a distinct possibility, it is unlikely that they will apologize for having committed a war crime.

The other major false flag that has recently surfaced is the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury England on March 4 th . Russia had no credible motive to carry out the attack and had, in fact, good reasons not to do so. The allegations made by British Prime Minister Theresa May about the claimed nerve agent being "very likely" Russian in origin have been debunked, in part through examination by the U.K.'s own chemical weapons lab. May, under attack even within her own party, needed a good story and a powerful enemy to solidify her own hold on power so false flagging something to Russia probably appeared to be just the ticket as Moscow would hardly be able to deny the "facts" being invented in London. Unfortunately, May proved wrong and the debate ignited over her actions, which included the expulsion of twenty-three Russian diplomats, has done her severe damage. Few now believe that Russia actually carried out the poisoning and there is a growing body of opinion suggesting that it was actually a false flag executed by the British government or even by the CIA.

The lesson that should be learned from Syria and Skripal is that if "an incident" looks like it has no obvious motive behind it, there is a high probability that it is a false flag. A bit of caution in assigning blame is appropriate given that the alternative would be a precipitate and likely disproportionate response that could easily escalate into a shooting war.


IllyaK 2 days ago ,

The USA and other transgender members of the "international community" no longer require proof or evidence. They are conditioned to believe whatever dogshit lies the Jew media's queer coiffed henchmen say. No matter how ridiculous.So as long as they re-enforce the post-modern soullessness narrative of homosexual auto-eroticism.

There is a reason why TV shows like 'Dancing With The Stars' and 'reality' TV dominate the collective self-absorbed psyche of meathead robots: one hundred years of Jungian and Freudian conditioning bullshit feed their need for fantasy - anything to escape their reality of bad hair, 44" waist, drunkenness, base greed, and self-hatred. The Need for Greed.

Just cater to the uneducated swine's basest desires and they'll happily tongue their master's rectums.

The west is into scat porn, gay pride parades, "feeling good about yourself", self-help, getting pissed off at the Walmart crackheads because they don't stock dildos with the correct curvature you desire, etc.

Tell me how a defunct species of automatic self-loathing shit-eaters with a victim-complex can do anything But believe the sexy blonde bimbo with an Adam's Apple reciting today's talking points?

The craven papal Jew-worshiping west are quietly self-medicating into non-existence in their prophylactic hygienic masturbatory GMO ass-perfumed bubbles. Occasionally one of them goes apeshit and shoots-up a school or something.

And2 Russell McGinnis a day ago ,

Chilling ..reading my own observations and semi formed opinion in someone else's point is ....chilling

Realist Joel Paul Stelt 17 hours ago ,

Recent mass shooting have too many unanswered questions. Strange circumstances lead one to believe they are false flags to promote gun confiscation.

Billo Joel Paul Stelt a day ago ,

Most of them were hoaxes.

Franz Kafka Joel Paul Stelt a day ago ,

"...mind controlled automatons controlled through drugs and remote EM voices directing their behavior..."
That sounds like the job description of CIANN.

And2 IllyaK a day ago ,

Dildos with the correct curvature .
Rothflmao
Been reading ya for years illya.
That was by far the most memorable line you've penned this year .
Great rant .

Jasonovich IllyaK a day ago ,

Everything you said Illyak, resonates with me. Your words intelligently crafted. It is a reflection of Western Society, where virtual signalling has replaced honest discussion.

The Western media creates a vacuum and the masses get sucked into the void, they are in a vegetative state, they disengage with reality. Even when basic common-sense hits you in the face, these people have the tenacity to accept as gospel the liars and deceits of their Governments. If you hear BS repeatedly and you are of simple disposition, you will eventually eat the BS, you will speak it and accept it as de-facto.

Much of the West live in a distorted reality field, these people have been embellished on tropes of 'Western Values' and failing to operate within the parameters, will ultimately exclude you from the collective mainstream, thus rendering you a conspiracy theorist or deranged person and further more you will be considered as a maverick person, who's unable to inflict upon thyself 'victim masturbation' or accept that there are other groups (Jews) more deserving than you.

Anti_Globalista IllyaK a day ago ,

In a few words: It is easy to rule morons, and sell them whatever you want.

Franz Kafka IllyaK a day ago ,

Since they need no evidence of gender either, just a daily 'mood', their departure from 'reality' is not surprising.

tomo stojanovic Franz Kafka a day ago ,

anything that makes Anglosheeple disconnect more from reality, from their own instincts and biology, and from other people is encouraged by the Empire of SLAVES

Tillthetruth IllyaK a day ago ,

My only Flaw in your comment is the 44 inch waist as that is now about the size they Strive to Slim Down to now
A comment made on here about two year's ago has alway's stuck in my mind was "How come British Women's bottom's start behind Their knee's"

tomo stojanovic IllyaK a day ago ,

as someone who spent more than a decade living in the US and as many years in the UK - I fully agree with your analysis. You just forgot to mention religion - and sexual mutilation of baby boys (only in the US are boys routinely circumcised as far as I know in all other places it's only Jews and Muslims who do it). Religion makes them slavish and fearful of their imaginary and other masters from early childhood.

IllyaK tomo stojanovic a day ago ,

Circumcision is a brutal ancient practice that is no longer justifiable in modern civilization.

I have no problem with religion except for the evangelical cults like Catholicism and it's various psychotic offshoots. It's mostly paganistic.

Orthodox, Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto, the Eskimos...I/m ok with that.

Did you know that John XXIII was the ONLY non-Jewish pope?

Franz Kafka IllyaK a day ago ,

Love your Nabokovian Jeremiad by the way!
"Occasionally one of them goes apeshit and shoots-up a school or something."
That reminds me of Winston in Nineteen Eighty Four.
The net was there to catch the outliers. In fact, the state ran the
'resistance'

Massi Gusoni Franz Kafka a day ago ,

. In fact, the state ran the
'resistance'

Jed Grover IllyaK 2 days ago ,

Not this American! I consider the tax extorting, mafia style Shameless Sam to be treasonous and should be on trial in an International court and many of the serial lying neocons who have been pushing our tyrannous foreign policy executed. The past five POTUS including Cheney and HRC should be held accountable.

IllyaK Jed Grover 2 days ago ,

No member of The Tribe will ever be held accountable for anything, ever....unless they try taking on Russia. Then they will swing. And the world will rejoice.

And2 Jed Grover a day ago ,

Not this Canadian.
Tho ..its a river to be pushed up a mountain for the rest of my folks to wake up .

Franz Kafka And2 a day ago ,

Is it the Soma that Turdeau legalised that makes canadians so dopey?

And2 Franz Kafka a day ago ,

Flouride..its everywhere up here.

Java Ape Timelord IllyaK 2 days ago ,

Yeah, do not hold back lllyak

Scandinavia - Java Ape Timelord 2 days ago ,

View Hide

Java Ape Timelord Scandinavia - 2 days ago ,

The Labour party has become anti-labour (i.e. working class) and Liberal party (*1) has become anti-liberal (i.e. anto human rights).

*1 Tory in UK.

Dr. Pro Liv Scandinavia - 2 days ago ,

This message is lacking viable alternative but still better than nothing.
"Falling" for Dr. Ron Paul would not be "dumb" at all.
It would have saved U.S. of coming collapse....But than why would I care?!
U.S. being aggressor Empire and all, they are doing me a favor really with their votes...
Trump
rimes
the swamp!

Robert Mcconnell IllyaK 5 hours ago ,

Brilliant.

Realist IllyaK 17 hours ago ,

"There is a reason why TV shows like 'Dancing With The Stars' and 'reality' TV dominate the collective self-absorbed psyche of meathead robots"

Exactly the majority of white Americans are shallow idiots. They are participating in their own genocide.

commonsenseadvocate IllyaK 21 hours ago ,

I think you pretty much summed it up.

Barnabus IllyaK a day ago ,

OMG thats awesome such eloquence

Tam Mailer IllyaK 19 hours ago ,

LMAO

cap960 IllyaK a day ago ,

Agree. Repeat a lie a 100 Times and people will believe it to be true...Lenin

CHUCKMAN 2 days ago ,

Yes, the same tricks keep being played by those in power, and they include more than just false flags.

Why should that be so? Because they still work.

Even the relative failures like the recent one in Syria (relative failure because millions know it was a fraud) give arrogant leaders who want to do something a public excuse for doing it, even when the excuse is weak and subject to controversy. It is their own people they are largely aiming at, people breathing the same atmosphere of misinformation and suspicion.

As Lord Acton said, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

tomo stojanovic CHUCKMAN a day ago ,

the bigger problem is that most (or all ) Americans I know don't actually want to hear about what is really going on.
They have been brainwashed from very early to value UNREALITY much more than the actual reality. Once you convince sheeple to think that way (and to actually fear reality) - they will happily lie to themselves - you don't even need to lie to them any more

[Apr 21, 2018] On the Criminal Referral of Comey, Clinton et al by Ray McGovern

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Putting aside his partisan motivations, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) was unusually blunt two months ago in warning of legal consequences for officials who misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to enable surveillance on Trump and his associates. Nunes's words are likely to have sent chills down the spine of those with lots to hide: "If they need to be put on trial, we will put them on trial," he said ."The reason Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we created." ..."
"... The media will be key to whether this Constitutional issue is resolved. Largely because of Trump's own well earned reputation for lying, most Americans are susceptible to slanted headlines like this recent one -- "Trump escalates attacks on FBI " -- from an article in The Washington Post , commiserating with the treatment accorded fired-before-retired prevaricator McCabe and the FBI he ( dis)served . ..."
"... What motivated the characters now criminally "referred" is clear enough from a wide variety of sources, including the text messages exchange between Strzok and Page. Many, however, have been unable to understand how these law enforcement officials thought they could get away with taking such major liberties with the law. ..."
"... None of the leaking, unmasking, surveillance, "opposition research," or other activities directed against the Trump campaign can be properly understood, if one does not bear in mind that it was considered a sure thing that Secretary Clinton would become President, at which point illegal and extralegal activities undertaken to help her win would garner praise, not prison. The activities were hardly considered high-risk, because candidate Clinton was sure to win. ..."
"... Comey admits, "It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the re-started investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in the polls." ..."
"... The key point is not Comey's tortured reasoning, but rather that Clinton was "sure to be the next president." This would, of course, confer automatic immunity on those now criminally referred to the Department of Justice. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men -- even very tall men. One wag claimed that the "Higher" in "A Higher Loyalty" refers simply to the very tall body that houses an outsized ego. ..."
"... "Hope springs eternal" would be the cynical folk wisdom. FYI we haven't had a functioning constitution since the National Security Act of 1947 brought this nation under color of law, but the IC types wouldn't have you know that. Too tough to square the idea you'd never have had your CIA career in a world where the FISA court couldn't exist either. ..."
"... there is concrete evidence that the Democratic party/Clinton manipulated the primaries to destroy Clinton's challanger. That the DOJ, FBI & other alphabet agencies conspired with Clinton to equally, destroy Trump's campaign. ..."
"... We saw the same nonsense with Obama, the "peace president". Obama a man who never saw a Muslim he did not want to bomb or a Jew he did not want to bail out ..."
"... The best thing about this referral is that it also demands deputy AG Rod Rosenstein the weasel to recluse himself from this case. Rosenstein is the pinnacle of corruption by the deep state. ..."
"... Former CIA Director John Brennan is the prime mover behind the ongoing coup attempt against Trump. He gathered his deep state allies at DOJ and the FBI to join him in this endeavor. Brennan's allies -- McCabe, Lynch, Strzok, Yates, ect., may or may not be aware of Brennan's true motive behind creating all the noise and distraction since the 2016 election. It could be they're just partisan hacks; or they're on board with Brennan to keep secret what was revealed in the hack of the Podesta emails. ..."
"... Assange had 'physical proof' Russians didn't hack DNC, Rohrabacher says https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/apr/19/julian-assange-has-physical-proof-russians-didnt-h/ ..."
"... I noticed Comey tried to pull a J Edgar-style subtle blackmail on Trump by the way he brought up the so-called "dossier" ..."
"... Bill Clinton got recruited into CIA by Cord Meyer, who bragged of it himself in his cups. ..."
"... Hillary cut her teeth on CIA's Watergate purge of Nixon. (If it's news to anyone that the Watergate cast of characters was straight out of CIA central casting, Russ Baker has conclusively tied the elaborate ratfeck to the intelligence community.) ..."
"... Obama was son of spooks, grandson of spooks, greased in to Harvard by Alwaleed bin-Talal's bagman. ..."
Apr 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

Wednesday's criminal referral by 11 House Republicans of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well as several former and serving top FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials is a giant step toward a Constitutional crisis.

Named in the referral to the DOJ for possible violations of federal law are: Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey; former Attorney General Loretta Lynch; former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe; FBI Agent Peter Strzok; FBI Counsel Lisa Page; and those DOJ and FBI personnel "connected to" work on the "Steele Dossier," including former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and former Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente.

With no attention from corporate media, the referral was sent to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah John Huber. Sessions appointed Huber months ago to assist DOJ Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz. By most accounts, Horowitz is doing a thoroughly professional job. As IG, however, Horowitz lacks the authority to prosecute; he needs a U.S. Attorney for that. And this has to be disturbing to the alleged perps.

This is no law-school case-study exercise, no arcane disputation over the fine points of this or that law. Rather, as we say in the inner-city, "It has now hit the fan." Criminal referrals can lead to serious jail time. Granted, the upper-crust luminaries criminally "referred" enjoy very powerful support. And that will come especially from the mainstream media, which will find it hard to retool and switch from Russia-gate to the much more delicate and much less welcome "FBI-gate."

As of this writing, a full day has gone by since the letter/referral was reported, with total silence so far from T he New York Times and The Washington Post and other big media as they grapple with how to spin this major development. News of the criminal referral also slipped by Amy Goodman's non-mainstream DemocracyNow!, as well as many alternative websites.

The 11 House members chose to include the following egalitarian observation in the first paragraph of the letter conveying the criminal referral: "Because we believe that those in positions of high authority should be treated the same as every other American, we want to be sure that the potential violations of law outlined below are vetted appropriately." If this uncommon attitude is allowed to prevail at DOJ, it would, in effect, revoke the de facto "David Petraeus exemption" for the be-riboned, be-medaled, and well-heeled.

Stonewalling

Meanwhile, the patience of the chairmen of House committees investigating abuses at DOJ and the FBI is wearing thin at the slow-rolling they are encountering in response to requests for key documents from the FBI. This in-your-face intransigence is all the more odd, since several committee members have already had access to the documents in question, and are hardly likely to forget the content of those they know about. (Moreover, there seems to be a good chance that a patriotic whistleblower or two will tip them off to key documents being withheld.)

The DOJ IG, whose purview includes the FBI, has been cooperative in responding to committee requests for information, but those requests can hardly include documents of which the committees are unaware.

Putting aside his partisan motivations, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) was unusually blunt two months ago in warning of legal consequences for officials who misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to enable surveillance on Trump and his associates. Nunes's words are likely to have sent chills down the spine of those with lots to hide: "If they need to be put on trial, we will put them on trial," he said ."The reason Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we created."

Whether the House will succeed in overcoming the resistance of those criminally referred and their many accomplices and will prove able to exercise its Constitutional prerogative of oversight is, of course, another matter -- a matter that matters.

And Nothing Matters More Than the Media

The media will be key to whether this Constitutional issue is resolved. Largely because of Trump's own well earned reputation for lying, most Americans are susceptible to slanted headlines like this recent one -- "Trump escalates attacks on FBI " -- from an article in The Washington Post , commiserating with the treatment accorded fired-before-retired prevaricator McCabe and the FBI he ( dis)served .

Nor is the Post above issuing transparently clever warnings -- like this one in a lead article on March 17: "Some Trump allies say they worry he is playing with fire by taunting the FBI. 'This is open, all-out war. And guess what? The FBI's going to win,' said one ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. 'You can't fight the FBI. They're going to torch him.'" [sic]

Mind-Boggling Criminal Activity

What motivated the characters now criminally "referred" is clear enough from a wide variety of sources, including the text messages exchange between Strzok and Page. Many, however, have been unable to understand how these law enforcement officials thought they could get away with taking such major liberties with the law.

None of the leaking, unmasking, surveillance, "opposition research," or other activities directed against the Trump campaign can be properly understood, if one does not bear in mind that it was considered a sure thing that Secretary Clinton would become President, at which point illegal and extralegal activities undertaken to help her win would garner praise, not prison. The activities were hardly considered high-risk, because candidate Clinton was sure to win.

But she lost.

Comey himself gives this away in the embarrassingly puerile book he has been hawking, "A Higher Loyalty" -- which

amounts to a pre-emptive move motivated mostly by loyalty-to-self, in order to obtain a Stay-Out-of-Jail card. Hat tip to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone for a key observation, in his recent article , "James Comey, the Would-Be J. Edgar Hoover," about what Taibbi deems the book's most damning passage, where Comey discusses his decision to make public the re-opening of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

Comey admits, "It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the re-started investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in the polls."

The key point is not Comey's tortured reasoning, but rather that Clinton was "sure to be the next president." This would, of course, confer automatic immunity on those now criminally referred to the Department of Justice. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men -- even very tall men. One wag claimed that the "Higher" in "A Higher Loyalty" refers simply to the very tall body that houses an outsized ego.

I think it can be said that readers of Consortiumnews.com may be unusually well equipped to understand the anatomy of FBI-gate as well as Russia-gate. Listed below chronologically are several links that might be viewed as a kind of "whiteboard" to refresh memories. You may wish to refer them to any friends who may still be confused.

2017

2018

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served as an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for a total of 30 years. In retirement, he co-created Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).


Mike Whitney , April 20, 2018 at 4:15 am GMT

This story appears to be developing very fast. Interested readers might want to look at this short video on the Tucker Carlson show last night: http://video.foxnews.com/v/5773524495001/?playlist_id=5198073478001#sp=show-clips

Will McCabe wind up in jail? Will Comey? Will Hillary face justice? Fingers crossed!

jilles dykstra , April 20, 2018 at 6:05 am GMT
A weird country, the USA. Reading the article I'm reminded of the 1946 Senate investigation into Pearl Harbour, where, in my opinion, the truth was unearthed. At the same time, this truth hardly ever reached the wider public, no articles, the book, ed. Harry Elmer Barnes, never reviewed.
Greg Bacon , Website April 20, 2018 at 6:54 am GMT

Will McCabe wind up in jail? Will Comey? Will Hillary face justice? Fingers crossed!

The short answer is NO. McCabe might, but not Comey and the Killer Queen, they've both served Satan, uh I mean the Deep State too long and too well.Satan and the banksters–who really run the show–take care of their own and apex predators like Hillary won't go to jail. But it does keep the rubes entertained while the banksters continue to loot, pillage and plunder and Israel keeps getting Congress to fight their wars.

Ronald Thomas West , Website April 20, 2018 at 7:23 am GMT
"Hope springs eternal" would be the cynical folk wisdom. FYI we haven't had a functioning constitution since the National Security Act of 1947 brought this nation under color of law, but the IC types wouldn't have you know that. Too tough to square the idea you'd never have had your CIA career in a world where the FISA court couldn't exist either.

Consortium News many sops tossed to 'realpolitik' where false narrative is attacked with alternative false narrative, example given, drunk Ukrainian soldiers supposedly downing MH 17 with a BUK as opposed to Kiev's Interior Ministry behind the Ukrainian combat jet that actually brought down MH 17, poisons everything (trust issues) spewed from that news service.

The realpolitik 'face saving' exit/offer implied in the Consortium News narrative where Russia doesn't have to confront the West with Ukraine's (and by implication the western intelligence agencies) premeditated murder of 300 innocents does truth no favors.

Time to grow up and face reality. Realpolitik is dead; the caliber of 'statesman' required for these finessed geopolitical lies to function no longer exist on the Western side, and the Russians (I believe) are beginning to understand there is no agreement can be made behind closed doors that will hold up; as opposed to experiencing a backstabbing (like NATO not moving east.)

Back on topic; the National Security Act of 1947 and the USA's constitution are mutually exclusive concepts, where you have a Chief Justice appoints members of our FISA Court, er, nix that, let's call a spade a spade, it's a Star Chamber. There is no constitution to uphold, no matter well intended self deceits. There will be no constitutional crisis, only a workaround to pretend a constitution still exists:

https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2017/12/01/the-oath-and-the-trash-bin/

For those who prefer the satire:

https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2016/01/07/moot-court/^

animalogic , April 20, 2018 at 8:00 am GMT
To comprehend the internal machinations s of US politics one needs a mind capable of high level yoga or of squaring a circle. On the one hand there is a multimillion, full throttle investigation into – at best – nebulus, inconsequential links between trump/ his campaign & Russia.
On the other there is concrete evidence that the Democratic party/Clinton manipulated the primaries to destroy Clinton's challanger. That the DOJ, FBI & other alphabet agencies conspired with Clinton to equally, destroy Trump's campaign.

Naturally, its this 2nd conspiracy which is retarded. Imagine, a mere agency of a dept, the FBI, is widely considered untouchable by The President ! Indeed, they will "torch" him. AND the "the third estate" ie: the msm will support them the whole way! As a script the "The Twilight Zone" would have rejected all this as too ludicrous, too psychotic for even its broad minded viewers.

Jake , April 20, 2018 at 11:29 am GMT
The Deep State will make certain none of its most important functionaries get anything close to what they deserve.
redmudhooch , April 20, 2018 at 11:43 am GMT
Just a show, nothing will happen. Anything to keep you talking about anything other than 9/11, fake economy, fake war on terror, or Zionists..
jacques sheete , April 20, 2018 at 11:49 am GMT

And that will come especially from the mainstream media

I quit reading right there. Use of that term indicates mental laziness at best. What's mainstream about it? Please refer to corporate media in proper terms, such as PCR's "presstitute" media. Speaking of PCR, it's too bad he doesn't allow comments.

DESERT FOX , April 20, 2018 at 12:58 pm GMT
The MSM is controlled by Zionists as is the U.S. gov and the banks, so it is no surprise that the MSM protects the ones destroying America, this is what they do. Nothing of consequence will be done to any of the ones involved, it will all be covered up, as usual.
tjm , April 20, 2018 at 1:06 pm GMT
What utter nonsense. These people are ALL actors, no one will go to jail, because everything they do is contrived, no consequence for doing as your Zionist owners command.

There is no there there. This is nothing but another distraction, something o feed the dual narratives, that Clinton and her ilk are out to get Trump, and the "liberal media" will cover it up. This narrative feeds very nicely into the primary goal of driving Republicans/conservatives to support Trump, even as Trump does everything they elected him NOT TO DO!

We saw the same nonsense with Obama, the "peace president". Obama a man who never saw a Muslim he did not want to bomb or a Jew he did not want to bail out

Yet even while Obama did the work of the Zionist money machine, the media played up the fake battle between those who thought he was not born in America, "birthers" and his blind supporters.

Nothing came of any of it, just like Monica Lewinsky, nothing but theater, fill the air waves, divide the people, while America is driven insane.

anon [321] Disclaimer , April 20, 2018 at 1:49 pm GMT
The best thing about this referral is that it also demands deputy AG Rod Rosenstein the weasel to recluse himself from this case. Rosenstein is the pinnacle of corruption by the deep state. It's seriously way pass time for Jeff Sessions to grow a pair, put on his big boy pants, unrecuse himself from the Russian collusion bullshit case, fire Rosenstein and Mueller and end the case once and for all. These two traitors are in danger of completely derailing the Trump agenda and toppling the Republican majority in November, yet Jeff Sessions is still busy arresting people for marijuana, talk about missing the forest for the trees.

As far as where this referral will go from here, my guess is, nowhere. Not as long as Jeff Sessions the pussy is the AG. It's good to hear that Giuliani has now been recruited by Trump to be on his legal team. What Trump really needs to do is replace Jeff Sessions with Giuliani, or even Chris Christie, and let them do what a real AG should be doing, which is clean house in the DOJ, and prosecute the Clintons for their pay-to-play scheme with their foundation. Not only is the Clinton corruption case the biggest corruption case in US history, but this might be the only way to save the GOP from losing their majority in November.

anon [321] Disclaimer , April 20, 2018 at 1:54 pm GMT
@Greg Bacon

But it does keep the rubes entertained while the banksters continue to loot, pillage and plunder and Israel keeps getting Congress to fight their wars.

Sadly I think you're right. Things might be different if we had a real AG, but Jeff Sessions is not the man I thought he was. He's been swallowed by the deep state just like Trump. At least Trump is putting up a fight, Sessions just threw in the towel and recused himself from Day 1. Truly pathetic. Some patriot he is.

Twodees Partain , April 20, 2018 at 2:32 pm GMT
@Nick Granite

" He's ferreted out more than a few and probably has a lot better idea who his friends are he certainly knows the enemies by now."

He failed to ferret out Haley, Pompeo, or Sessions and he just recently appointed John Bolton, so I don't agree with your assessment. If his friends include those three, that says enough about Trump to make any of his earlier supporters drop him.

Anyway, not having a ready made team, or at least a solid short list of key appointees shows that he was just too clueless to have even been a serious candidate. It looks more as though Trump is doing now what he intended to do all along. That means he was bullshitting everybody during his campaign.

So, maybe the neocons really have been his friends all along.

Twodees Partain , April 20, 2018 at 2:46 pm GMT
@jacques sheete

It's also telling that Ray didn't mention what was included in the referral regarding an enforced recusal of Rosenstein going forward.

https://desantis.house.gov/_cache/files/8/0/8002ca75-52fc-4995-b87e-43584da268db/472EBC7D8F55C0F9E830D37CF96376A2.final-criminal-referral.pdf

Authenticjazzman , April 20, 2018 at 6:02 pm GMT
@Renoman

" America is a very crooked country, nothing suprises me".

Every country on this insane planet is "crooked" to a greater or lesser degree, when to a lesser degree, this is simply because they, the PTB, have not yet figured out how to accelerate, how to increase their corruption and thereby how to increase their unearned monetary holdings.

Money is the most potent singular factor which causes humans to lose their minds, and all of their ethics and decency.
And within the confines of a "socialist" system, "money" is replaced by rubber-stamps, which then wield, exactly in the manner of "wealth", the power of life or death, over the unwashed masses.

Authenticjazzman "Mensa" qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro jazz musician.

anon [140] Disclaimer , April 20, 2018 at 7:24 pm GMT
@Ronald Thomas West

BTW Jeff Sessions is a fraternal brother of Pence (a member of the same club, same [recently deceased] guru) and is no friend of Trump.

That would explain why Sessions reclused himself from the start, and refused to appoint a special council to investigate the Clintons. He's in on this with Pence.

anon [140] Disclaimer , April 20, 2018 at 7:30 pm GMT
Just as it looks like the Comey memos will further exonerate Trump, we now have this farce extended by the DNC with this latest lawsuit on the "Trump campaign". The Democrats are now the most pathetic sore losers in history, they are hell bent on dragging the whole country down the pit of hell just because they can't handle a loss.
anon [140] Disclaimer , April 20, 2018 at 7:34 pm GMT
Wishful thinking that anything will come of this, just like when the Nunes memo was released. Nothing will happen as long as Jeff Sessions is AG. Trump needs to fire either Sessions or Rosenstein ASAP, before he gets dragged down by this whole Russian collusion bullshit case.
SunBakedSuburb , April 20, 2018 at 7:45 pm GMT
Former CIA Director John Brennan is the prime mover behind the ongoing coup attempt against Trump. He gathered his deep state allies at DOJ and the FBI to join him in this endeavor. Brennan's allies -- McCabe, Lynch, Strzok, Yates, ect., may or may not be aware of Brennan's true motive behind creating all the noise and distraction since the 2016 election. It could be they're just partisan hacks; or they're on board with Brennan to keep secret what was revealed in the hack of the Podesta emails.

John Podesta, in addition to being a top Democrat/DC lobbyist and a criminal deviant, is also a long-time CIA asset running a blackmail/influence operation that utilized his deviancy: the sexual exploitation of children.

Haxo Angmark , Website April 20, 2018 at 10:38 pm GMT
Seth Rich is still dead...
utu , April 20, 2018 at 11:33 pm GMT
Assange had 'physical proof' Russians didn't hack DNC, Rohrabacher says https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/apr/19/julian-assange-has-physical-proof-russians-didnt-h/
UrbaneFrancoOntarian , April 21, 2018 at 12:18 am GMT
@anon

His cowardice is shocking. I wonder what they have on him? Probably some Roy Moore shit. Some shady stuff happened in the old South.

Ronald Thomas West , Website April 21, 2018 at 12:56 am GMT
@utu

https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2017/09/16/incompetent-espionage-wikileaks-iii/

Yeah, and General Kelly won't let Rohrabacher meet with Trump. What do you suppose is up with that (rhetorical question)

RobinG , April 21, 2018 at 1:02 am GMT
@utu

What kind of "physical proof" could Assange have? A thumb drive that was provably American, or something? Rohrabacher only got Red Pilled on Russia because he had one very determined (and well heeled) constituent. But he did cosponsor one of Tulsi Gabbard's "Stop Funding Terrorists" bills, which he figured out on his own. Nevertheless, a bit of a loose cannon and an eff'd up hawk on Iran He's probably an 'ISIS now, Assad later' on Syria.

anonymous [185] Disclaimer , April 21, 2018 at 2:36 am GMT
I noticed Comey tried to pull a J Edgar-style subtle blackmail on Trump by the way he brought up the so-called "dossier". Anyone could see it was absurd but he played his hand with it, pretending it was being looked at. I would say Trump could see through this sleazy game Comey was trying to play and sized him up. Comey is about as slimy as they get even as he parades around trying to look noble. What a corrupt bunch.
Culloden , April 21, 2018 at 2:45 am GMT
"The culprit has swayed with the immediate need for a villain "

[What follows is excerpted from an article headlined Robert Mueller's Questionable Past that appeared yesterday on the American Free Press website:]

During his tenure with the Justice Department under President George H W Bush, Mueller supervised the prosecutions of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, the Lockerbie bombing (Pan Am Flight 103) case, and Gambino crime boss John Gotti. In the Noriega case, Mueller ignored the ties to the Bush family that Victor Thorn illustrated in Hillary (and Bill): The Drugs Volume: Part Two of the Clinton Trilogy. Noriega had long been associated with CIA operations that involved drug smuggling, money laundering, and arms running. Thorn significantly links Noriega to Bush family involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Regarding Pan Am Flight 103, the culprit has swayed with the immediate need for a villain. Pro-Palestinian activists, Libyans, and Iranians have all officially been blamed when US intelligence and the mainstream mass media needed to paint each as the antagonist to American freedom. Mueller toed the line, publicly ignoring rumors that agents onboard were said to have learned that a CIA drug-smuggling operation was afoot in conjunction with Pan Am flights. According to the theory, the agents were going to take their questions to Congress upon landing. The flight blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.

http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/

"We were in Libya for oil" (only). Who said that:

http://www.firmmagazine.com

Bennis Mardens , April 21, 2018 at 2:47 am GMT
Without exception, leftists are degenerate filth.

But they won't be going to jail.

It's kabuki theater.

Art , April 21, 2018 at 5:21 am GMT
My god – who believes this woman?

Hillary says "they would never let me be president" – she is serious. She has gone bonkers with self-pity.

This is no longer laughable – it boarders on the pathological.

Art

WhiteWolf , April 21, 2018 at 5:39 am GMT
@Bennis Mardens

There has been some former high flyers going to jail recently. Sarkozy is facing a hard time at the moment. If it can happen to a former president of France it can happen to Hillary.

Stonehands , April 21, 2018 at 6:20 am GMT
@Twodees Partain

I still read ZH articles, but the commentariat has devolved to lockeroom towel-snapping, barely above YouTube chattering.

Stonehands , April 21, 2018 at 6:42 am GMT
@Ronald Thomas West

Ronald, thank-you for posting this Doug Coe sermon; l have never heard of him. BTW are you a Christian?

Stonehands , April 21, 2018 at 7:56 am GMT
@Ronald Thomas West

Ronald, thank-you for posting this Doug Coe sermon; l have never heard of him. BTW are you a Christian?

Twodees Partain , April 21, 2018 at 10:11 am GMT
@Culloden

Here's another about Mueller's involvement with the FBI's Whitey Bulger scandal.

https://saraacarter.com/questions-still-surround-robert-muellers-boston-past/

Mueller's past is so laden with misfeasance and malfeasance that he should have been disbarred a few decades ago.

Ronald Thomas West , Website April 21, 2018 at 1:14 pm GMT
@Stonehands

Am I a Christian? Well, no. I had some exposure to Christianity but it never took hold. On the other hand, I do believe there was a historical Jesus that was a remarkable man, but there is a world (or universe) of difference between the man and the mythology. Here's some of my thoughts on the matter:

https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2013/04/11/celebrating-the-anti-christ/

^ It doesn't necessarily go where the title might suggest (for many)

CIA in Charge , April 21, 2018 at 1:58 pm GMT
@Authenticjazzman

Nothing uncanny about it. There's a frenetic Democratic cottage industry inferring magical emotional charisma powers that explain the outsized influence of those three. The fact is very simple. All three are CIA nomenklatura.

(1.) Bill Clinton got recruited into CIA by Cord Meyer, who bragged of it himself in his cups.

(2.) Hillary cut her teeth on CIA's Watergate purge of Nixon. (If it's news to anyone that the Watergate cast of characters was straight out of CIA central casting, Russ Baker has conclusively tied the elaborate ratfeck to the intelligence community.)

(3.) Obama was son of spooks, grandson of spooks, greased in to Harvard by Alwaleed bin-Talal's bagman. While he was vocationally wet behind the ears he not only got into Pakistan, no mean feat at the time, but he went to a falconry outing with the future acting president of Pakistan. And is there anyone alive who wasn't flabbergasted at the instant universal acclaim for some empty suit who made a speech at the convention? Like Bill Clinton, successor to DCI Bush, Obama was blatantly, derisively installed in the president slot of the CIA org chart.

Authenticjazzman , April 21, 2018 at 6:06 pm GMT
@CIA in Charge

Excellent post and quite accurate information, however my point being that the irrational fear harbored by the individuals who could actually begin to rope these scumbags in, is just that : Irrational, as they seem to think or have been lead/brainwashed to believe that these dissolute turds are somehow endowed with supernatural, otherworldy powers and options, and that they are capable of unholy , merciless vengeance : VF, SR, etc.

And the truth is as soon as they finally start to go after them they, they will fall apart at the seams, such as with all cowards, and this is the bottom line : They, the BC/HC/BO clique, they are nothing more than consumate cowards, who can only operate in such perfidious manners when left unchallenged.

Authenticjazzman "Mensa" qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro Jazz artist.

[Apr 19, 2018] They never planned to let "Harvey" survive to see an actual trial, because of the lack of evidence against him, and therefore the evidence of a high-level conspiracy would then be so obvious.

Apr 19, 2018 | www.unz.com

Paul Jolliffe , April 19, 2018 at 12:12 am GMT

@jilles dykstra

"Harvey" Oswald didn't shoot anyone -- his denial was perfectly plausible, and his murder at Ruby's hands was a desperate stopgap measure to shut him up before he started naming his handlers who had framed him. Badly.

They never planned to let "Harvey" survive to see an actual trial, because of the lack of evidence against him, and therefore the evidence of a high-level conspiracy would then be so obvious.

No trial, no test of the evidence against him.

"Harvey" was exactly what he claimed to be -- he was the patsy.

[Apr 18, 2018] Ever heard of the British Army s 77th Brigade?

Notable quotes:
"... It turns out that news reports citing UOSSM tend *also* to cite or refer to "French intelligence," especially if the report has to do with local conditions or events within Syria. So perhaps the "partnership" between the UOSSM and the White Helmets in Syria represents, in large part, the coordination of British and French military propaganda/intelligence services ..."
"... I had already heard that French intelligence was using Doctors Without Borders (MSF) as cover in Syria, but was not aware that UOSSM in Syria is likely--at least in part--another French intelligence front. ..."
"... My own impression is that the NGO-ification of military and state intelligence of the degree and sophistication we see in Syria is a relatively recent phenomenon, predicated in part on the disseminating capacities of social media platforms. Is this right? ..."
"... My wife and I stopped donating to MSF a few months ago, based on their evident lack of neutrality in Syria. ..."
Apr 18, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Pat Lang Mod -> Wj , a day ago

Ever heard of the British Army's 77th Brigade?
Wj -> Pat Lang , a day ago
PLang,

No, but you just sent me down a fascinating rabbit hole. From what I can tell, there is the already established link between White Helmets and Mayday Rescue, which seems to be an extension of or front for the 77th.

It turns out that news reports citing UOSSM tend *also* to cite or refer to "French intelligence," especially if the report has to do with local conditions or events within Syria. So perhaps the "partnership" between the UOSSM and the White Helmets in Syria represents, in large part, the coordination of British and French military propaganda/intelligence services.

I had already heard that French intelligence was using Doctors Without Borders (MSF) as cover in Syria, but was not aware that UOSSM in Syria is likely--at least in part--another French intelligence front. How common is this kind of multinational coordination of intelligence/propaganda front groups, if that is what this is?

My own impression is that the NGO-ification of military and state intelligence of the degree and sophistication we see in Syria is a relatively recent phenomenon, predicated in part on the disseminating capacities of social media platforms. Is this right?

TTG -> Wj , a day ago
Wj,

"How common is this kind of multinational coordination of intelligence/propaganda front groups, if that is what this is?"

The coordination and interoperability among these special operations units is intense and has grown rapidly over the last decade. Even in the 80s this joint combined exchange training was the norm. Now it extends into live operations.

This 77th Brigade is an odd mashup linking civil affairs and PSYOP capabilities, but kept within the Tier 1 special operations community. I never heard of it before, but it's a logical progression. We probably have a similar military capability, but i have no idea what it is.

JJackson -> TTG , a day ago
I note it also has close links to the close ties with the 361st Civil Affairs Brigade.
Peter C. -> Wj , 7 hours ago
My wife and I stopped donating to MSF a few months ago, based on their evident lack of neutrality in Syria. The reply from their Donor Relations office did nothing to dispel that impression. In it, MSF admitted that "extreme insecurity has forced us to remove our medical teams from the front lines of the conflict. As a result, in order to do what we can to help alleviate the suffering of Syrians, we have partnered with several hospitals and medical clinics to provide support, with medical supplies and expertise from a distance...Though our teams may not be physically present on the front lines, we receive regular reports..."

I think we can guess who those "reports" are from.

[Apr 17, 2018] False flags are real US has a long history of lying to start wars -- RT Op-ed

Notable quotes:
"... indulging an addiction ..."
"... in all probability ..."
"... casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation ..."
"... repeated acts of violence ..."
"... could be used in a deception operation designed to confuse enemy planes in the air, to launch a surprise attack against enemy installations or in a provocation operation in which Soviet aircraft would appear to attack US or friendly installations to provide an excuse for US intervention. ..."
Apr 17, 2018 | www.rt.com

Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance journalist. Having lived and worked in the US, Germany and Russia, she is currently based in Budapest, Hungary. Her work has been featured by Salon, The Nation, Rethinking Russia, Russia Direct, teleSUR, The BRICS Post and others. Follow her on Twitter @DanielleRyanJ, check out her Facebook page, or visit her website: danielle-ryan.com Published time: 16 Apr, 2018 15:49 Get short URL False flags are real – US has a long history of lying to start wars FILE PHOTO: U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he described as one that could contain anthrax © Ray Stubblebine / Reuters Use of the term 'false flag' is often met with raised eyebrows and accusations of conspiracism. But false flags are a very real and very present feature of geopolitics -- and denying that is simply denying reality. Last week, the United States, along with the United Kingdom and France, bombed Syrian government targets, ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged chemical attack which was carried out one week before in the city of Douma.

The story we're told is simple: Syrian President Bashar Assad is an evil maniac who uses poison gas on his citizens for the sheer entertainment value. As neocon think tank the Atlantic Council put it last week, when Assad gasses people, he is simply " indulging an addiction " -- an addiction which he seems to have only recently acquired, given the fact that before Syria's war began, American journalists were busy praising the " educated " and " informed " Assad and marveling at the " phenomenal " levels of peace and religious diversity within Syria.

In 2006 Diane Sawyer praised Assad during a trip to Syria for the "phenomenal" levels of religious tolerance and peace in Syria. Funny how he turned into a monster at the exact moment Washington decided it was time for regime change. https://t.co/24qy6UtFez

-- Danielle Ryan (@DanielleRyanJ) April 14, 2018

Anyway, so intense is Assad's newfound desire for watching Syrian babies foaming at the mouth, that he is willing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by deciding to use these weapons despite knowing it would provoke worldwide outrage and potentially a major US military effort to oust him. So, that's the story. Assad is a monster and the world must unite to stop him.

There are plenty of people who are less than convinced by this narrative, however. One of them is Peter Ford, the former British ambassador to Syria. Ford told BBC Radio Scotland that " in all probability " the alleged chemical attack never happened and that the video and image evidence used as proof by the US and its allies was falsified. There are others who believe that the attack could have been real, but that the perpetrators were anti-Assad rebels trying to provoke fresh military action from the US -- in other words, it was very possibly a false flag event which served its purpose perfectly.

One of the best questions to ask when something like this happens, is: Who benefits? Very clearly in this case, Assad has not benefited at all, but the rebel groups fighting against him have.

Whatever the truth about this alleged chemical attack, the notion of false flag events being used to prompt military action should not be met with such skepticism. The US has a long history of using lies (or 'fake news' you might call it) as a pretext for war. It is important to look at recent events in Syria within that context.

Nayirah testimony

Perhaps the most famous of all examples was the heart-wrenching testimony to Congress of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, identified only as Nayirah, which was used to sell the first Gulf War to the American people in October 1990. An emotional Nayirah told the Congressional Human Rights Caucus that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators and leaving them on the floor to die.

What Americans did not know, was that Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and she had been coached by the American PR firm Hill and Knowlton. But before the details of the stunt and false testimony became widely known, it had already been used to sell America's war against Iraq in 1991.

In 1990 young Nayirah told of seeing Iraqi soldiers pull Kuwaiti babies out of incubators. Today our delivery of atrocity propaganda is more sophisticated, yet public credulity remains about the same. pic.twitter.com/l7UYmByl5D

-- U.S. Dept. of Fear (@FearDept) April 8, 2018
Operation Northwoods

In the 1960s, American military leaders devised plans to bomb US cities and blame Cuban leader Fidel Castro in order to manufacture public and international support for a war.

The plan was codenamed Operation Northwoods and what it advocated was nothing short of horrendous. The American military suggested sinking boatloads of Cuban refugees, hijacking planes and bombing Miami. The goal was to convince Americans that Castro had unleashed a reign of terror upon them.

The top brass were even willing to cause US military casualties by blowing up an American boat in Guantanamo Bay and blaming Cuba. Why? Because, as they put it, " casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation " and help manufacture support for war. The plans were quashed by President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated one year later, leading some to speculate on a link between those events.

Gulf of Tonkin

Top US officials also distorted the facts in the lead-up to the Vietnam War and the media dutifully reported the official narrative as absolute fact, helping launch perhaps the most disastrous war in America's history.

On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attack the USS 'Maddox' while it was on " routine patrol " in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. Two days later, the US Navy reported a second " unprovoked " attack on the 'Maddox' and the USS 'Turner Joy' -- a second destroyer which had been sent in after the first attack. President Lyndon B. Johnson told the American people on TV that " repeated acts of violence " against the US ships must be met with a strong response. Soon after Johnson appeared on TV, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which pre-approved any military action that he would take from that moment on.

The only problem was, there was no second attack on the US ships at all -- and the allegation that the first attack had been " unprovoked " was also a lie. In reality, the USS 'Maddox' had been gathering intelligence and providing it to South Vietnamese boats which were attacking North Vietnam. As for the second attack, the US boats had misinterpreted radio signals and radar images and spent two hours firing at nothing. Nonetheless, the " attack " was used to convince the American people to support war.

3. Given the folly of the British government over Iraq and Libya, and its undoubted misleading of the public over Iraq, it is perfectly reasonable to suspect it of doing the same thing again. Some of us also do not forget the blatant lying over Suez, and indeed the Gulf of Tonkin https://t.co/GLzyoPWaDG

-- Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) April 12, 2018
Soviet aircraft false flags

Recently declassified documents show yet more American false flag plotting, this time against the Soviet Union. A three-page memo , written by members of the National Security Council, suggested that the US government should acquire Soviet aircraft which would be used to stage attacks and provide the pretext for war.

Such aircraft, the memo said, " could be used in a deception operation designed to confuse enemy planes in the air, to launch a surprise attack against enemy installations or in a provocation operation in which Soviet aircraft would appear to attack US or friendly installations to provide an excuse for US intervention. "

The government even considered producing the soviet planes domestically in a massive covert operation. They went so far as to acquire estimates from the Air Force on the cost and length of time such an operation would take.

In a memo of undisclosed date, the US National Security Council suggested the government should either buy or covertly produce Soviet aircraft and use them to launch fake attacks, providing pretext for war https://t.co/d7fPLW6Fxw pic.twitter.com/tVnqbValPP

-- Danielle Ryan (@DanielleRyanJ) April 15, 2018

This is by no means an exhaustive list. Is there even any need to rehash the lies which were told in the lead-up to the Iraq war? The media here again swallowed the government's lies, one by one -- and 15 years later, the region is still suffering the consequences and very few lessons appear to have been learned.

These are not conspiracy theories. They are cold, hard evidence that the US has no qualms whatsoever about using false flag events and fake evidence to provide pretext for military action.

Continued lack of critical inquiry from the media, given the severe potential consequences of escalating the conflict in Syria, is tantamount to a crime.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Apr 11, 2018] Another step closer to the totalitarian state

Apr 11, 2018 | www.unz.com

Bill Jones , April 10, 2018 at 9:57 pm GMT

Another step closer to the totalitarian state

https://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/homeland-security-to-compile-database-of-journalists-and-media-influencers/

The Department of Homeland Security wants to track the comings and goings of journalists, bloggers and other "media influencers" through a database.

[Apr 10, 2018] The "Russian" Poisoning of the Skirpals In Context

Notable quotes:
"... U.S. government documents declassified in October 2017 admitted that a very high-level 1962 meeting of U.S. government officials – separate from the Joint Chiefs of Staff – also discussed: The possibility of U.S. manufacture or acquisition of Soviet aircraft . There is a possibility that such aircraft could be used in a deception operation designed to confuse enemy planes in the air, to launch a surprise attack against enemy installations or in a provocation operation in which Soviet aircraft would appear to attack U.S. or friendly installations in order to provide an excuse for U.S. intervention. ..."
Apr 10, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Unless you've been living under a rock, by now you know that the British government falsely claimed that irrefutable evidence proved that the Russian government was behind the poisoning of a former Russian double agent and his daughter using a "Novichok" nerve agent.

In response, the UK and US carried out the largest expulsion of Russian diplomats in history.

Now that the wheels have come off this farce, it is interesting to note previous examples of the West falsely blaming Russia for bad acts.

Official German intelligence service documents show that, in 1994, the German intelligence services planted (original German ) plutonium on an airplane coming from Russia, as a way to frame Russia for exporting dangerous radioactive materials which could end up in the hands of terrorists and criminals.

This frame-up job was so successful at whipping up fear that it got German Chancellor Kohl re-elected, and the U.S. used it as an excuse to "help" secure Russia's nuclear facilities, as a way to get access to Russian nuclear secrets.

While everyone "knows" that the Kremlin poisoned Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium, a very high-level French counterterrorism official, Paul Barril, alleges that French, US and UK intelligence worked together to kill Litvinenko and to frame Russia: And see this .

U.S. government documents declassified in October 2017 admitted that a very high-level 1962 meeting of U.S. government officials – separate from the Joint Chiefs of Staff – also discussed: The possibility of U.S. manufacture or acquisition of Soviet aircraft . There is a possibility that such aircraft could be used in a deception operation designed to confuse enemy planes in the air, to launch a surprise attack against enemy installations or in a provocation operation in which Soviet aircraft would appear to attack U.S. or friendly installations in order to provide an excuse for U.S. intervention.

Newsweek ran an article headlined (all caps in original Newsweek title):

U.S. GOVERNMENT PLANNED FALSE FLAG ATTACKS TO START WAR WITH SOVIET UNION, JFK DOCUMENTS SHOW

The article notes:

The U.S. government once wanted to plan false flag attacks with Soviet aircraft to justify war with the USSR or its allies, newly declassified documents surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy show.

***

False flag attacks are covert operations that make it look like an attack was carried out by another group than the group that actually carried them out.

Indeed, falsely blaming other countries for terrorism or violence is the oldest way to create a "justification" for war.

Update: Why the Russian Double-Agent Skripal Could Not Have Been Poisoned with "Novichok"

Umh Sun, 04/08/2018 - 08:58 Permalink

The governments have certainly learned how to mess with the thinking gear of people. I spent most of my life working with inanimate objects not spending much time figuring out how people think. Most of the people that I did try to figure out were personally known to me. It was only in the last few years of my career that I paid any real attention to how people are manipulated. I knew people were easily manipulate for years, just think about how the war in Iraq in 2003 was so popular amoung most people.

are we there yet -> DuneCreature Sun, 04/08/2018 - 17:56 Permalink

Hi, I am from the government. I am here to lie to you. I have so many lies on top of other lies that sometimes they are true. Even the government has lost track. I am not sure if even MIC or Israel knows anymore.

[Apr 09, 2018] There is no doubt that Trump is an elite "false flag". Someone who was intended to be simply PORTRAYED as being anti-establishment, but in reality, one who carried out and amplified everything the establishment wanted. But neoliberal elite overplayed its hand by encouraging hateful anti-Trump rhetoric so much that now everything that Trump will do will garner massive opposition.

Trump as a "false flag operation," That's rich ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... So the paradox is this: how are the elites herding people towards a new war, while at the same time encouraging thoughts and movements which will be a solid opposition block against military action? ..."
"... Concur. Clinton is sociopathic. Trump is narcissistic. The Deep State uses both. The former willing tool, she cares nothing for anyone but herself. The latter, the psychologists in CIA have his profile and manipulate him like a woman with a velvet glove. His inadequacies are easily stroked. ..."
Apr 09, 2018 | thesaker.is

therealestg9 on April 08, 2018 , · at 11:21 pm UTC

There is no doubt that Trump is an elite "false flag". Someone who was intended to be simply PORTRAYED as being anti-establishment, but in reality, one who carried out and amplified everything the establishment wanted. That much is clear and solidified now.

But here is the real strangeness in the situation:

A quick scan of Twitter and Facebook commentary on this new Syria situation shows that a clear majority of Americans are opposed to anything that Trump touches. And this includes military action in Syria, as evidenced from the social media postings. What was once a simple matter of anti-war opposition has turned into a magnified anti-war plus anti-Trump opposition.

So the paradox is this: how are the elites herding people towards a new war, while at the same time encouraging thoughts and movements which will be a solid opposition block against military action?

I think a rational explanation is that the elites simply got overconfident. They overplayed their hand. It will indeed come back to bite them. The American people, whether pro-Trump or anti-Trump, will resist any military action in Syria no matter what. The elites will have to stop this movement and come up with a new strategy towards war.

vot tak on April 09, 2018 , · at 12:37 am UTC
T9

"There is no doubt that Trump is an elite "false flag". Someone who was intended to be simply PORTRAYED as being anti-establishment, but in reality, one who carried out and amplified everything the establishment wanted. That much is clear and solidified now."

Exactly. The main reason trump is better than Clinton, in my opinion, is all that opposition to Trump we see, would not be there against a Clinton regime. Both in the u.s. and international in the west.

Larchmonter445 on April 09, 2018 , · at 7:35 am UTC
Concur. Clinton is sociopathic. Trump is narcissistic. The Deep State uses both. The former willing tool, she cares nothing for anyone but herself. The latter, the psychologists in CIA have his profile and manipulate him like a woman with a velvet glove. His inadequacies are easily stroked.
Ahmed on April 09, 2018 , · at 11:05 am UTC
Larchmonter – "His inadequacies are easily stroked." lol I think Stormy Daniels would concur.

[Apr 04, 2018] A Special Relationship Born in Hell, by Philip Giraldi

Apr 03, 2018 | www.unz.com

Paul C. , April 3, 2018 at 5:51 am GMT

@exiled off mainstreet

I agree.

Just consider 9/11. Mossad was caught with bombs in NYC the day of and yet they were released and there's no mention in the media. All the evidence Chris Bollyn and others have put together points to a zionist "inside" operation. Over 2,300 engineers conclude the government's narrative "defies physics", not to mention logic. WTC Building 7 collapses in 7 seconds and this is ignored without repercussion. 3,000 died that day and millions since as a result (fake "War on Terror", actual "War OF Terror").

The country has been overthrown from within. The question is what to do? How do we wake up the masses suffering from Stockholm Syndrome? Or is it best to get the heck out of dodge before things unravel and escalate?

We have a fake government, fake media, fake legal system (UCC contract law, no common law), fake education, fake history, fake air/skies (chemtrails, geo-engineering), fake water (fluoridated), fake food (GMO). 5G is coming, cameras are going up everywhere. We're close to a police state and martial law can't be far off. Fake President. I deep down knew he wasn't real because it's not possible. http://themillenniumreport.com

It's a pretty bleak picture. We need an awakening / revolution.

Frankie P , April 3, 2018 at 6:05 am GMT
@exiled off mainstreet

The vampire squid has its much larger and more powerful prey so under control that there is almost no need for it to deliver orders and commands. The evil parasite has a thought and the host carries out the action as if the blood/brain barrier has been breached. The only remaining question for sensible realists concerns how much time should pass before they begin to wish for/hope for/work to bring about the downfall of the host prey as it becomes clearer and more obvious that its downfall is the only way to destroy the evil parasite and spare the rest of the world.

Frankie P

Anon [183] Disclaimer , April 3, 2018 at 6:11 am GMT
The critical mistake that the CIA and other institutions of the American deep state made was in failing to understand that media is critical infrastructure just as much as roads, bridges, ports and the electrical grid and therefore needed to be kept out of the cartelized control of a tiny ethnic group with foreign allegiances. They allowed this critical infrastructure be bought up by this foreign minority and thereby used to brainwash the American public and control the perimeter of the debate. This was a catastrophic mistake which is the primary root cause of most of America's greatest problems from immigration to foreign wars in the Middle East.

If effect, the American media is controlled by a foreign mafia, until and unless it is dealt with as such, in the same manner as the Italian mafia, if necessary, America will continue to be run for foreign interests. Most countries are much smarter than us (e.g., China). They never would have let this happen.

Brian Roberts: Comcast and MSNBC
Aviv Nevo: Time Warner and CNN.
Sulzburger family: NYTimes
Sumner Rothstein: CBS

Biff , April 3, 2018 at 6:23 am GMT
Unfortunately, the police forces in the U.S. loves the way the Israeli military does business. Their costumes and tactics are becoming quite similar.
Mark James , April 3, 2018 at 6:48 am GMT
You won't hear about shooting Gaza protesters on prime time MSNBC, CNN shows for two reasons. The guests either wouldn't be inclined to speak about it, for ideological and ethic reasons. Or, those that might like to express concern would feel sufficiently threatened that they would never be asked to come back.

Oh Lord, I want that money is a line from The Producers . But it's applicable here. Many of these cable contributors know what's expected of them and deliver safe answers so they can continue cashing scale appearance checks. And any show with a negative focus on Israel would be attacked by the Israel Lobby, forthwith.

mark green , April 3, 2018 at 8:49 am GMT
There are many compelling reasons for the US to disengage from these costly, intractable, religious-based MidEast conflicts.

So why haven't these sensible ideas gotten through to average Americans?

Because dominant forces want these dissenting thoughts and opinions eradicated, silenced or altogether demonized.

... ... ...

Mike Garrett , April 3, 2018 at 9:37 am GMT
I spent several summers in Israel when I was a college student in 1968 and 1969. When I went back to the University of North Carolina I took a course in the Arab/Israel Dispute; it was a seminar that was methodically fair, telling both sides of the story. After class the professor and I would walk to our cars in faculty parking areas. He would actually look over his shoulder before admitting that most to the people in his field were strongly in favor of the Palestinians, since the Jews had such a strangle-hold on every American university.
Randal , April 3, 2018 at 10:54 am GMT
Certainly those on the right whose priorities are most directly under attack by powerful jewish lobbies and oligarchs should tactically support the idea of cutting off any positive connections with Israel, until jewish money stops promoting:

Interventionist wars;

The imposition of speech taboos and ultimately speechcrime laws (as in Europe and the UK) under the pretexts of suppressing "hate speech" and the political correctness smears (anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, islamophobia etc);

Mass immigration.

annamaria , April 3, 2018 at 11:10 am GMT
@NoseytheDuke

Ziocons (Israel-firsters) on the march, on the US taxpayers expense: https://www.globalresearch.ca/neoconservative-ideology-in-the-trump-white-house-u-s-military-power-torture-and-the-defense-of-israel/5634336

"When Mr. Bush [the lesser] cited its most simplified tenet -- that the US should seek to promote liberal democracy around the world -- as a key case for invading Iraq, neoconservatism was suddenly everywhere. It was a unified ideology that justified military adventurism, sanctioned torture and promoted aggressive Zionism."

anarchyst , April 3, 2018 at 11:11 am GMT
Normally, on the 50th anniversary of any notable event, there is almost always recognition in the mainstream media not so for the deliberate Israeli attack on the USS Liberty (GTR-5). The American mainstream media was totally silent -- not a single peep or mention of this act of war by Israel. This is PROOF that our mainstream media is "owned", lock, stock and barrel by Israel
annamaria , April 3, 2018 at 11:18 am GMT
https://www.globalresearch.ca/neoconservative-ideology-in-the-trump-white-house-u-s-military-power-torture-and-the-defense-of-israel/5634336

"One of the most influential neoconservatives in Washington is Robert Kagan, the husband of Victoria Nuland who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs under the Obama administration (and one of the architects of the Ukraine's civil war) describes himself as a "liberal interventionist"

Between the 1950′s and the 1960′s, a political movement known as Neo-conservatism was born under the liberal hawks of the Democratic Party in the United States. Then came the Vietnam war where the liberal hawks called for military action to prevent the Communists from taking power in Vietnam. The neocons were also proponents of the Cold War and supporters of Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine The neocons made their way to the Reagan administration with Eliot Abrams and company with wars in Central America including Nicaragua and El Salvador."

-- In any civilized society, the Kagans clan et al would have been isolated like a plague from the population. The US has become truly zionized by the Trotskyists who have been working synergetically with the MIC and the CIA.
.

anarchyst , April 3, 2018 at 11:21 am GMT
@Biff

It is a loosely guarded secret that American "law enforcement" has embraced Israeli "law enforcement" tactics (which are akin to military practices). As Israel is on a constant "war footing", its tactics are contentious and confrontational. In fact, American "law enforcement" agencies routinely send their officers to Israel to receive "training" in Israeli police tactics. There is no room for Israeli tactics in American "law enforcement".

"Escalation of force" used to be the cornerstone of American "law enforcement", but no more. Police expect us mere mundanes to cower in fear, and obey their (sometimes confusing and ridiculous) commands without question. This goes hand-in-hand with the militarization of American "law enforcement". Of course, us mere mundanes are expected to embrace the "escalation of force" doctrine under penalty of law.

We are all Palestinians now

Tbbh , April 3, 2018 at 12:04 pm GMT
SERIOUS question for people that want to roll back borders to where they were over a half century ago (or wherever their 0 year, they made up, is):

Can we put Instanbul back in charge of the muddy yeast, being as Erdogan seems tremendously trustworthy, or maybe swap ruling families back to where they were before some of the swaps? Moving royal fams around is near tradition, at this point.

Where is the "baseline" and why?

For the unedumacated:

http://markcurtis.info/2016/11/02/how-britain-carved-up-the-middle-east-and-helped-create-saudi-arabia/

Not a proper history, but, if you are actually interested, there is much more to read. They even put most of this history in books, which are often the place to go after web comments. Peer review and everything, on a good day.

Tbbh , April 3, 2018 at 12:48 pm GMT
@CalDre

If you stand in front of a Chinese tank, you die. If you throw rocks at an Israeli tank, you die. Nothing novel in either case.

Russia has been very restrained re: ukies. Was zero reason to turn it into Chechnya, and that is exactly what State was angling for. On a meddling n garbage angle: Hell, Obummer tried to pull off a coup in Tatarstan (on the Volga ) and I wish I was imagining it, but they tried to create a Free Tatarstan Army was heavily under-reported by Western media.

annamaria , April 3, 2018 at 1:03 pm GMT
@Tbbh

The ziocon triumph in dumbing down the US' and UK ' "establishment" (in Russian with English subtitles): http://thesaker.is/were-not-going-to-participate-in-the-madness-zakharova-says-rf-will-retaliate-but-keep-it-sane/

-- Perversity and indignity, the twin children of the zionized mentality of the US & UK deciders.

RebelWriter , April 3, 2018 at 1:09 pm GMT
Funny how perfectly the Israelis mimic the Nazis they kvetch about all the time, if one believe the stories they tell. They keep the untermensch Palestinians in ghettos, where they shoot them and gas them, and otherwise treat them like vermin. No doubt some commenters here agree that they are vermin. How long until Israel builds them showers?

Is a total lack of introspection heritable?

JackAlbatross , April 3, 2018 at 12:46 pm GMT
I appreciate Giraldi's articulate and concise summary of the problem. I would also add that Israel had also been designated by the UN as the world's leader in human slavery and sex trafficking, another thing you'll never hear reported in America's Jewish-controlled media. Based on that alone we should be enacting sanctions against Israel.

But I have noticed for decades the recurring quiet void that follows the "something must be done" part in the endless articles I've read on the subject, as if that iron wall of Jewish censorship and power is eternally insurmountable. It isn't.

We should know by now that there is not going to be a political solution, and I have long since stopped dreaming about voting Israeli collaborators out of our government.

Put simply, Jewish power comes from money and that money comes from us. The populace may complain endlessly about Washington Post propaganda and its pernicious efforts to overthrow our democratically elected president, but every December Americans will dump a few billion dollars into Jeff Bezos' pocket. It's time to stop.

You can already see the effects of Americans boycotting Hollywood and the NFL -- it works.

What I would like to see everyone do is offer a solution instead of another explication of the problems. Essentially, how do we overthrow this Jewish police state we live in and regain control of our own country before it's too late?

My suggestion is a comprehensive economic boycott against all Jewish goods and services.

You have a better solution? Let's hear it. In fact, I would love to see the Unz Review commit to a series of "solution" articles.

Wizard of Oz , April 3, 2018 at 12:52 pm GMT
@Bradrrr

8Are you saying that only a response which shows that a civlian's life is not safe if he engages in a peaceful -- and certainly not life threatening -- demonstration against the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is adequate to deal with such a demonstration without severely risking the security of Israel?

Your answer, impled by what you have already said, appears to be "Yes". Really!?

Z-man , April 3, 2018 at 12:55 pm GMT
@jilles dykstra

Some of this blame has to be put on the lap of the feckless Arab nation. Egypt, Jordan and of course the coward princes in Saudi Arabia. El Sisi is a banana republic despot looking, poor man's version of Mubarak, the King of Jordan is trying to stay above it all and the worst is that 'idiot savant' gorilla sized 'clown prince' MBS who has become good buds with that weird (even for a Jew) Trump son-in-law Jared . Does he own a chain of jewelry stores? (Grin)

The Turkish emir Erdogan is doing the heavy lifting for these weak Arabs. At least he's trading insults with 'Yahoo'.

The United States, my country, unfortunately is Zionist Occupied Territory. I just started picking fights on Beitbart and while many of the posters I assume are Zionist trolls some have to be real posters and there the pro Zionist posters outnumbered the anti Zionist ones at least 5 to 1.

I bow my head in shame for my once great and now Zionist occupied country.

ISmellBagels , April 3, 2018 at 1:50 pm GMT
The sad truth is, most Americans don't really care what is happening eight thousand miles away, no matter how horrific, and no matter that their money is being used to support it. They drink the media koolaid, and think mostly about what's for dinner and where to go on vacation this year. This is how the farce goes on. It makes the zio animals smile.
Twodees Partain , April 3, 2018 at 2:31 pm GMT
@Paul C.

Yes, there's a lot of fakery going on, Paul. I agree that the "special relationship" benefits Israel exclusively and that it has reached the stage of being undeniable. I can't quite accept this latest Q, though. His communiques sound too much like the average blog commenter's repetitive postings, as though the average blog commenter is the target audience.

jconsley , April 3, 2018 at 2:42 pm GMT
Everyone should hope that Justin Raimondo and the readership of "Antiwar.com" reads Giraldi's facts as written in this article. Moreover, all the subscribers of the New York Times and Washington Post should be apprised of the facts that these two publishers deliberately withhold from readers. U.S. citizens who are taxed to support these war crimes are purposely kept ignorant of the facts. Nevertheless, the world is aware of U.S. hypocritical support for Israel's disdain of international law and the horrible war crimes that occur in Israel's unlawful occupation of Palestinian captured land.
anonymous [341] Disclaimer , April 3, 2018 at 2:57 pm GMT

sad realization that the blood of many innocent people is, to a considerable extent, on our hands

Sad to say, most Americans don't know, don't want to know and don't care. The US, since the end of the last world war, has caused millions to die all over the world either directly or indirectly. This has gone on up to the present day. The collective response of the average American to all that has been a collective yawn. The only fightback came during the Vietnam war when the costs and body counts started getting too high. Otherwise if the furriners get killed at a low cost to us then no problem. Only about perhaps 2-5% of the American public evinces any moral misgivings about the mass atrocities it's supposed government has carried out routinely. Because of this it's safe to conclude that America is a nation of moral defectives so don't expect much from them. In this context the recent Israeli actions are small change and will be memory-holed quickly. They are America's local pit bull and therefore have the umbrella of American protection. It's also interesting to note how the Palestinians have been abandoned by the leadership of some of their supposed fellow Arab states of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, all US client-flunkies. Non-Arabs seem to be among the ones most discomfited by these recent events.

Che Guava , April 3, 2018 at 3:15 pm GMT
I would suspect I am not the first to say it (but may be), from the outside, this 'special relationship' looks much like the special relationship between the face-hugger and the character John Hurt is playing in Alien .
flashlight joe , April 3, 2018 at 3:17 pm GMT
"The sad truth is, most Americans don't really care what is happening eight thousand miles away"

They didn't care what happened in Vegas, either. Illegal gun running, money laundering, mobsters working with the FBI and ATF, 58 innocent Americans dead, hundreds more wounded.

But hey, pretty girls and Harvey Weinstein's wee wee are much more important. Everyone did see that this sex scandal was a deliberate news bomb to knock Vegas off the news, right?

Jake , April 3, 2018 at 3:28 pm GMT
@CCR

The Leon Trotsky position was that all gentile Christians must be forced to deny Christ and Church and affirm atheism, and all nations on the planet must be forced to accept Marxism.

Are you stupid enough to label Trotsky a right winger?

Not many leftists do, but all kinds of leftist Jews and Jewish Neocons call Stalin some type of fascist. Of course, economically, all fascists are socialists.

[Apr 03, 2018] Americans Trust 'Our' Intelligence Agencies. Should We

Notable quotes:
"... "We don't torture people. Okay?" Tenet says. ..."
"... "Come on, George," Pelley says. ..."
"... "We don't torture people," Tenet maintains. ..."
"... "Khalid Sheikh Mohammad?" Pelley asks. ..."
"... "We don't torture people," Tenet says. ..."
"... "Water boarding?" Pelley asks. ..."
"... "We do not – I don't talk about techniques," Tenet replies. ..."
"... "It's torture," Pelley says. ..."
"... "And we don't torture people." ..."
"... any Government that's friendly toward Russia ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
Apr 03, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

The record is clear that 'our' (that is, the ruling Establishment's) intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, have lied to the public many times, actually lie routinely -- but these lies are always revealed only decades later, by historians, which is too late, because the damage was already done. Think, for example, of just two of the now-famous cases, Iran 1953 , and Chile 1973 , in both of which instances the US Government ended a democracy abroad, and established a brutal dictatorship there (the Shah in Iran, and Pinochet in Chile) -- but what good can a historian do, when the Government and its 'news'-media were persistently lying, and they had fooled the US public, at the time -- which is all that really counted (and ever will count)? Can a historian undo the damage that the Government and its propaganda-agencies had perpetrated, by means of their lies, and coups, and invasions? Never. But this Government, and its propaganda-agents, claim to defend democracies, not to end them. Can it actually be a democracy, if it's doing such things, and doing it time after time?

Something's deeply wrong here. Government by deceit, cannot be a democracy. And, yet, the public still don't get the message, even after it has been delivered to us in history-books. By then, it's no longer in the news, and so only few people really care about it. The message of history is not learned. The public still accepts the ongoing lies -- the new lies, in the new 'news', for the new atrocities.

During the period after the Soviet Union, and its communism, and its Warsaw Pact military alliance, all ended in 1991, the US-and-allied historical record (all now after the Cold War has supposedly been over) is even worse, and is even more clearly evil, because the ideological excuse that had formerly existed (and which was only the excuse, and not the reason, in most cases, such as in Iran, and in Chile) is gone.

Iraq in 2003 was a particularly blatant demonstration of the US-Government's psychopathy regarding foreign affairs. So: let's consider this example (hopefully, to learn a lesson from it -- which still hasn't yet been learnt):

Bill Clinton's CIA chief George Tenet told President George W. Bush that convincing the American people that Saddam Hussein had WMD, weapons of mass destruction, was "a slam-dunk." His job wasn't to find the truth, but to authenticate the 'evidence' to back up the President, and Tenet did just that. The American people went for it, even though no WMD actually remained in Iraq, because the U.N. inspectors in 1998 had destroyed all of them, and because there was no indication (other than hired and coerced testimony, and especially fabrications from CIA-partnered anti-Saddam Iraqis such as Ahmed Chalabi ) that there had been restored in Iraq any WMD program. A crucial date was 7 September 2002, when George W. Bush and Tony Blair both said that a new report had just been issued by the IAEA saying that Saddam Hussein was only six months away from having a nuclear weapon. The IAEA promptly denied that it had issued any such "new report" at all, and the 'news' media simply ignored the denial, which the IAEA then repeated weeks later, and it again was ignored ; so, the false impression, that such an IAEA report had been issued, remained in the publics' minds, and they favored invading Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein before there would be, as Condoleezza Rice warned the next day following Bush-Blair, on September 8th, a "mushroom cloud" . It was all just lies -- lies that were believed, at the time, and even believed by many for a long time after we invaded. Some of these lies were derived from torturing detainees -- torturing them to say what the US and British regimes wanted them to say.

On 25 April 2007, Tenet told CBS "60 Minutes" that

"We don't torture people. Okay?" Tenet says.

"Come on, George," Pelley says.

"We don't torture people," Tenet maintains.

"Khalid Sheikh Mohammad?" Pelley asks.

"We don't torture people," Tenet says.

"Water boarding?" Pelley asks.

"We do not – I don't talk about techniques," Tenet replies.

"It's torture," Pelley says.

"And we don't torture people."

US President Donald Trump has now appointed to lead the CIA the very same woman, Gina Haspel, who had operated, under Tenet, under Bush, the CIA "black site" in Thailand, where Abu Zubaydeh was waterboarded 83 times and otherwise tortured so that he lost his left eye. The reason why he was being tortured was in order to extract from him testimony that Saddam Hussein had been involved in 9/11, but Zubaydeh didn't even know anything about any such matter, and tried desperately to say what he thought his torturers wanted him to say, so as to stop these tortures, but he didn't know that they were intending to torture him until he would implicate Saddam Hussein in causing the 9/11 attacks. And so the torturing just went on and on. The CIA's Haspel finally gave up, after deciding that he'd die if they continued any further. The problem now was to hide him from the public. So, Zubaydeh subsequently has been held incommunicado at Guantanamo since 2001, so that he can't communicate with anyone in the outside world, and thus the crimes of George Bush and his employee George Tenet and his employee Gina Haspel, can't be prosecuted. And, now, Trump appoints her to Tenet's old spot, as the CIA Director. So: Bush had hired her, then protected her. Obama protected instead of prosecuted her. And, finally, Trump now promotes her, to be the CIA's new chief. She has demonstrated herself to be a reliable liar for whomever is her boss. Trump therefore can trust her to vouch for whatever he wants her to 'prove', to whatever American suckers still remain, as being American suckers.

This isn't new, but maybe it's just worse. Think JFK assassination. Think RFK assassination. Think MLK assassination. And, even think about the CIA's Gladio operation, which since the very start of the CIA , has been setting up atrocities designed to deceive their publics, so as to blame, first, the USSR's Government, and then, now, Russia's Government. (And, also, Iran's Government, and Iraq's Government, and Syria's Government, and Libya's Government, and Ukraine's Government -- any Government that's friendly toward Russia -- all for the purpose of "regime-change," so as to pump up the sales of corporations such as Lockheed Martin and BAE, and to extend the properties of oil and gas companies like ExxonMobil . Lying to the public, in order to back up what the President wants, is what the American 'intelligence' community is designed to do . And, things aren't much better in UK. (But Seymour Hersh reported that, at least one time, they were somewhat better .)

Is this type of government really in service to the public, anywhere? It is in service to the allied aristocracies -- those of US & Israel & Sauds & British & etc. -- who own those weapons-making firms. The military tail wags this 'democratic' dog.

Globally, there is a competition between aristocracies, and they are contending gangs. That's no different than was the case leading up to WW I . But WW III will end it all -- and all of us -- unless the public wises up, and fast, and recognizes whom their real enemies are (which are internal, not external). Without cooperation from the news-media (owned by those aristocracies), to expose (instead of spread) the frauds, WW III -- the end of everything -- is in the cards. It's in the cards, right now. And, this time, it's not a mistake. It won't need any wild assassin to spark the conflagration . Instead, it's the plan . It has actually been building ever since 24 February 1990 . And this has been even more confirmed now .

Should we trust 'our' intelligence agencies to tell us how they're carrying out the plan? Are we idiots? Or is it just that the 'news' media are an arm of the CIA ? In fact, "America's Top Scientists Confirm: US Goal Now Is to Conquer Russia" , but did you read about that in the New York Times , or Washington Post , or UK's Guardian , or at all?

Patriotism is to the public, not to the rulers. Any rulers who expect it to be to them, instead of to the public, are simply tyrants -- they are traitors, who happen to rule the public. Do we live in a dictatorship, or in a democracy? If it's a dictatorship ( such as the best available evidence shows that America is ), then this, which we are now experiencing, is simply par for the course. But will we continue to accept it? Or, will we, finally, learn from history ? (And, if so, then will we do it fast enough, under the prevailing circumstances?) The time to decide, and to act, could be short . Have we had enough now, of that lying? Because, accepting just a little bit more of it, could mean the end of everything. If it's not going to be the end of the liars, it will probably soon be the end of everything. Because that's the path we now are on.

[Apr 02, 2018] Steal This Book The Publishing Misadventures of a CIA Whistleblower

Notable quotes:
"... The Secret Team ..."
"... is an ex-geek turned writer and editor. He hails from Boston and writes about whatever distortions of reality strike his fancy. Currently, he's pedaling a novel chronicling the lives and times of members of a cell of terrorists in Europe, completing a collection of essays on high technology delusions, and can be found barking at progressivepilgrim.review. ..."
Apr 02, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

by Geoff Dutton

The decorated cold-warrior Air Force Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty would have turned 100 last June. Today few remember him, but those who do may recall him as an arch military intelligence insider who alerted the nation to the capture of reins of government by the intelligence establishment, from the Korean Conflict forward to this day. He served his country under five presidents, first as an Army Air officer who saw service in Africa, South Asia, and Japan in WWII, ending up an Air Force Major assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [1] As Chief of Special Operations there, he coordinated CIA and military activities between JCS, directorates of the CIA, the National Security Council, and teams in the field. A key player, Prouty was privy to top-secret planning and policy documents and lists of CIA plants in civilian and military organizations, including CIA front companies. There was little he didn't know about how the agency operated its clandestine operations and little anyone around him knew more about. His Rolodex must have been amazing.

But then, having retired with accolades in 1964 to work as a banker and now and then a bit of a fixer, he wrote a book exposing it all that ruffled a lot of institutional feathers. In almost unbearable detail, The Secret Team (Prentice-Hall 1973) detailed how from the get-go, Allen Dulles' CIA insinuated itself into national institutions to become a driver of policies and armed interventions that few officials would or could resist. Both John F. and Robert F. Kennedy tried to rein in the agency and tragically failed. Prouty's 1993 book, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy , served as grist for Oliver Stone's film JFK by methodically piecing together evidence for an inside job that brought the president down. [2]

That book's Epilog (inexplicably missing from the paperback version) contains some fairly juicy tidbits, assuming they weren't fake news. In it, Prouty describes a meeting at a "Businessmen's Club in Manhattan at which unnamed bankers and defense contractors were in an uproar over the rumor that JFK would decamp US forces from Vietnam:

An elderly member, who used to visit the Dulles family in their summer home on Henderson Bay, leaned over toward the center of that small group and almost in a whisper said that his boys had just completed a ten-year war in Vietnam. The total was in the thousands, and the cost ran into the billions of dollars. Then he looked around the group of old cronies and snarled, "That goddamn Kennedy bastard has been working all summer with some of Old Joe's Irish Mafia and his favorite generals and they are planning every which way to get us out of Vietnam. This can't happen. He's got to go. Right now he's a sure thing for reelection and then there is Bobby and after him Teddy. I tell you that Kennedy has got to go."

But it was The Secret Team that most occasioned the ire of the intelligence establishment, especially for its workaday descriptions of the methods by which the CIA usurped power and leveraged authority to become a self-selected branch of the Executive and the military, using techniques borrowed from Machiavelli to J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to get its way. Ineffectual attempts were immediately made to suppress the book, which was twice reprinted. More successful was the campaign to deep-six the second edition, a paperback put out in 1979 by Ballantine Books. Of the 100,000 printed, few remain available today, selling on Amazon for $342 and up . (Amazon sells used copies of the original hardback and a Kindle version of it for more reasonable amounts.)

That notwithstanding, thanks to the efforts of Prouty's widow and acolyte Len Osanic (who runs The Col. L Fletcher Prouty Reference Site , from which part of this article was taken), the paperback was reissued in 2011 via SkyHorse Publishing , with a Foreword by Jesse Ventura. And, if the most recent version of TST you crave, eager reader, you needn't bother to buy it.

Go straightaway to a convenient, complete, and free Web edition that ratical.org, has cached for your inspection.

* * *

Prouty lived in Arlington Virginia, where he died at 84 and continues to occupy from Arlington National Cemetery. He was writing articles and giving interviews up until the end. Somehow I doubt he could have made it much past retirement without some protection from the inside, out of concern for his files and Rolodex if nothing else. His texts continue to exert influence despite concerted efforts to suppress them. In the Author's Note from what would have been TST's third edition (taken from ratical.org ) he explains how he came to publish his book and how the suppression manifested itself:

After I had given the manuscript of the original draft of this book to my editor at Prentice- Hall, in 1972; and had received the galley proof of the first edition back from him, he called me to suggest that I keep it in a safe place at all times. He told me that his home had been broken into the night before, and he suspected it was an attempt to steal his copy of that galley proof. He said, "They didn't get it. It was under the seat of the Volkswagon."

A few days later a nationwide release by the well-known Washington columnist, Jack Anderson, appeared across the country, "Book Bares CIA's Dirty Tricks". In that column, Anderson reported that the CIA had contacted a well-known bookstore in Washington and asked one of the employees to see if he could get a copy of the galley from me, and agreed to pay him $500, if he did. I agreed to meet him at my home that evening.

I suspected his call, but invited him anyway. In the meantime I set up a tape recorder in the umbrella stand near my front door and arranged for it to turn on when I switched on the overhead on the front porch. With that arrangement, I recorded the whole visit including his final burst, "They promised me $500.00, if I got that galley proof." I took that tape to Anderson, and it was the basis of his March 6, 1973 column. The underground attack didn't quit there.

After excellent early sales of The Secret Team during which Prentice ­Hall printed three editions of the book, and it had received more than 100 favorable reviews, I was invited to meet Ian Ballantine, the founder of Ballantine Books. He told me that he liked the book and would publish 100,000 copies in paperback as soon as he could complete the deal with Prentice-Hall. Soon there were 100,000 paperbacks in bookstores all around the country.

Then one day a business associate in Seattle called to tell me that the bookstore next to his office building had had a window full of books the day before, and none the day of his call. They claimed they had never had the book. I called other associates around the country. I got the same story from all over the country. The paperback had vanished. At the same time I learned that Mr. Ballantine had sold his company. I travelled to New York to visit the new "Ballantine Books" president. He professed to know nothing about me, and my book. That was the end of that surge of publication. For some unknown reason Prentice-Hall was out of my book also. It became an extinct species.

Coincidental to that, I received a letter from a Member of Parliament in Canberra, Australia, who wrote that he had been in England recently visiting in the home of a friend who was a Member of the British Parliament. While there, he discovered The Secret Team on a coffee table and during odd hours had begun to read it.

Upon return to Canberra he sent his clerk to get him a copy of the book. Not finding it in the stores, the clerk had gone to the Customs Office where he learned that 3,500 copies of The Secret Team had arrived, and on that same date had been purchased by a Colonel from the Royal Australian Army. The book was dead everywhere.

The campaign to kill the book was nationwide and world-wide. It was removed from the Library of Congress and from College libraries as letters I received attested all too frequently.

That was twenty years ago. Today I have been asked to rewrite the book and bring it up to date. Those who have the book speak highly of it, and those who do not have it have been asking for it. With that incentive, I have begun from page one to bring it up to date and to provide information that I have learned since my first manuscript.

In the beginning, this book was based upon my unusual experience in the Pentagon during 1955-1964 and the concept of the book jtself was the outgrowth of a series of luncheon conversations, 1969-1970, with my friends Bob Myers, Publisher of the New Republic, Charlie Peters, founder of The Washington Monthly, and Ben Schemmer, editor and publisher of the Armed Forces Journal, and Derek Shearer. They were all experienced in the ways and games played in Washington, and they tagged my stories those of a "Secret Team." This idea grew and was polished during many subsequent luncheons.

After my retirement from the Air Force, 1964, I moved from an office in the Joint Chiefs of Staff area of the Pentagon to become Manager of the Branch Bank on the Concourse of that great building. This was an interesting move for many reasons, not the least of which was that it kept me in business and social contact with many of the men I had met and worked with during my nine years of Air Force duties in that building. It kept me up-to-date with the old "fun-and-games" gang.

After graduating from the Graduate School of Banking, University of Wisconsin, I transfered to a bank in Washington where in the course of business I met Ben Schemmer. He needed a loan that would enable him to acquire the old Armed Forces Journal. During that business process I met two of Ben's friends Bob Myers and Charlie Peters. We spent many most enjoyable business luncheons together. This is where "The Secret Team" emerged from a pattern of ideas to a manuscript.

As they heard my stories about my work with the CIA, and especially about the role of the military in support of the world-wide, clandestine operations of the CIA, they urged me to write about those fascinating nine years of a 23-year military career. During the Spring of 1970 I put an article together that we agreed to call "The Secret Team", and Charlie Peters published it in the May 1970 issue of The Washington Monthly.

Before I had seen the published article myself, two editors of major publishers in New York called me and asked for appointments. I met with both, and agreed to accept the offer to write a book of the same name, and same concept of The Secret Team from Bram Cavin, Senior Editor with Prentice-Hall.

After all but finishing the manuscript, with my inexperienced typing of some 440 pages, I sat down to a Sunday breakfast on June 13, 1971 and saw the headlines of the New York Times with its publication of the "purloined" Pentagon Papers. [Any reader of the "Pentagon Papers" should be warned that although they were commissioned on June 17, 1967, by the Secretary of Defense as "the history of United States involvement in Vietnam from World War II [Sept 2, 1945] to the present" [1968], they are unreliable, inaccurate and marred by serious omissions. They are a contrived history, at best, even though they were written by a selected Task Force under Pentagon leadership.]

One of the first excerpts from those papers was a TOP SECRET document that I had worked on in late 1963. Then I found more of the same. With that, I knew that I could vastly improve what I had been writing by making use of that hoard of classified material that "Daniel Ellsberg had left on the doorstep of the Times," and other papers. Up until that time I had deliberately avoided the use of some of my old records and copies of highly classified documents. The publication of the Pentagon Papers changed all that. They were now in the public domain. I decided to call my editor and tell him what we had with the "Pentagon Papers" and to ask for more time to re-write my manuscript. He agreed without hesitation. From that time on I began my "Doctorate" course in, a) book publishing and, b) book annihilation.

As we see, by some time in 1975 The Secret Team was extinct; but unlike the dinosaur and others, it did not even leave its footprints in the sands of time. There may be some forty to fifty thousand copies on private book shelves. A letter from a professor informed me that his department had ordered more than forty of the books to be kept on the shelves of his university library for assignment purposes. At the start of the new school year his students reported that the books were not on the shelves and the registry cards were not in the master file. The librarians informed them that the book did not exist.

With that letter in mind, I dropped into the Library of Congress to see if The Secret Team was on the shelves where I had seen it earlier. It was not, and it was not even in that library's master file. It is now an official non-book.

I was a writer whose book had been cancelled by a major publisher and a major paperback publisher under the persuasive hand of the CIA. Now, after more than twenty years the flames of censorship still sweep across the land. Despite that, here we go again with a new revised edition of The Secret Team.

One last caveat. Don't expect to learn anything new on Wikipedia . His page has been repeatedly doctored to remove any reference to prouty.org and cast him as an unreliable source. Even in his serviceman's grave, the longwinded Leroy Fletcher Prouty continues to be cashiered, but still heard.

Notes.

[1] Leroy Fletcher Prouty (January 24, 1917 – June 5, 2001) was Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy in 1962-63. Prouty earned the position after nearly ten years in the Pentagon providing military support to CIA clandestine operations. Prouty was awarded the Legion of Merit for his efforts, and after his retirement in 1964 was further awarded a Joint Chiefs of Staff Commendation Medal by General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the 1970s, Prouty became a writer and historical commentator, focusing on Cold War history, the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Kennedy assassination. The character "X" in Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK was based largely on Prouty, who acted as a consultant on the film. (From proutypedia .)

[2] Conservative Marquette University Associate Professor of Political Science John McAdams (currently suspended for criticizing a graduate assistant on his blog for abridging a homophobic student's First Amendment rights by preventing him from speaking in class) vociferously disagrees with Prouty and other JFK assassination conspiracy theorists on his (Marquette) site Kennedy Assassination Home Page . See its subpage labeling Prouty as an "All-Purpose Conspiracy Expert." Yet, McAdams takes the assessment of Prouty (that he has a "wacky imagination") by General and regime-change expert Edward Lansdale at face value. Prouty asserts that Lansdale was present at Dealy Plaza at the moment JFK was killed and had unaccountably billeted Prouty to Antarctica at the time to chaperone a party of VIPs. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Geoff Dutton

Geoff Dutton is an ex-geek turned writer and editor. He hails from Boston and writes about whatever distortions of reality strike his fancy. Currently, he's pedaling a novel chronicling the lives and times of members of a cell of terrorists in Europe, completing a collection of essays on high technology delusions, and can be found barking at progressivepilgrim.review.

[Mar 31, 2018] RFK and Nixon immediately understood the assassination was a CIA-led wet-works operation since they chaired the assassination committees themselves in the past

Highly recommended!
This hypothesis about JFK preserves currency for along time: "When JFK started dismantling the CIA Deep State and ending the Cold War with the USSR, Dulles dispatched a CIA hit-squad to gun down the President. (RFK and Nixon immediately understood the assassination was a CIA-led wet-works operation since they chaired the assassination committees themselves in the past). "
Notable quotes:
"... The liberal order aka the New British Empire, was born 70 years ago by firebombing and nuking undefended civilian targets. It proceeded to launch serial genocidal rampages in the Koreas, SE Asia, Latin America until finally burning down a large portion of the Middle East. ..."
"... The liberal order is dying because it is led by criminally depraved Predators who have pauperized the labor force and created political strife, though the populists don't pose much threat to the liberal-order Predators. ..."
"... However by shipping the productive Western economies overseas to Asia, the US in particular cannot finance and physically support a military empire or the required R&D to stay competitive on the commercial and military front. ..."
Mar 31, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Posa Fri, 03/30/2018 - 23:10 Permalink

The usual self-serving swill from the Best and the Brightest of the Predator Class out of the CFR via Haas.

The liberal order aka the New British Empire, was born 70 years ago by firebombing and nuking undefended civilian targets. It proceeded to launch serial genocidal rampages in the Koreas, SE Asia, Latin America until finally burning down a large portion of the Middle East.

The fact that there has not been a catastrophic nuclear war is pure dumb luck. The Deep State came within seconds of engineering a nuclear cataclysm off the waters of Cuba in 1962. When JFK started dismantling the CIA Deep State and ending the Cold War with the USSR, Dulles dispatched a CIA hit-squad to gun down the President. (RFK and Nixon immediately understood the assassination was a CIA-led wet-works operation since they chaired the assassination committees themselves in the past).

The liberal order is dying because it is led by criminally depraved Predators who have pauperized the labor force and created political strife, though the populists don't pose much threat to the liberal-order Predators.

However by shipping the productive Western economies overseas to Asia, the US in particular cannot finance and physically support a military empire or the required R&D to stay competitive on the commercial and military front.

So the US Imperialists are being eclipsed by the Sino-Russo Alliance and wants us to believe this is a great tragedy. Meanwhile the same crew of Liberal -neoCon Deep Staters presses on with wars and tensions that are slipping out of control.

[Mar 31, 2018] Finally, Kennedy had enough, and in a personal letter dated May 18, 1963, the president warned that unless American inspectors were allowed into Dimona (meaning the end of any military activities), Israel would find itself totally isolated. Rather than answering, Ben-Gurion abruptly resigned

Notable quotes:
"... Kennedy, the Lobby and the Bomb: http://www.voltairenet.org/article178401.html ..."
"... Michael Collins Piper – Final Judgement -The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy: http://americanfreepress.net/PDF/Final_Judgment.pdf ..."
"... Muammar Al-Gaddafi – Ben Gurion ordered JFK's death over Israeli Nuke Plant at Dimona: This may have angered them a bit too: http://time.com/4711687/john-f-kennedy-diary-hitler/ ..."
Mar 29, 2018 | www.unz.com

El Dato says: March 23, 2018 at 9:22 am GMT

@redmudhooch Trump should call for a real 9/11 investigation, that would drain the swamp, the American people would all be behind him, what better way to win over America than 9/11 justice that is way past due?

If this is democracy we need something else, if what we done to Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Latin American countries is democracy, we need to rid ourselves of democracy

The entire system is 100% corrupt, including Judges, prosecutors, lawyers, the whole swamp. Big money rules.

The media is with the deep state, they clearly have an agenda, and it doesn't seem to be an American one, something has to be done to shut them up.
Hell yes they're spying on us, They use the IRS and state revenue agencies to get back at dissenters, I have experienced it...

Not only are they spying on us, they're spying on the politicians, judges, literally everyone, and blackmailing the snot out of them. Using extortion to get their way. The corruption needs to be punished, all of it, not just who deep state chooses to get back at. They're all corrupt.

Look at the electoral map for 2016 election, it is nearly completely red, and all that red is very well armed and very pissed off. If Trump does the things he got elected on, stops kissing Netanyahus ass he'll be fine. All he would have to do is get on twitter and make the announcement, tell the people to help him drain the swamp, shut it down, we can protest and yell just as loud as the well funded made for tv protesters. People have had enough, we can't go on this way, people feel threatened now, and they will do what needs to be done to protect their families. We just need an organizer (Trump) to give the word. But if he keeps up the war mongering and giving in to the establishment on all the issues that won him the election, hes done.

Look at what happend to Jim Traficant when he got out of line, who goes to jail in DC? People who do the right thing..
Heres another example of how they get their way:
Atlanta Jewish Times featured a column by its owner-publisher suggesting that U.S.-based Israeli Mossad agents might someday need to "order a hit" on the president of the United States.

http://original.antiwar.com/alison-weir/2012/01/24/israeli-assassinations-and-american-presidents/
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/284979-ajt.html

On Jan. 13 the Atlanta Jewish Times featured a column by its owner-publisher suggesting that Israel might someday need to "order a hit" on the president of the United States.

In the column, publisher Andrew Adler describes a scenario in which Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu would need to "give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel."
The purpose? So that the vice president could then take office and dictate U.S. policies that would help the Jewish state "obliterate its enemies."
Adler wrote that it is highly likely that the idea "has been discussed in Israel's most inner circles."

I think this is what happened to JFK when he tried shutting down CIA, cracking down on the Israeli lobby, inspecting Israeli Dimona nuclear facility. END the Fed scam, take away the blank check.

I think this is what happened to JFK when he tried shutting down CIA, cracking down on the Israeli lobby, inspecting Israeli Dimona nuclear facility. END the Fed scam, take away the blank check.

I can't remember JFK wanting to do any of this.

utu , March 24, 2018 at 6:50 pm GMT

@El Dato

No wonder you do not remember because it was not in media. Many documents were declassified since.

John F. Kennedy Administration: Letter to Israeli PM Ben-Gurion Regarding Visit to Dimona (May 18, 1963)

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/kennedy-letter-to-ben-gurion-regarding-visit-to-dimona

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/When-Ben-Gurion-said-no-to-JFK

Finally, Kennedy had enough, and in a personal letter dated May 18, 1963, the president warned that unless American inspectors were allowed into Dimona (meaning the end of any military activities), Israel would find itself totally isolated. Rather than answering, Ben-Gurion abruptly resigned.

John F. Kennedy Administration: Summary of Eshkol Reply To Kennedy Letter (November 9, 1963)

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/summary-of-eshkol-reply-to-kennedy-letter-november-1963

In the November 12 talks we hope through open and frank responses to convince the Israeli representatives of our sympathetic interest in their security concerns and of our genuine desire to help Israel to the best of our ability. We will press the view that U.S. ability to deter aggression against Israel makes less imperative the need for Israel to maintain clear military superiority over the U.A.R. in all fields and underlines the futility of large expenditures of time, effort and money on a spiralling arms race. We will stress that Israel's acquisition of missiles could result in a Soviet supply of missiles to the U.A.R. and that a missile race increases the chance of a missile exchange in which Israel as a small, compact target would inevitably suffer most.

https://pulsemedia.org/2009/08/28/the-kennedys-vs-israels-lobby/

Details of the JFK-RFK duo's effort to register the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC) parent organization, the American Zionist Council (AZC) as an Israeli foreign agent were shrouded in mystery until declassified in mid-2008.

redmudhooch , March 23, 2018 at 3:50 pm GMT
@El Dato

"I can't remember JFK wanting to do any of this."

Try harder. Do a little research.. not hard.

Kennedy, the Lobby and the Bomb: http://www.voltairenet.org/article178401.html

Michael Collins Piper – Final Judgement -The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy: http://americanfreepress.net/PDF/Final_Judgment.pdf

Muammar Al-Gaddafi – Ben Gurion ordered JFK's death over Israeli Nuke Plant at Dimona: This may have angered them a bit too: http://time.com/4711687/john-f-kennedy-diary-hitler/

The diary reveals that during his time in Berlin, Kennedy wrote about visiting Hitler's bunker only months after Germany surrendered in the Second World War.

"You can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived," Kennedy wrote in his diary in 1945.

"He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him," he added. "He had in him the stuff of which legends are made."

[Mar 28, 2018] Deep State and False Flag Attacks

Highly recommended!
Pretty interesting presentation; almost two hours long.
Mar 28, 2018 | www.unz.com

wayfarer , March 24, 2018 at 4:05 am GMT

"Deep State – False Flag Attacks"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNA4f45F5II

[Mar 27, 2018] how do you reform the Secret Police?

Notable quotes:
"... Is this trolling or naïvete? All US investigating agencies are complicit, so who is going to investigate investigators? ..."
Mar 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

Si1ver1ock , March 27, 2018 at 6:01 pm GMT

So how do you reform the Secret Police? It is an interesting idea. The National Security State has locked out any outside criticism and made reform almost impossible.

Then, there is also the whole indoctrination process. From hire to retire, these three letter agencies indoctrinate their employees with esprit de corps and being a team player with the greatest enthusiasm for the mission.

Pathological groupthink, ideologically pure, hermetically sealed. Eyes Only, NOFORN.

josealamia , March 27, 2018 at 6:07 pm GMT
Claim made by high level persons in the link, suggest need for deep investigation into who in the USA is getting paid to deliver or make available American taxpayer paid for resources to foreign payee governments conducting terrorism and destabilization programs?

http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2018/03/27/556651/Kamal-Kharrazi-Institute-of-Policy-Studies-Islamabad-terrorism

very interesting

Charles Pewitt , March 27, 2018 at 6:08 pm GMT
John Brennan is a propaganda whore for the family that owns Comcast. Comcast runs NBC. I would call them the Roberts family, but none of them look like Henry Fonda, so I won't. I don't dare speculate what their real name is.

Mike Morell is a propaganda whore for the family that owns Viacom. Viacom runs CBS. I don't care how convoluted those shysters made the exact corporate control of CBS, they run it. The family name of these nasty Viacom shysters ain't their real name either.

President Trump should have declared war on the corporate propaganda apparatus and the Deep State on day number one of his administration. Trump let the shysters who run the corporate media and the treasonous rats in the Deep State off the hook.

President Trump won the GOP presidential primary and the presidency itself because Trump promised to put the safety, security and sovereignty of America first. The largest vote getter in terms of specific issues was the IMMIGRATION issue. Trump had the chance to fire every damn treasonous rat in the Deep State and he didn't do it. Trump betrayed his voters who wanted immigration reduced and illegal aliens deported.

President Trump should face a GOP presidential primary challenger. Maybe that will force Trump to remove the Deep State, remove the current controllers of the corporate media and put America first.

Trump should also call for an immigration moratorium and begin deporting all illegal aliens immediately.

Trump's problems with the corporate media and the Deep State stem from the fact that Trump didn't immediately remove them when he had the chance. Trump's voter base was more than ready for a "burn the boats on the beach" battle plan to defend the United States against the treasonous rats in the Deep State and the anti-White, anti-Christian shyster rats in the corporate media.

AnonFromTN , March 27, 2018 at 6:57 pm GMT
Is this trolling or naïvete? All US investigating agencies are complicit, so who is going to investigate investigators?
Anonymous [230] Disclaimer , March 27, 2018 at 7:06 pm GMT
@SunBakedSuburb

"He [Brennan] said that the U.S. President is 'afraid of the president of Russia' and that the Kremlin 'may have something on him personally.' "

Brennan is PROJECTING.

They have the goods on HIM, and will squeeze out of him every last second of influence operations as long as he draws breath. Brennan will never be able to get off the HAMSTER WHEEL alive.

ChuckOrloski , March 27, 2018 at 7:12 pm GMT
@Charles Pewitt

Charles Pewitt wrote: "John Brennan is a propaganda whore for the family that owns Comcast."

Hi C.P.,

Above reflects the better part of Brennan' s character.

More definitive is Mr. Giraldi's identifying him as a "possible war criminal."

Also, why can not you see that "treasonous rats" rule? A learning deficiency?

Thanks.

Anon [425] Disclaimer , Website March 27, 2018 at 7:55 pm GMT
Wiki says he voted for communist Gus Hall in 1975.

Actually THAT Brennan was better than later Brennan who just became a mindless shill for Empire.

Charles Pewitt , March 27, 2018 at 8:05 pm GMT

More definitive is Mr. Giraldi's identifying him as a "possible war criminal."

Americans are pragmatic people. Identifying John Brennan as a so-called "war criminal" because he was involved in all the extraneous crap the American Empire is pulling overseas won't get the interest of ordinary Americans. Calling John Brennan a "propaganda whore" for the family that controls Comcast will pique their interest.

I would suggest that John Brennan could be politically damaged the most by stating that John Brennan supports open borders mass immigration. John Brennan and the rest of the Deep State are dangerous to Americans because they all support open borders mass immigration. The corporate media all supports mass immigration.

Over 60 million of us voted for Trump because Trump said he would stop the unnecessary overseas wars, reduce immigration and scrap the sovereignty-sapping trade deal scams. We voted for Trump to make the American Empire act more like a republic. We're stuck with the American Empire until it croaks or is croaked in turn. And the empires all turn into rust again.

The treasonous rats in the American Empire's Deep State all push nation-wrecking mass immigration.

Johnny Rico , Next New Comment March 27, 2018 at 8:26 pm GMT
@Twodees Partain

It probably wouldn't take a week for felony charges to be brought against him and he could be in jail waiting for a trial.

When was the last time something like that happened in the United States? I think maybe your spellcheck turned never to probably.

Curmudgeon , Next New Comment March 27, 2018 at 8:27 pm GMT
@utu

But was it CIA or DIA that helped to count Trump votes?

Hmmm, let's see here.
Counted Trump votes but not Clinton's?
Counted but reduced the number of Trump votes?
Counted all of the votes, but inflated Clinton's?
Successfully hacked the voting machines in some states to inflate Clinton votes and deflate Trump votes?

So many possibilities.

Art , March 27, 2018 at 8:38 pm GMT
How Brennon came to power, should draw questions. Was the dethroning of Gen. David Petraeus, as CIA chief, a palace coup? Was Brennen spying on Petraeus? Was the NSA tapping his phones? Did the idea that a military man was heading the CIA, anathema to the institution – so they got rid of him?

Just how much actual power does the CIA have in the American permanent Deep State?

Congress is NO check on the CIA – all the politicians on the intel security committees are handpicked dedicated worshipers.

The CIA is the most anti democracy organization on the planet. From its beginning, it has played with, subverted, and toppled democracies and sovereign governments. Today it assonates, tortures, and bombs people around the world. (Has Trump given them a free hand?)

The commie cold war is over – let's not start another one. The CIA's covert activities must stop.

(Spying is rational.)

Think Peace -- Art

[Mar 27, 2018] FBI Paid Geek Squad Repair Staff As Informants

Mar 27, 2018 | yro.slashdot.org

(zdnet.com) BeauHD on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @08:20PM from the plot-twist dept. According to newly released documents by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, federal agents would pay Geek Squad employees to flag illegal materials on devices sent in by customers for repairs. "The relationship goes back at least ten years, according to documents released as a result of the lawsuit [ filed last year ]," reports ZDNet. "The agency's Louisville division aim was to maintain a 'close liaison' with Geek Squad management to 'glean case initiations and to support the division's Computer Intrusion and Cyber Crime programs.'" From the report: According to the EFF's analysis of the documents, FBI agents would "show up, review the images or video and determine whether they believe they are illegal content" and seize the device so an additional analysis could be carried out at a local FBI field office. That's when, in some cases, agents would try to obtain a search warrant to justify the access. The EFF's lawsuit was filed in response to a report that a Geek Squad employee was used as an informant by the FBI in the prosecution of child pornography case. The documents show that the FBI would regularly use Geek Squad employees as confidential human sources -- the agency's term for informants -- by taking calls from employees when they found something suspect.

[Mar 27, 2018] Leaked Files Show How the NSA Tracks Other Countries' Hackers

Mar 27, 2018 | yro.slashdot.org

(theintercept.com) it could also help the cybersecurity community discover previously unknown threats . The Intercept: When the mysterious entity known as the " Shadow Brokers " released a tranche of stolen NSA hacking tools to the internet a year ago, most experts who studied the material honed in on the most potent tools, so-called zero-day exploits that could be used to install malware and take over machines. But a group of Hungarian security researchers spotted something else in the data, a collection of scripts and scanning tools the National Security Agency uses to detect other nation-state hackers on the machines it infects. It turns out those scripts and tools are just as interesting as the exploits. They show that in 2013 -- the year the NSA tools were believed to have been stolen by the Shadow Brokers -- the agency was tracking at least 45 different nation-state operations, known in the security community as Advanced Persistent Threats, or APTs. Some of these appear to be operations known by the broader security community -- but some may be threat actors and operations currently unknown to researchers.

The scripts and scanning tools dumped by Shadow Brokers and studied by the Hungarians were created by an NSA team known as Territorial Dispute, or TeDi. Intelligence sources told The Intercept the NSA established the team after hackers, believed to be from China, stole designs for the military's Joint Strike Fighter plane, along with other sensitive data, from U.S. defense contractors in 2007; the team was supposed to detect and counter sophisticated nation-state attackers more quickly, when they first began to emerge online. "As opposed to the U.S. only finding out in five years that everything was stolen, their goal was to try to figure out when it was being stolen in real time," one intelligence source told The Intercept. But their mission evolved to also provide situational awareness for NSA hackers to help them know when other nation-state actors are in machines they're trying to hack.

[Mar 22, 2018] The Israelis I believe needed JFK dead so they made sure he became deceased. He was in the way and with so many others hating him and his brother after he challenged the CIA, his days were numbered. Then it was Bobbies turn.

Mar 22, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

robert e williamson jr , March 20, 2018 at 12:44 pm

Ray good stuff. Let us talk about the Israelis and the problems they have created in this country. I'm 69 drafted in May 1968 no Vietnam, I was a spook attached to the 592nd Signal Co of the Berlin Brigade. I got hooked and I haven't really been a "TRUE BELIEVER" since. I mean that in the sense that I have suspected the activities of the state ever since.

I'm no genius and you may already gather that , no matter, but I know B.S. from Shinola which was a famous shoe polish.

I have been anti-Israeli Government since I realized who they were. The Israelis compromised J.J. Angleton and our country has been adversely affected ever since. They have compromised our sovereignty ever since.

Shapiro spirited SNM-fissile out of the country. The Israelis I believe needed JFK dead so they made sure he became deceased. He was in the way and with so many others hating him and his brother after he challenged the CIA, his days were numbered. Then it was Bobbies turn. The damned guy just wouldn't quit, so when it became obvious he was likely to be elected president in 68 he had to go also. Nice Irish Catholic boy scout like him wasn't about to let those who murdered his brother get away with it. But it much more involved than simply him getting his brothers killers. RFK had front row knowledge of his brother battles with the Israelis over their nuclear weapons program.

Sometime during 1967 John Hadden learned that Portsmouth Ohio HEU-235 was present in Isreal. In April or May Helms contacted the attorney general about this and then the FBI contacted him, Ramsey Clark, in May about opening an investigation in Zalmon Shaprio of NUMEC fame. At that point in time I can see that RFK must go. If RFK had learned of the Portsmouth Ohio U-235 in Israel he would have known immediately who had what to hide and why. His friggin' security detail should have been beefed up. Nothing of the sort happened. So depending on how you count the days from the time that CIA and FBI contacted the AG R Clark about the U-235 in Israel and FBI contacted the AG was a matter or 30 or so days. RFK died on June 6, 1968 and it was no Dogdamned coincident.

I have done limited research on the CIA machinations and FBI investigations connected with the NUMEC saga. The pursuit of the investigation was hampered because "The Fix" was in and I think you know this.

The present time is the best time I've seen in my life to expose this bullshit for what it is. Keep up the great work.

[Mar 21, 2018] Former CIA Chief Brennan Running Scared by Ray McGovern

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... It is an open secret that the CIA has been leaking like the proverbial sieve over the last two years or so to its favorite stenographers at the New York Times ..."
"... Washington Post. ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... On April 6, 2017 I attended a panel discussion on "Russia's interference in our democracy" at the Clinton/Podesta Center for American Progress Fund. In my subsequent write-up I noted that panelist Palmieri had inadvertently dropped tidbits of evidence that I suggested "could get some former officials in deep kimchi -- if a serious investigation of leaking, for example, were to be conducted." ..."
"... Palmieri was asked to comment on "what was actually going on in late summer/early fall [2016]." She answered: "It was a surreal experience so I did appreciate that for the press to absorb the idea that behind the stage that the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton was too fantastic for people to, um, for the press to process, to absorb . ..."
"... But she lost. And a month ago, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) threw down the gauntlet, indicating that there could be legal consequences, for example, for officials who misled the FISA court in order to enable surveillance on Trump and associates. ..."
"... John Brennan is widely reported to be Nunes's next target. Does one collect a full pension in jail? ..."
"... Unmasking: Senior national security officials are permitted to ask the National Security Agency to unmask the names of Americans in intercepted communications for national security reasons -- not for domestic political purposes. ..."
"... Brennan's words and attitude are a not-so-subtle reminder of the heavy influence and confidence of the deep state, including the media -- exercised to a fare-thee-well over the past two years. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the Washington Post ..."
"... The Post, incidentally, waited until paragraph 41 of 44 to inform readers that it was the FBI's own Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General of the Department of Justice that found McCabe guilty, and that the charge was against McCabe, not the FBI. A quite different impression was conveyed by the large headline "Trump escalates attacks on FBI" as well as the first 40 paragraphs of Sunday's lead article. ..."
"... "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you," Schumer told Maddow. "So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this." Did Maddow ask Schumer if he was saying President of the United States should be afraid of the intelligence community? No, she let Schumer's theorem stand. ..."
Mar 19, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

With former CIA Director John Brennan accusing President Donald Trump of "moral turpitude" for his "scapegoating" of Andy McCabe, it remains to be seen whether a constitutional crisis will be averted, writes Ray McGovern.

What prompted former CIA Director John Brennan on Saturday to accuse President Donald Trump of "moral turpitude" and to predict, with an alliterative flourish, that Trump will end up "as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history"? The answer shines through the next sentence in Brennan's threatening tweet : "You may scapegoat Andy McCabe [former FBI Deputy Director fired Friday night] but you will not destroy America America will triumph over you."

It is easy to see why Brennan lost it. The Attorney General fired McCabe, denying him full retirement benefits, because McCabe "had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor -- including under oath -- on multiple occasions." There but for the grace of God go I, Brennan must have thought, whose stock in trade has been unauthorized disclosures.

In fact, Brennan can take but small, short-lived consolation in the fact that he succeeded in leaving with a full government pension. His own unauthorized disclosures and leaks probably dwarf in number, importance, and sensitivity those of McCabe. And many of those leaks appear to have been based on sensitive intercepted conversations from which the names of American citizens were unmasked for political purposes. Not to mention the leaks of faux intelligence like that contained in the dubious "dossier" cobbled together for the Democrats by British ex-spy Christopher Steele.

It is an open secret that the CIA has been leaking like the proverbial sieve over the last two years or so to its favorite stenographers at the New York Times and Washington Post. (At one point, the obvious whispering reached the point that the Wall Street Journal saw fit to complain that it was being neglected.) The leaking can be traced way back -- at least as far as the Clinton campaign's decision to blame the Russians for the publication of very damning DNC emails by WikiLeaks just three days before the Democratic National Convention.

This blame game turned out to be a hugely successful effort to divert attention from the content of the emails, which showed in bas relief the dirty tricks the DNC played on Bernie Sanders. The media readily fell in line, and all attention was deflected from the substance of the DNC emails to the question as to why the Russians supposedly "hacked into the DNC and gave the emails to WikiLeaks."

This media operation worked like a charm, but even Secretary Clinton's PR person, Jennifer Palmieri, conceded later that at first it strained credulity that the Russians would be doing what they were being accused of doing.

Magnificent Diversion

On April 6, 2017 I attended a panel discussion on "Russia's interference in our democracy" at the Clinton/Podesta Center for American Progress Fund. In my subsequent write-up I noted that panelist Palmieri had inadvertently dropped tidbits of evidence that I suggested "could get some former officials in deep kimchi -- if a serious investigation of leaking, for example, were to be conducted." (That time seems to be coming soon.)

Palmieri was asked to comment on "what was actually going on in late summer/early fall [2016]." She answered: "It was a surreal experience so I did appreciate that for the press to absorb the idea that behind the stage that the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton was too fantastic for people to, um, for the press to process, to absorb .

"But then we go back to Brooklyn [Clinton headquarters] and heard from the -- mostly our sources were other intelligence, with the press who work in the intelligence sphere, and that's where we heard things and that's where we learned about the dossier and the other story lines that were swirling about; and how to process And along the way the administration started confirming various pieces of what they were concerned about what Russia was doing. So I do think that the answer for the Democrats now in both the House and the Senate is to talk about it more and make it more real."

So the leaking had an early start, and went on steroids during the months following the Democratic Convention up to the election -- and beyond.

As a Reminder

None of the leaking, unmasking, surveillance, or other activities directed against the Trump campaign can be properly understood, if one does not bear in mind that it was considered a sure thing that Secretary Clinton would become President, at which point illegal and extralegal activities undertaken to help her win would garner praise, not prison.

But she lost. And a month ago, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) threw down the gauntlet, indicating that there could be legal consequences, for example, for officials who misled the FISA court in order to enable surveillance on Trump and associates. His words are likely to have sent chills down the spine of yet other miscreants. "If they need to be put on trial, we will put them on trial," he said. "The reason Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we created."

John Brennan is widely reported to be Nunes's next target. Does one collect a full pension in jail?

Unmasking: Senior national security officials are permitted to ask the National Security Agency to unmask the names of Americans in intercepted communications for national security reasons -- not for domestic political purposes. Congressional committees have questioned why Obama's UN ambassador Samantha Power (as well as his national security adviser Susan Rice) made so many unmasking requests. Power is reported to have requested the unmasking of more than 260 Americans, most of them in the final days of the administration, including the names of Trump associates.

Deep State Intimidation

Back to John Brennan's bizarre tweet Saturday telling the President, "You may scapegoat Andy McCabe but you will not destroy America America will triumph over you." Unmasking the word "America," so to speak, one can readily discern the name "Brennan" underneath. Brennan's words and attitude are a not-so-subtle reminder of the heavy influence and confidence of the deep state, including the media -- exercised to a fare-thee-well over the past two years.

Later on Saturday, Samantha Power, with similar equities at stake, put an exclamation point behind what Brennan had tweeted earlier in the day. Power also saw fit to remind Trump where the power lies, so to speak. She warned him publicly that it is "not a good idea to piss off John Brennan."

Meanwhile, the Washington Post is dutifully playing its part in the deep-state game of intimidation. The following excerpt from Sunday's lead article conveys the intended message: "Some Trump allies say they worry he is playing with fire by taunting the FBI. 'This is open, all-out war. And guess what? The FBI's going to win,' said one ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. 'You can't fight the FBI. They're going to torch him.'" [sic]

The Post, incidentally, waited until paragraph 41 of 44 to inform readers that it was the FBI's own Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General of the Department of Justice that found McCabe guilty, and that the charge was against McCabe, not the FBI. A quite different impression was conveyed by the large headline "Trump escalates attacks on FBI" as well as the first 40 paragraphs of Sunday's lead article.

Putting Down a Marker

It isn't as though Donald Trump wasn't warned, as are all incoming presidents, of the power of the Deep State that he needs to play ball with -- or else. Recall that just three days before President-elect Trump was visited by National Intelligence Director James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Michael Rogers, Trump was put on notice by none other than the Minority Leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer. Schumer has been around and knows the ropes; he is a veteran of 18 years in the House, and is in his 20th year in the Senate.

On Jan. 3, 2017 Schumer said it all, when he told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, that President-elect Trump is "being really dumb" by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia's cyber activities:

"Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you," Schumer told Maddow. "So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this." Did Maddow ask Schumer if he was saying President of the United States should be afraid of the intelligence community? No, she let Schumer's theorem stand.

With gauntlets now thrown down by both sides, we may not have to wait very long to see if Schumer is correct in his blithe prediction as to how the present constitutional crisis will be resolved.

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served as a CIA analyst under seven Presidents and nine CIA directors and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

[Mar 21, 2018] The NUMEC Affair: Did Highly Enriched Uranium from the U.S. Aid Israel's Nuclear Weapons Program?

Mar 21, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Abe , March 21, 2018 at 2:47 pm

The NUMEC Affair: Did Highly Enriched Uranium from the U.S. Aid Israel's Nuclear Weapons Program?
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2016-11-02/numec-affair-did-highly-enriched-uranium-us-aid-israels

Abe , March 21, 2018 at 2:49 pm

Concerned About Nuclear Weapons Potential, John F. Kennedy Pushed for Inspection of Israel Nuclear Facilities
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2016-04-21/concerned-about-nuclear-weapons-potential-john-f-kennedy

robert e williamson jr , March 20, 2018 at 12:49 pm

Damn it, " in April or May of 1968!!!!!! Helms contacted the AG . . . . .

[Mar 21, 2018] NSA Has Been Tracking Bitcoin Users Since 2013, New Snowden Documents Reveal

Mar 21, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

As it turns out, Ulbricht's lawyers were on to something.

In a blockbuster report published Tuesday in the Intercept, reporter Sam Biddle cited several documents included in the massive cache of stolen NSA documents that showed that the agency has been tracking bitcoin users since 2013, and has potentially been funneling some of this information to other federal agencies. Or, as Biddle puts it, maybe the conspiracy theorists were right.

It turns out the conspiracy theorists were onto something. Classified documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently to target Bitcoin users around the world - and wielded at least one mysterious source of information to "help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins," according to a top-secret passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013. The data source appears to have leveraged the NSA's ability to harvest and analyze raw, global internet traffic while also exploiting an unnamed software program that purported to offer anonymity to users, according to other documents.

Using its ability to siphon data directly from the fiber-optic cables, the NSA managed to develop a system for tracing transactions that went well beyond simple blockchain analysis. The agency relied on a program called MONKEYROCKET , a sham Internet-anonymizing service that, according to the documents, was primarily deployed in Asia, Africa and South America with the intention of thwarting terrorists.

The documents indicate that "tracking down" Bitcoin users went well beyond closely examining Bitcoin's public transaction ledger, known as the Blockchain, where users are typically referred to through anonymous identifiers; the tracking may also have involved gathering intimate details of these users' computers.

The NSA collected some Bitcoin users' password information, internet activity, and a type of unique device identification number known as a MAC address, a March 29, 2013 NSA memo suggested. In the same document, analysts also discussed tracking internet users' internet addresses, network ports, and timestamps to identify "BITCOIN Targets."

...

The NSA's budding Bitcoin spy operation looks to have been enabled by its unparalleled ability to siphon traffic from the physical cable connections that form the internet and ferry its traffic around the planet. As of 2013, the NSA's Bitcoin tracking was achieved through program code-named OAKSTAR, a collection of covert corporate partnerships enabling the agency to monitor communications, including by harvesting internet data as it traveled along fiber optic cables that undergird the internet.

...

Specifically, the NSA targeted Bitcoin through MONKEYROCKET, a sub-program of OAKSTAR, which tapped network equipment to gather data from the Middle East, Europe, South America, and Asia, according to classified descriptions. As of spring 2013, MONKEYROCKET was "the sole source of SIGDEV for the BITCOIN Targets," the March 29, 2013 NSA report stated, using the term for signals intelligence development, "SIGDEV," to indicate the agency had no other way to surveil Bitcoin users. The data obtained through MONKEYROCKET is described in the documents as "full take" surveillance, meaning the entirety of data passing through a network was examined and at least some entire data sessions were stored for later analysis.

Naturally, once the NSA got involved, the notion of anonymity - whether with bitcoin, or even some of the privacy-oriented coins like Zcash - was completely crushed.

Emin Gun Sirer, associate professor and co-director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts at Cornell University, told The Intercept that financial privacy "is something that matters incredibly" to the Bitcoin community, and expects that "people who are privacy conscious will switch to privacy-oriented coins" after learning of the NSA's work here. Despite Bitcoin's reputation for privacy, Sirer added, "when the adversary model involves the NSA, the pseudonymity disappears. You should really lower your expectations of privacy on this network."

Green, who co-founded and currently advises a privacy-focused Bitcoin competitor named Zcash, echoed those sentiments, saying that the NSA's techniques make privacy features in any digital currencies like Ethereum or Ripple "totally worthless" for those targeted.

While bitcoin appeared to be the NSA's top target, it wasn't the agency's only priority. The NSA also used its unparalleled surveillance powers to take down Liberty Reserve - a kind of proto-ICO that was involved in money laundering. Though the company was based in Costa Rica, the Department of Justice partnered with the IRS and Department of Homeland Security to arrest its founder and hand him a 20-year prison sentence.

The March 15, 2013 NSA report detailed progress on MONKEYROCKET's Bitcoin surveillance and noted that American spies were also working to crack Liberty Reserve, a far seedier predecessor. Unlike Bitcoin, for which facilitating drug deals and money laundering was incidental to bigger goals, Liberty Reserve was more or less designed with criminality in mind. Despite being headquartered in Costa Rica, the site was charged with running a $6 billion "laundering scheme" and triple-teamed by the U.S. Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and the IRS, resulting in a 20-year conviction for its Ukrainian founder. As of March 2013 -- just two months before the Liberty Reserve takedown and indictment -- the NSA considered the currency exchange its No. 2 target, second only to Bitcoin. The indictment and prosecution of Liberty Reserve and its staff made no mention of help from the NSA.

Of course, several of the agency's defenders argued that the notion that the NSA would use these programs to spy on innocuous bitcoin users is "pernicious", according to one expert source.

The hypothesis that the NSA would "launch an entire operation overseas under false pretenses" just to track targets is "pernicious," said Matthew Green, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute. Such a practice could spread distrust of privacy software in general, particularly in areas like Iran where such tools are desperately needed by dissidents. This "feeds a narrative that the U.S. is untrustworthy," said Green. "That worries me."

But forget bitcoin: the notion that the NSA has been illegally feeding intelligence to other federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies has been a watershed issue for civil libertarians, with implications far beyond cryptocurrency money laundering . The process, known as "parallel construction", would, if definitive proof could ever be obtained by a defense attorney, render an entire case as inadmissible.

Civil libertarians and security researchers have long been concerned that otherwise inadmissible intelligence from the agency is used to build cases against Americans though a process known as "parallel construction": building a criminal case using admissible evidence obtained by first consulting other evidence, which is kept secret, out of courtrooms and the public eye. An earlier investigation by The Intercept, drawing on court records and documents from Snowden, found evidence the NSA's most controversial forms of surveillance, which involve warrantless bulk monitoring of emails and fiber optic cables, may have been used in court via parallel construction.

The timing of the Intercept's report is also interesting. We reported last year that a Russian national named Alexander Vinnick, the alleged mastermind of a $4 billion bitcoin-based money laundering operation, had been arrested following an indictment that levied 21 counts of money laundering and other crimes that could land him in a US prison for up to 55 years.

And given the justice system's treatment of other cryptocurrency-related criminals, the notion that Vinnick might spend multiple decades in prison is not beyond the realm of possibility. Of course, if the case against him is built on illegally obtained evidence, one would think his defense team would want to know.

Heavily redacted versions of the Snowden documents are available on the Intercept's website.


wee-weed up -> J S Bach Tue, 03/20/2018 - 19:05 Permalink

"NSA Has Been Tracking Bitcoin Users Since 2013, New Snowden Documents Reveal"

Yep, I knew it! I've been trying to tell the crypto-enthusiasts that the gov't is on their trail, but they are in utter denial. They think their tech is superior. Sad mistake.

So again I ask... can you say... "Poof it's gone!"

Baron von Bud -> Coinista Tue, 03/20/2018 - 20:25 Permalink

I don't believe the NSA knows the content of crypto transactions due to packet data encryption. They do likely know the identities of frequent Bitcoin users via traffic tracking. Infrequent users very unlikely. That's what the IT programmer in me says. But we're talking Ed Snowden who knows a lot about networks and encryption. This suggests that NSA has a man-in-the-middle attack.

Baron von Bud -> lookslikecraptome Tue, 03/20/2018 - 22:41 Permalink

Nobody cracked TOR and the code is open source. Identities were determined via the host site communications not in TOR transit. The govt does have https keys - isp told me. But software encrypted data in packets - no they don't. TOR and OpenPGP are very good to have with govts and social media getting more abusive collecting/selling any data that will bring a buck.

NiggaPleeze -> Coinista Tue, 03/20/2018 - 21:50 Permalink

Well, NSA developed TOR. Then they developed bitcoin to work on TOR. How much you want to bet they have infiltrated every single exchange?

They are watching you. Five eyes.

[Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... If on November 6 the Democratic Party makes the net gain of 24 seats needed to win control of the House of Representatives, former CIA agents, military commanders, and State Department officials will provide the margin of victory and hold the balance of power in Congress. ..."
"... Since its establishment in 1947 -- under the administration of Democratic President Harry Truman -- the CIA has been legally barred from carrying out within the United States the activities which were its mission overseas: spying, infiltration, political provocation, assassination. These prohibitions were given official lip service but ignored in practice. ..."
"... The Church Committee in particular featured the exposure of CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, General Rene Schneider in Chile, and many others. More horrors were uncovered: MK-Ultra, in which the CIA secretly subjected unwitting victims to experimentation with drugs like LSD; ..."
"... Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA recruited journalists to plant stories and smear opponents; Operation Chaos, an effort to spy on the antiwar movement and sow disruption; Operation Shamrock, under which the telecommunications companies shared traffic with the NSA for more than a quarter century. ..."
"... The Church and Pike committee exposures, despite their limitations, had a devastating political effect. The CIA and its allied intelligence organizations in the Pentagon and NSA became political lepers, reviled as the enemies of democratic rights. The CIA in particular was widely viewed as "Murder Incorporated." ..."
"... The last 15 years have seen a massive expansion of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, backed by an avalanche of media propaganda, with endless television programs and movies glorifying American spies and assassins ..."
"... The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks . ..."
"... This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine. ..."
"... The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. ..."
"... The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are "former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however, purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments. ..."
Mar 13, 2018 | www.wsws.org

In a three-part series published last week, the World Socialist Web Site documented an unprecedented influx of intelligence and military operatives into the Democratic Party. More than 50 such military-intelligence candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts identified by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as its targets for 2018. These include both vacant seats and those with Republican incumbents considered vulnerable in the event of a significant swing to the Democrats.

If on November 6 the Democratic Party makes the net gain of 24 seats needed to win control of the House of Representatives, former CIA agents, military commanders, and State Department officials will provide the margin of victory and hold the balance of power in Congress. The presence of so many representatives of the military-intelligence apparatus in the legislature is a situation without precedent in the history of the United States.

Since its establishment in 1947 -- under the administration of Democratic President Harry Truman -- the CIA has been legally barred from carrying out within the United States the activities which were its mission overseas: spying, infiltration, political provocation, assassination. These prohibitions were given official lip service but ignored in practice.

In the wake of the Watergate crisis and the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon, reporter Seymour Hersh published the first devastating exposure of the CIA domestic spying, in an investigative report for the New York Times on December 22, 1974. This report triggered the establishment of the Rockefeller Commission, a White House effort at damage control, and Senate and House select committees, named after their chairmen, Senator Frank Church and Representative Otis Pike, which conducted hearings and made serious attempts to investigate and expose the crimes of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.

The Church Committee in particular featured the exposure of CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, General Rene Schneider in Chile, and many others. More horrors were uncovered: MK-Ultra, in which the CIA secretly subjected unwitting victims to experimentation with drugs like LSD;

Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA recruited journalists to plant stories and smear opponents; Operation Chaos, an effort to spy on the antiwar movement and sow disruption; Operation Shamrock, under which the telecommunications companies shared traffic with the NSA for more than a quarter century.

The Church and Pike committee exposures, despite their limitations, had a devastating political effect. The CIA and its allied intelligence organizations in the Pentagon and NSA became political lepers, reviled as the enemies of democratic rights. The CIA in particular was widely viewed as "Murder Incorporated."

In that period, it would have been unthinkable either for dozens of "former" military-intelligence operatives to participate openly in electoral politics, or for them to be welcomed and even recruited by the two corporate-controlled parties. The Democrats and Republicans sought to distance themselves, at least for public relations purposes, from the spy apparatus, while the CIA publicly declared that it would no longer recruit or pay American journalists to publish material originating in Langley, Virginia. Even in the 1980s, the Iran-Contra scandal involved the exposure of the illegal operations of the Reagan administration's CIA director, William Casey.

How times have changed. One of the main functions of the "war on terror," launched in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has been to rehabilitate the US spy apparatus and give it a public relations makeover as the supposed protector of the American people against terrorism.

This meant disregarding the well-known connections between Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and the CIA, which recruited them for the anti-Soviet guerrilla war in Afghanistan, waged from 1979 to 1989, as well as the still unexplained role of the US intelligence agencies in facilitating the 9/11 attacks themselves.

The last 15 years have seen a massive expansion of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, backed by an avalanche of media propaganda, with endless television programs and movies glorifying American spies and assassins ( 24 , Homeland , Zero Dark Thirty , etc.)

The American media has been directly recruited to this effort. Judith Miller of the New York Times , with her reports on "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, is only the most notorious of the stable of "plugged-in" intelligence-connected journalists at the Times , the Washington Post , and the major television networks. More recently, the Times has installed as its editorial page editor James Bennet, brother of a Democratic senator and son of the former administrator of the Agency for International Development, which has been accused of working as a front for the operations of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks .

In centering its opposition to Trump on the bogus allegations of Russian interference, while essentially ignoring Trump's attacks on immigrants and democratic rights, his alignment with ultra-right and white supremacist groups, his attacks on social programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and his militarism and threats of nuclear war, the Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice.

This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine.

The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. A chorus of media backers -- Nicholas Kristof and Roger Cohen of the New York Times , the entire editorial board of the Washington Post , most of the television networks -- are part of the campaign to pollute public opinion and whip up support on alleged "human rights" grounds for an expansion of the US war in Syria.

The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are "former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however, purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments.

The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies.

The working class is confronted with an extraordinary political situation. On the one hand, the Republican Trump administration has more military generals in top posts than any other previous government. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies.

The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule.

Millions of working people want to fight the Trump administration and its ultra-right policies. But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils.

Patrick Martin

The author also recommends:

Palace coup or class struggle: The political crisis in Washington and the strategy of the working class

[Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death.

Highly recommended!
There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time.
It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this
Notable quotes:
"... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
"... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
"... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
"... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
"... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
"... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
"... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
"... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
"... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
"... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
"... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
"... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
"... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
"... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'

In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background, which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.'

There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.

This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.

And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area.

Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.

The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.

In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry – the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.

Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier, which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.

(See http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/what-really-happened-robert-levinson-cia-iran-454803.html .)

Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio 4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets, backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.

The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available – evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.

Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.

What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest a sale had been completed.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.

All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder. For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.

(On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews both with Mogilevich and Levinson at

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcript_06_12_99.txt )

In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.

Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions north of the Litani.

These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.

What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.

Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking 'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.

Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.

So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.

All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate Russia in supplying materials.

There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)

It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional, Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.

It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here, a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.

Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.

In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.

Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain, but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)

That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:

'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear limited life components and you can read for weeks).'

(For this and other articles by Kaszeta, as also his bio, see http://strongpointsecurity.co.uk ')

What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility, in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of ones which lasted longer.

For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.

What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.

In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'

According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?

As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.

In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties, and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another day.

A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.

Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.

Posted at 03:42 PM in As The Borg Turns , Habakkuk , Russia , Russiagate | Permalink


james , 03 February 2018 at 04:33 PM

thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..

it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..

JohnB , 03 February 2018 at 05:17 PM
David,

Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.

turcopolier , 03 February 2018 at 06:02 PM
james

It is the closest of all international intelligence relationships. It started in WW2. Before that the Brits were though of as a potential enemy. pl

Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 03 February 2018 at 06:10 PM
I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
catherine , 03 February 2018 at 06:22 PM
That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.

Re: Levinson

# Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.

# Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson went to Jablonski with it.

# And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson? The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing came of it.

I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.

Ishmael Zechariah , 03 February 2018 at 06:54 PM
DH,

As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.

I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".

Be safe.

Ishmael Zechariah

Rd , 03 February 2018 at 07:31 PM
Babak Makkinejad said in reply to turcopolier...

The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
..and US is the one who has been paying for it since 1979!!!

kooshy said in reply to Ishmael Zechariah... , 03 February 2018 at 08:21 PM
IZ
My guess is, that he is unpredictable, instantaneous and therefore can't be consistent and reliable, useful idiot needs to be predictable.
kooshy , 03 February 2018 at 08:43 PM
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. "

David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making. Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

different clue , 03 February 2018 at 08:49 PM
Ishmael Zechariah,

( reply to comment 6),

I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.

It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate.

And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.

So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.

Jack , 03 February 2018 at 08:54 PM
David,

Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.

In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.

Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century endorsed her.

Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in. Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling the Borg pundits.

SmoothieX12 -> kooshy... , 03 February 2018 at 09:51 PM
So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.

Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:10 PM
They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.
kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:24 PM
You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier on atlantic side.
catherine said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:21 AM
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''

The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.

'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'

In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241, 251 - 256]

'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'

State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union

aleksandar , 04 February 2018 at 04:41 AM
David,

About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS.

Fred said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 08:40 AM
Babak,

"they got US to bail them out during WWII" And how would things have worked out had we not done so?

Fred , 04 February 2018 at 08:46 AM
David,

"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time."

Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.

Anna said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 08:48 AM
"They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
-- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
turcopolier , 04 February 2018 at 08:54 AM
Anna

The powerful are often remarkably ignorant. pl

Babak Makkinejad -> Fred... , 04 February 2018 at 10:08 AM
England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion, did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 11:53 AM
"unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental people. Just general impressions, mind you.
Kooshy said in reply to catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting, even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such an escalation.
Phodges said in reply to turcopolier ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:23 PM
Sir

It seems we are being defeated by Cicero's enemy within. Zion is achieving what no one could hope to achieve by force of arms.

David Habakkuk -> catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 01:17 PM
catherine,

In response to comment 5.

I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain more pointers.

It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.

An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian attempts to get hold of him. An extract:

'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'

(See http://defiancethebook.com/legal/habeas/petition.htm .)

Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.

Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:

'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'

(See http://konanykhin.com/news/the-konanykhine-case.html .)

So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has changed.

For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:

'"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [Ł1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign passports for its "very, very special clients".

'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".

(For a 'Guardian report, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/sep/23/julianborger ; for the actual testimony, see http://archives-financialservices.house.gov/banking/92299ger.pdf .)

Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter, Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:

'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'

(For the transcript presented in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, see http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ )

When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.

(For the first part of the exchanges of comments, the second apparently having become unavailable, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/markurban/2008/07/litvinenko_killing_had_state_i.html )

She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator, David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.

Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.

What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary claim about Shvets:

'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.

'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.

'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'

Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling her as to the side for which he was working.

It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.

An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria' was actually credible.

This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking, and for similar action against Syria.

Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.

There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.

A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing. This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High') might be a start.

Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')

The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one feel as though one wanted to throw up.

Thomas , 04 February 2018 at 01:24 PM
"They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.}

No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.

SmoothieX12 -> Anna... , 04 February 2018 at 01:39 PM
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.

My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.

Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.

Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.

james said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 04 February 2018 at 03:01 PM
there seems to be no shortage of money for these blatant propaganda exercises..
Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 04:14 PM
I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914. Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
begob , 04 February 2018 at 05:20 PM
I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 06:20 PM
IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.

The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.

spy killer , 04 February 2018 at 06:55 PM
Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
English Outsider -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 07:23 AM
Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google also allows searches with more than one term. This link -

https://twitter.com/pat_lang

- gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories" on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.

If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.

"Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.

The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations" (hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many of the contributors know it from inside.

In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible, but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.

jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 08:11 AM
Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for the most part, Labor was Left.
Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.

So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.

Babak Makkinejad -> jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 08:29 AM
All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
Sid Finster said in reply to Jack... , 05 February 2018 at 10:26 AM
Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.

The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.

Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.

Sid Finster said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 05 February 2018 at 10:31 AM
Explain Marshall Miller's role in this, please. He is someone I know quite well. I also know one of the Chalupas.
begob said in reply to jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 10:56 AM
jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat of the BEF.
turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 11:18 AM
FM
What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break - David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 11:19 AM
Yes, I am Iranian. All "Babak"s are Iranians - except some obscure ones that are Rus - Babakov.
Anna , 05 February 2018 at 02:07 PM
The hard, blinding truth: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Thomas said in reply to turcopolier ... , 05 February 2018 at 02:08 PM
Colonel,

This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.

Richardstevenhack , 05 February 2018 at 02:36 PM
Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.

And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.

Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."

Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.

Seriously, read this! The whole thing!

Rampant abuse and possible contempt of Court: what you need to know about the GOP memo
http://theduran.com/rampant-abuse-contempt-court-analysis-gop-memorandum/

blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 03:25 PM
Sen Grassley releases memo heavily redacted by DOJ/FBI.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-05/grassley-graham-blast-fbi-censoring-memo-calling-criminal-probe-trump-dossier

"Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "

I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI is lying.

What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that are based on classified documents.

turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 04:38 PM
FM

We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status. You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are, in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you. You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl

Kooshy said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 04:46 PM
Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from Northeestern
blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 04:55 PM
...would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

Aye. Aye. Sir!

+1

That is why some of us believe the Patriot Act and FISA are both unpatriotic and unconstitutional. SCOTUS disagrees with the few of us.

Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 05:03 PM
I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist. I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians - they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
English Outsider , 05 February 2018 at 06:31 PM
Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.

David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because of that.

The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as "salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling around unsupervised?

The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but for the general public, that bit more untenable.

So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.

I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?

kooshy , 05 February 2018 at 07:49 PM
Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type, they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 07:59 PM
EO

Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to pay him until he left UK service. pl

English Outsider , 06 February 2018 at 05:10 AM
Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.

Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK side.

English Outsider -> Cortes... , 06 February 2018 at 05:53 AM
Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about the "golden showers"? "

I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.

So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.

Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.

But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK get mixed up in it?

David Habakkuk -> Sid Finster... , 06 February 2018 at 06:19 AM
Sid Finster,

In response to comment 53.

When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.

A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella.

When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.

His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques, and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.

So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'

The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.

(This initial post by me, and later posts by me on that site, are at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/uid:1857/diary. Three posts David Loepp and I produced jointly in December 2012, which have a lot on Scaramella and Shvets, are on his page there, at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/de%20Gondi/diary .)

The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December 2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:

'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic- Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'

Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:

'12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them [presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'

The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':

'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI. Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini. Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'

In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography – which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella which had been described in the wiretap request.

As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.

In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.

Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.

'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with him.'

From a fax dated 7 November 2005:

'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re: Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'

From a fax dated 5 December 2005:

'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'

In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be in a chaotic state.

However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus justifications.

Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.

(I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)

And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence in the Inquiry.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.

Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.

The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')

Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 09:40 AM
Thank you David Habakkuk. Truly sordid and deplorable. WWIII to be initiated on basis of lies.
Jack , 06 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
David

You may already know this but Steele was a no show in a UK court for a deposition on the libel suit.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/02/05/christopher-steele-is-no-show-in-london-court-in-civil-case-over-dossier.amp.html

Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 01:18 PM
I know something of spectroscopy.

The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis itself or its instrumentation.

The paragraph that you have quoted:

"To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."

And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics - which did not and could not exist in this situation.

LeaNder , 07 February 2018 at 09:16 AM
David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there is to know?

I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.

Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.

By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.

According to Google search there are no other links then your articles here:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf

**********

JAN RICHARD BĆRUG
The Collapsing Wall. Hybrid Journalism.
A Comparative Study of Newspapers and
Magazines in Eight Countries in Europe

Available online. Haven't read it yet, but journalism as hidden public relations transfer belt would be one of my minor obsessions. ...

Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 07 February 2018 at 11:23 AM
I wonder too; their command of the English idiom is very au currant - noticed "opt in/opt out" reference? Too American.

They clearly are not native speakers of German.

LeaNder said in reply to kooshy... , 07 February 2018 at 12:30 PM
why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_Island#Economy

Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.

Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those?

The German link is different. How about the Iranian?

or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?

LeaNder said in reply to LeaNder... , 07 February 2018 at 01:14 PM
correcting myself #94:

another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s

I see Sergei seems to share my interest in the literary genre:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Ivanov#Personal

[Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
"... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
"... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
"... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
"... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
"... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
"... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
"... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
"... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
"... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
"... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
"... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
"... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
"... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'

In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background, which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.'

There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.

This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.

And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area.

Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.

The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.

In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry – the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.

Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier, which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.

(See http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/what-really-happened-robert-levinson-cia-iran-454803.html .)

Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio 4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets, backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.

The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available – evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.

Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.

What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest a sale had been completed.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.

All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder. For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.

(On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews both with Mogilevich and Levinson at

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcript_06_12_99.txt )

In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.

Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions north of the Litani.

These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.

What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.

Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking 'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.

Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.

So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.

All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate Russia in supplying materials.

There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)

It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional, Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.

It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here, a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.

Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.

In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.

Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain, but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)

That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:

'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear limited life components and you can read for weeks).'

(For this and other articles by Kaszeta, as also his bio, see http://strongpointsecurity.co.uk ')

What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility, in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of ones which lasted longer.

For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.

What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.

In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'

According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?

As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.

In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties, and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another day.

A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.

Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.

Posted at 03:42 PM in As The Borg Turns , Habakkuk , Russia , Russiagate | Permalink


james , 03 February 2018 at 04:33 PM

thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..

it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..

JohnB , 03 February 2018 at 05:17 PM
David,

Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.

turcopolier , 03 February 2018 at 06:02 PM
james

It is the closest of all international intelligence relationships. It started in WW2. Before that the Brits were though of as a potential enemy. pl

Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 03 February 2018 at 06:10 PM
I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
catherine , 03 February 2018 at 06:22 PM
That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.

Re: Levinson

# Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.

# Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson went to Jablonski with it.

# And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson? The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing came of it.

I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.

Ishmael Zechariah , 03 February 2018 at 06:54 PM
DH,

As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.

I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".

Be safe.

Ishmael Zechariah

Rd , 03 February 2018 at 07:31 PM
Babak Makkinejad said in reply to turcopolier...

The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
..and US is the one who has been paying for it since 1979!!!

kooshy said in reply to Ishmael Zechariah... , 03 February 2018 at 08:21 PM
IZ
My guess is, that he is unpredictable, instantaneous and therefore can't be consistent and reliable, useful idiot needs to be predictable.
kooshy , 03 February 2018 at 08:43 PM
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. "

David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making. Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

different clue , 03 February 2018 at 08:49 PM
Ishmael Zechariah,

( reply to comment 6),

I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.

It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate.

And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.

So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.

Jack , 03 February 2018 at 08:54 PM
David,

Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.

In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.

Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century endorsed her.

Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in. Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling the Borg pundits.

SmoothieX12 -> kooshy... , 03 February 2018 at 09:51 PM
So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.

Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:10 PM
They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.
kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:24 PM
You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier on atlantic side.
catherine said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:21 AM
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''

The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.

'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'

In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241, 251 - 256]

'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'

State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union

aleksandar , 04 February 2018 at 04:41 AM
David,

About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS.

Fred said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 08:40 AM
Babak,

"they got US to bail them out during WWII" And how would things have worked out had we not done so?

Fred , 04 February 2018 at 08:46 AM
David,

"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time."

Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.

Anna said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 08:48 AM
"They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
-- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
turcopolier , 04 February 2018 at 08:54 AM
Anna

The powerful are often remarkably ignorant. pl

Babak Makkinejad -> Fred... , 04 February 2018 at 10:08 AM
England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion, did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 11:53 AM
"unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental people. Just general impressions, mind you.
Kooshy said in reply to catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting, even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such an escalation.
Phodges said in reply to turcopolier ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:23 PM
Sir

It seems we are being defeated by Cicero's enemy within. Zion is achieving what no one could hope to achieve by force of arms.

David Habakkuk -> catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 01:17 PM
catherine,

In response to comment 5.

I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain more pointers.

It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.

An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian attempts to get hold of him. An extract:

'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'

(See http://defiancethebook.com/legal/habeas/petition.htm .)

Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.

Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:

'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'

(See http://konanykhin.com/news/the-konanykhine-case.html .)

So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has changed.

For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:

'"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [Ł1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign passports for its "very, very special clients".

'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".

(For a 'Guardian report, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/sep/23/julianborger ; for the actual testimony, see http://archives-financialservices.house.gov/banking/92299ger.pdf .)

Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter, Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:

'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'

(For the transcript presented in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, see http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ )

When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.

(For the first part of the exchanges of comments, the second apparently having become unavailable, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/markurban/2008/07/litvinenko_killing_had_state_i.html )

She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator, David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.

Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.

What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary claim about Shvets:

'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.

'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.

'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'

Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling her as to the side for which he was working.

It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.

An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria' was actually credible.

This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking, and for similar action against Syria.

Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.

There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.

A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing. This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High') might be a start.

Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')

The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one feel as though one wanted to throw up.

Thomas , 04 February 2018 at 01:24 PM
"They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.}

No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.

SmoothieX12 -> Anna... , 04 February 2018 at 01:39 PM
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.

My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.

Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.

Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.

james said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 04 February 2018 at 03:01 PM
there seems to be no shortage of money for these blatant propaganda exercises..
Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 04:14 PM
I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914. Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
begob , 04 February 2018 at 05:20 PM
I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 06:20 PM
IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.

The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.

spy killer , 04 February 2018 at 06:55 PM
Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
English Outsider -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 07:23 AM
Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google also allows searches with more than one term. This link -

https://twitter.com/pat_lang

- gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories" on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.

If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.

"Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.

The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations" (hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many of the contributors know it from inside.

In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible, but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.

jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 08:11 AM
Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for the most part, Labor was Left.
Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.

So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.

Babak Makkinejad -> jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 08:29 AM
All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
Sid Finster said in reply to Jack... , 05 February 2018 at 10:26 AM
Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.

The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.

Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.

Sid Finster said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 05 February 2018 at 10:31 AM
Explain Marshall Miller's role in this, please. He is someone I know quite well. I also know one of the Chalupas.
begob said in reply to jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 10:56 AM
jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat of the BEF.
turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 11:18 AM
FM
What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break - David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 11:19 AM
Yes, I am Iranian. All "Babak"s are Iranians - except some obscure ones that are Rus - Babakov.
Anna , 05 February 2018 at 02:07 PM
The hard, blinding truth: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Thomas said in reply to turcopolier ... , 05 February 2018 at 02:08 PM
Colonel,

This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.

Richardstevenhack , 05 February 2018 at 02:36 PM
Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.

And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.

Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."

Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.

Seriously, read this! The whole thing!

Rampant abuse and possible contempt of Court: what you need to know about the GOP memo
http://theduran.com/rampant-abuse-contempt-court-analysis-gop-memorandum/

blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 03:25 PM
Sen Grassley releases memo heavily redacted by DOJ/FBI.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-05/grassley-graham-blast-fbi-censoring-memo-calling-criminal-probe-trump-dossier

"Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "

I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI is lying.

What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that are based on classified documents.

turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 04:38 PM
FM

We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status. You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are, in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you. You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl

Kooshy said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 04:46 PM
Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from Northeestern
blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 04:55 PM
...would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

Aye. Aye. Sir!

+1

That is why some of us believe the Patriot Act and FISA are both unpatriotic and unconstitutional. SCOTUS disagrees with the few of us.

Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 05:03 PM
I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist. I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians - they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
English Outsider , 05 February 2018 at 06:31 PM
Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.

David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because of that.

The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as "salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling around unsupervised?

The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but for the general public, that bit more untenable.

So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.

I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?

kooshy , 05 February 2018 at 07:49 PM
Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type, they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 07:59 PM
EO

Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to pay him until he left UK service. pl

English Outsider , 06 February 2018 at 05:10 AM
Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.

Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK side.

English Outsider -> Cortes... , 06 February 2018 at 05:53 AM
Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about the "golden showers"? "

I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.

So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.

Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.

But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK get mixed up in it?

David Habakkuk -> Sid Finster... , 06 February 2018 at 06:19 AM
Sid Finster,

In response to comment 53.

When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.

A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella.

When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.

His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques, and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.

So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'

The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.

(This initial post by me, and later posts by me on that site, are at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/uid:1857/diary. Three posts David Loepp and I produced jointly in December 2012, which have a lot on Scaramella and Shvets, are on his page there, at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/de%20Gondi/diary .)

The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December 2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:

'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic- Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'

Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:

'12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them [presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'

The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':

'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI. Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini. Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'

In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography – which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella which had been described in the wiretap request.

As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.

In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.

Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.

'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with him.'

From a fax dated 7 November 2005:

'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re: Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'

From a fax dated 5 December 2005:

'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'

In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be in a chaotic state.

However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus justifications.

Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.

(I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)

And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence in the Inquiry.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.

Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.

The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')

Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 09:40 AM
Thank you David Habakkuk. Truly sordid and deplorable. WWIII to be initiated on basis of lies.
Jack , 06 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
David

You may already know this but Steele was a no show in a UK court for a deposition on the libel suit.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/02/05/christopher-steele-is-no-show-in-london-court-in-civil-case-over-dossier.amp.html

Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 01:18 PM
I know something of spectroscopy.

The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis itself or its instrumentation.

The paragraph that you have quoted:

"To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."

And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics - which did not and could not exist in this situation.

LeaNder , 07 February 2018 at 09:16 AM
David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there is to know?

I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.

Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.

By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.

According to Google search there are no other links then your articles here:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf

**********

JAN RICHARD BĆRUG
The Collapsing Wall. Hybrid Journalism.
A Comparative Study of Newspapers and
Magazines in Eight Countries in Europe

Available online. Haven't read it yet, but journalism as hidden public relations transfer belt would be one of my minor obsessions. ...

Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 07 February 2018 at 11:23 AM
I wonder too; their command of the English idiom is very au currant - noticed "opt in/opt out" reference? Too American.

They clearly are not native speakers of German.

LeaNder said in reply to kooshy... , 07 February 2018 at 12:30 PM
why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_Island#Economy

Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.

Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those?

The German link is different. How about the Iranian?

or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?

LeaNder said in reply to LeaNder... , 07 February 2018 at 01:14 PM
correcting myself #94:

another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s

I see Sergei seems to share my interest in the literary genre:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Ivanov#Personal

[Mar 10, 2018] The frankly farcical nature of the 'Joint Investigative Mechanism' report into Khan Sheikhoun

Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

David Habakkuk -> JohnB... , 04 February 2018 at 10:35 AM

JohnB,

In response to comment 2.

If you are interested in Higgins and 'Bellingcat', you might want be interested in a 'Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media' which has recently been set up by a group of British academics.

(See http://syriapropagandamedia.org .)

At the moment, work which has already been done is being prepared for publication on the site. However, some of it has already appeared on the blog of one of the members, Tim Hayward.

This includes a detailed discussion of the report of the 'Joint Investigative Mechanism' on the Khan Sheikhoun attack by Paul McKeigue.
His professorship, at Edinburgh, is in Genetic Epidemiology and Statistical Genetics. This means that, unlike most of us interested in these matters, with the obvious exception of Theodore Postol, he has a grasp of a lot of relevant science.

(See https://timhayward.wordpress.com/2017/12/22/khan-sheikhoun-chemical-attack-guest-blog-featuring-paul-mckeigues-reassessment/ .)

A basic tool of his trade is a technique called 'Bayesian analysis', one of whose many applications is to separate out genetic factors in disease from others. His use of it in the piece may make bits of it somewhat hard going for those of us whose scientific education stopped at school.

But if you are interested in a demonstration of the way that the kind of pure charlatanry propagated by Higgins and Kaszeta has come to be accepted uncritically by supposed impartial international bodies, you should read the piece.

Also on Hayward's blog is an article which was submitted to the Guardian's 'Comment is Free' page, in response to a piece by Olivia Solon smearing those who have had the temerity to suggest that the 'White Helmets' may be something less than a band of disinterested charity workers, and an account of the attempts of the 'Working Group' to get a response from the paper.

(See https://timhayward.wordpress.com/2018/01/12/the-guardian-white-helmets-and-silenced-comment/ .)

This has links to material on that organisation already published. A lot more work will be appearing on the 'Working Group' site.

David Habakkuk -> blowback... , 06 February 2018 at 11:42 AM

blowback,

In response to 36.

Thanks for the link. But what Mattis has said relates to the latest accusations, not early ones. Key paragraphs:

'A deadly sarin attack on another rebel-held area in April 2017 prompted President Donald Trump to order a U.S. missile strike on the Shayrat airbase, from which the Syrian operation is said to have been launched.

'"We are on the record and you all have seen how we reacted to that, so they would be ill-advised to go back to violating the chemical (weapons) convention," Mattis said.'

So he is not repudiating the conventional wisdom according to which sarin was used at Khan Sheikhoun, and the possibility of a military response to a fresh 'false flag' is left open. Unless he is basing his accusation on credible evidence, this to be blunt, comes close to inciting jihadists to atrocity.

The extent -- and unscrupulousness -- of the mounting propaganda campaign in relation to the recently claims is well brought out in a piece by Rick Sterling in 'Consortium News' on Sunday. Whether those involved are still hoping to precipitate a serious American military intervention, and whether those hopes might be realistic, I cannot say.

(See https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/04/wmd-claims-in-syria-raise-concerns-over-u-s-escalation/ .)

This makes the detailed demonstration by Professor McKeigue of the frankly farcical nature of the 'Joint Investigative Mechanism' report into Khan Sheikhoun, to which I linked, all the more important. In addition to exposing the total dependence of its analysis on a completely incredible claim about the aircraft which is supposed to have delivered the chemical weapon, and discussing much other evidence, he brings out a key point about developments in 'chemical forensics' over the past years.

As well as the 1995 sarin attacks, the 2001 anthrax letter attacks led to an enormous investment of money and intellectual energy in the development of analytical techniques making it possible to identify perpetrators of chemical weapons incidents. A fascinating article entitled 'Tracing a Threat' by Bethany Halford in 'Chemistry & Engineering News World' in February 2012 provides a good picture of what the state of play was at that time.

(See https://cen.acs.org/articles/90/i6/Tracing-Threat.html .)

She quotes an expert called Joseph Chipuk, from a consultancy called 'Signature Science' in Austin, explaining how the 'spectra' -- different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation associated with different 'impurities' in samples, including 'environmental' ones, such as soil, fragments of weapons, and clothing -- can be matched with reconstructions of possible 'synthetic pathways'.

The levels of sophistication of which this kind of analysis was already capable, he made clear, are close to breathtaking:

'To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an "almost robotic manner," following a database that tells them exactly what conditions to use. They then hand off the product to the analytical chemists, who look at all the tiny impurities that turn up along with the toxic chemical -- "the stuff that's down in the weeds," as Chipuk describes it. From there, the hundreds or, in some cases, thousands of spectra that are collected go to statisticians and computer scientists who work their magic to tease out the unique attribution signatures.'

At the end of the article, Halford quotes Chipuk again making clear that improvement is continuous in a way that is making it quite extraordinarily difficult to fool analysts who are genuinely looking for the truth -- as not only Dan Kaszeta but, very regrettably, key figures at the OPCW and some of its 'Designated Laboratories' do not appear to be:

'"The fact is that technology continues to improve, instrumentation continues to improve, and computers continue to improve. The chances of someone being able to slip by undetected are getting smaller and smaller," says Signature Science's Chipuk. "If you were to choose to do something like this, the science is going to catch up to you."'

In relation to the claims now being made, what is initially at issue is simply the question of whether the 'impurities' identified by the 'spectra' in samples from the incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal match.

What characterised the 'hexamine hypothesis' as put forward by Kaszeta was the -- close to surreal -- suggestion that a single substance, hexamine, was a 'smoking gun'. To anyone who had taken the trouble to read easily accessible discussions of the methodology, such as Halford's piece, it would be apparent that it is simply ludicrous to base a claim on a single substance -- particularly given that hexamine is also used in explosives.

In the 'Reuters' report on 30 January, we were told:

'Two compounds in the Ghouta sample matched those also found in Khan Sheikhoun, one formed from sarin and the stabilizer hexamine and another specific fluorophosphate that appears during sarin production, the tests showed.'

(See https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-chemicalweapons-exclusiv/exclusive-tests-link-syrian-government-stockpile-to-largest-sarin-attack-sources-idUSKBN1FJ0MG .)

So we have an -- unidentified -- compound which supposedly establishes that the hexamine did indeed form part of the sarin production process, rather than of the explosive charge. And we are then told of the presence of another compound, which are told is 'another specific fluorophosphate': why not tell us which?

To anyone interested in actually making sense of the evidence, to have a mere two compounds mentioned, and those not adequately identified, suggests an alternative possibility: that people who knew details of the 'synthetic pathway' by which Syrian government sarin had been synthesised leaked them to those who were producing the substance for a 'false flag.' It would have been beyond the capabilities of a relatively primitive operation to produce any kind of close fit -- to get a couple of compounds to match would probably not have been difficult at all.

If this suspicious interpretation if false, there is a very simple way to refute it -- and General Mattis is in a perfect position to do this.

The close links between the American and British 'intelligence communities' have been stressed in comments on this thread. It is clear that in relation to Syrian chemical weapons, there was a division of labour.

Analysis of 'environmental' samples was concentrated at the British OPCW-certified facility, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down in Wiltshire. Meanwhile, preparations for the dismantling of the Syrian chemical arsenal were the made at one of the two American OPCW-certified laboratories, the U.S. Army's Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland.

The destruction of the 581 tonnes of the sarin precursor methylphosphonyl difluoride, or DF, aboard the specially kitted out vessel 'M.V. Cape Ray' in the Mediterranean was announced in August 2014. In the extensive reporting on the preparations for this, it was made absolutely clear that -- as one would expect -- the vessel was equipped with a proper analytical laboratory, with OPCW scientists involved as well as those from the Edgewood Center.

(See https://www.chemistryworld.com/feature/eliminating-syrias-chemical-weapons/7390.article .)

In a post entitled 'Sentence First -- Verdict Afterwards?' shortly after the Khan Sheikhoun attack, and then in two 'open letters' to the members of our Defence and Foreign Affairs Committees, I pointed to the mass of evidence suggesting that the test results from different incidents did not match each other or those from the stocks destroyed on the 'Cape Ray.'

(See http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/habakkuk/ .)

The publicly available evidence, I argued, provided strong reason to believe that results from Porton Down and the OPCW confirmed the claim made by the Russians, supposedly on the basis of tests from their own OPCW-certified laboratory, that the sarin used at Khan Al-Asal and Ghouta was a 'cottage industry' product. This was also what Seymour Hersh claimed that tests carried out at Porton Down had revealed about the sarin used at Ghouta - he used the term 'kitchen sarin.'

What the Reuters report has -- perhaps inadvertently -- confirmed is that Porton Down had in fact tested 'environmental' samples from the Khan Al-Asal incident on 19 March 2013, the first where sarin was used in Syria, by suggesting that tests from that incident as well as those at Ghouta and Khan Sheikhoun matched the results from the stocks on the 'Cape Ray':

'Laboratories working for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons compared samples taken by a U.N. mission in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta after the Aug. 21, 2013 attack, when hundreds of civilians died of sarin gas poisoning, to chemicals handed over by Damascus for destruction in 2014.

'The tests found "markers" in samples taken at Ghouta and at the sites of two other nerve agent attacks, in the towns of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib governorate on April 4, 2017 and Khan al-Assal, Aleppo, in March 2013, two people involved in the process said.

'"We compared Khan Sheikhoun, Khan al-Assal, Ghouta," said one source who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the findings. "There were signatures in all three of them that matched."'

Can anyone seriously believe that if the tests we know to have been done on at Porton Down had established what this 'source' who does not have the guts to the identify himself claims, this fact would not have been trumpeted to the skies -- first when the results from Ghouta matched those from Khan Al-Asal, and then when both matched those from the 'Cape Ray'?

Allright -- sometimes the practically incredible turns out to be true. But if he has any evidence on which to base his claims, General Mattis should have the courage of his convictions, and order the disclosure of the relevant 'spectra.'

David Habakkuk -> Babak Makkinejad... , 07 February 2018 at 09:28 AM
Babak Makkinejad,

You are wrong about this. That the 'chain of custody' principle has been flagrantly violated in the reports of the 'Fact-Finding Mission' and the 'Joint Investigative Mechanism' is patently the case, and in itself reason why the almost unanimous acceptance of these in the MSM is scandalous. But that is a separate issue.

(See http://russiaun.ru/en/news/opcwun -- the whole document is well worth reading.)

The reasons why the test results from the various laboratories were critical were set out last April in my '"Sentence First -- Verdict Afterwards"?' piece, and the two 'open letters' to the members of the Defence and Foreign Affairs Committees pointing out the need for clarification as to what was being claimed about the test results.

Let me recap, and update.

An example of the kind of 'chemical forensics' one needs in incidents like this was provided by the analysis of test results on 'shell and soil' samples purporting to derive from the Khan Al-Asal incident on 19 March 2013 which formed part of the document from the Russian OPCW-certified laboratory which was submitted to the UN Secretary-General on 9 July that year.

On 4 September, as part of the attempt to stop the visible attempt to use Ghouta to create an unstoppable momentum towards the destruction of the Syrian government, more details of what looks like an expanded version of the original document were made public by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In it they claimed that:

'shell and soil samples contained nerve agents -- sarin gas and diisopropylfluorophosphate -- not synthesized in an industrial environment, which was used by Western states for producing chemical weapons during World War II.'

It was also made clear that the conclusions rested upon precisely the kind of very complex analysis Bethany Halford is describing:

'We highlight that the Russian report is extremely specific. It is a scientific and technical document containing about 100 pages with many tables and diagrams of spectral analysis of the samples. We expect that it will significantly assist in the investigation into this incident by the UN. Unfortunately, it has in fact not started yet.'

(See https://www.rusemb.org.uk/fnapr/3169 .)

Unfortunately, the detailed 'spectra' have not been released, but they have certainly been analysed by experts at the OPCW and that organisation's 'Designated Laboratories' in the West, including Porton Down. We know that the results from the materials tested on the 'Cape Ray' will show a sarin precursor 'manufactured in an industrial environment.'

To prove what Mattis and others want to claim it is necessary that the 'spectra' from none of the other tests match those in the Russian report, and the 'markers' from the 'Cape Ray' materials are the same as those from Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, and Khan Al-Asal. If there are serious 'chain of custody' problems, the 'markers' from the four sets of tests might not be sufficient to establish Syrian government culpability -- a lack of a match would be quite sufficient to establish that the indictment cannot be accepted as it stands.

As I brought out in my post last April, the publicly available evidence -- of which Hersh's 'Red Line and Rat Line' article and subsequent interviews form an important part -- strongly suggests the Russian claims that the toxin used in both Khan Al-Asal and also Ghouta was 'cottage industry', as they put it, or 'kitchen sarin', as he put it, are correct.

It is simply not a refutation of these claims to treat one compound supposed to validate the 'hexamine hypothesis', and an unspecified fluorophosphate, which could be the diisopropylfluorophosphate reported by the Russians, or hexafluorophosphate, as conclusive evidence. (The implications, or lack of them, would be quite different, depending on which compound it was.)

And all this hush-hush whisper-whisper from 'diplomats and scientists' who are not prepared to be identified, as well as assurances from that supposedly 'independent' expert Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, only add to the grounds for scepticism. As I brought out in my post, he is under the strongest possible suspicion of having been involved in covering up, and quite possibly colluding in, the 'false flags.'

If they have evidence to support the case, then let Western governments produce the 'spectra' -- as also should the Russians. We do not need complete reports, which may need to be kept secret for perfectly good reasons -- simply the 'many tables and diagrams' which must exist. Once these were out in the open, then it would be much easier to have an informed argument.

Most of this ground I covered last April. However, there is some crucial new context. Part of this is provided by a report in 'The Intercept' last October, entitled 'NSA Document Says Saudi Prince Directly Ordered Coordinated Attack By Syrian Rebels On Damascus.' As it explains:

'According to a top-secret National Security Agency document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the March 2013 rocket attacks were directly ordered by a member of the Saudi royal family, Prince Salman bin Sultan, to help mark the second anniversary of the Syrian revolution. Salman had provided 120 tons of explosives and other weaponry to opposition forces, giving them instructions to "light up Damascus" and "flatten" the airport, the document, produced by U.S. government surveillance on Syrian opposition factions, shows.'

(See https://theintercept.com/2017/10/24/syria-rebels-nsa-saudi-prince-assad/ .)

This was on 18 March -- the day before Khan Al-Asal. Further relevant context is provided by a piece in February 2017 on the 'Monitor on Massacre Marketing' site by Adam Larson, entitled 'What happened on March 19, 2013?' which is subtitled 'The First Bodies Tossed Across Obama's "Red Line" in Syria.'

(See http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/what-happened-on-march-19-2013.html .)

This starts by reviewing the -- ample -- evidence that the Khan Al-Asal attack came at a point where there was very visible enthusiasm on the part of a lot of people in the United States and Western Europe for intervention in support of the 'Assad must go' agenda, so that he had every incentive to avoid chemical weapons use, and the insurgents every incentive to produce a 'false flag.'

And Larson goes on to note that 'Ironically, the first solid news of the feared chemical attack came in the form of a Syrian government announcement on March 19 that their forces had been gassed by "terrorists" in a town just west of Aleppo" -- that is, the Shi'ite town of Khan Al-Asal.

There follow detailed reviews of the evidence of another incident on the same day, in which the victims appeared to be insurgents, at the Damascus suburb variously transliterated as Otaybah and Uteibah, and more fragmentary and puzzling evidence about events at Homs.

And Larson goes on to suggest that a three-pronged 'false flag' was planned for 19 March, in Aleppo, Damascus and Homs -- the country's three largest cities. This would obviously fit very well with the NSA intercept, in that it would suggest that the intent was to portray these as Assad's savage response to the attacks in Damascus, thus, hopefully, generating unstoppable momentum for American military intervention.

This seems to me eminently plausible, but it leaves open two possible interpretations of Khan Al-Asal. When insurgents who are difficult to control are given access to weapons like sarin, there is an obvious possibility of matters developing in unexpected directions, either as the result of their bungling an attack, or succumbing to the temptation to use it against government forces.

However, a different set of unintended consequences is also possible. It could be that Syrian intelligence, perhaps with the assistance of Russian and/or Iranian, and with a combination of 'SIGINT' and 'HUMINT' methods quite possibly being deployed, knew precisely what was going on -- and had double agents inside the groups preparing the 'false flags.'

Rather than wait until the inevitable chorus calling for all-out air strikes began, it could well have made sense to turn one of the incidents into a 'false flag' within a 'false flag.'

The anti-Assad camp would then have been effectively 'snookered.' They would have faced a situation where they would know that, if they acceded to the calls from the Syrians and Russians for a proper UN/OPCW investigation, making a rigorous use of 'chemical forensics', these would implicate the insurgents. And if the evidence suggested that it was these who had crossed Obama's 'red line', it would have been game and set, and probably match, to the Syrian and Russian governments.

Irrespective of people's views on what interpretation is plausible in relation to Khan Al-Asal, the important point is that strategies which rely strongly on convert action -- as the 'régime change' projects I outlined in the current post do -- are inherently liable to run out of control. The uncontrollability of their instruments, and the possibility of covert action meeting covert action in return, are always liable to generate unintended consequences which can escalate.

As soon as the possible that an impartial investigation would implicate the insurgents was real, in relation to Khan Al-Asal, irrespective of whether the imputation would have been justified, the alternative to facing a complete collapse of their projects in Syria, for Western governments, was inherently likely to be at best covering up, at worst colluding in, further 'false flags.' Moreover, intense pressure had to be mounted, to ensure that what were supposed to be sources of independent expertise supported their cover-ups.

This pattern, I am suggesting is common both to history of the 'StratCom' in which Christopher Steele has been involved, and that relating to chemical weapons use in Syria. Particularly when the 'Fourth Estate' ceases to do its job, a likely result is the progressive systematic corruption of institutions.

blowback , 04 February 2018 at 03:20 PM
David,

You have read one of the articles on what James Mattis said on Friday about sarin? He quite clearly states that the United States has no evidence that the Syrian government has used sarin. Given the way, the French, British, German, etc. intelligence services share information, that suggests that if James Mattis is speaking the truth then no one in NATO, except perhaps for Turkey given Erdogan's recent behavior, has any evidence either. This means that both incidents, East Ghouta and Khan Shaykhoun, and any other incidents that are alleged by the terrorists to have involved sarin are not what they are claimed to be in western msm and most western politicians. Bellingcat and all the other NGOs who have made similar claims about sarin are all wrong.

Mattis does claim that Syria has used chlorine.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-usa/u-s-mattis-says-concerned-about-syrias-potential-use-of-sarin-gas-idUSKBN1FM1VJ

[Mar 09, 2018] Yahoo scanned emails for US intelligence

Notable quotes:
"... The custom software program was secretly built last year to comply with a classified US government directive. The program scanned hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts, according to revelations first reported by Reuters. ..."
"... Surveillance experts told Reuters this is the first case to surface of an US internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to requests for stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time. ..."
www.defenddemocracy.press

The custom software program was secretly built last year to comply with a classified US government directive. The program scanned hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts, according to revelations first reported by Reuters.

It is not known whether the directive, which was sent to the company's legal team, came from the National Security Agency or the FBI, according to the two former Yahoo employees. It is also not known what the intelligence officials were seeking, except wanting the company to search for a set of characters, which could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment.

The former employees said Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's decision to follow the directive angered some senior executive and led to the departure of Alex Stamos, the company's chief information officer.

When Stamos discovered Mayer had authorized the program, he told his subordinates that he had been left out of a decision that hurt users' security, the sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them, hackers could have accessed the stored emails.

Yahoo said in a statement issued to Reuters about the intelligence demand that it "is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States."

Surveillance experts told Reuters this is the first case to surface of an US internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to requests for stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

[Mar 09, 2018] US Spying the UN Security Council Defend Democracy Press by Norman Solomon

Notable quotes:
"... by Norman Solomon Posted on March 09, 2018 ..."
"... "If you have information that bears on deception or illegality in pursuing wrongful policies or an aggressive war," he said in a statement released last week, "don't wait to put that out and think about it, consider acting in a timely way at whatever cost to yourself . Do what Katharine Gun did." ..."
"... That's the kind of reality George Orwell was referring to when he wrote: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." ..."
"... What Ellsberg read in the newspaper story "was a cable from the NSA asking GCHQ to help in the intercepting of communications, and that implied both office and home communications, of every member of the Security Council of the UN. ..."
"... Now, why would NSA need GCHQ to do that? Because a condition of having the UN headquarters and the Security Council in the US in New York was that the US intelligence agencies promised or were required not to conduct intelligence on members of the UN. Well, of course they want that. So, they rely on their allies, their buddies in the British GCHQ, to commit these criminal acts for them. And with this clearly I thought someone very high in access in Britain intelligence services must dissent from what was already clear the path to an illegal war. ..."
Mar 09, 2018 | www.defenddemocracy.press
Those Who Controlled the Past Should Not Control the Future

by Norman Solomon
Posted on
March 09, 2018

Daniel Ellsberg has a message that managers of the warfare state don't want people to hear.

"If you have information that bears on deception or illegality in pursuing wrongful policies or an aggressive war," he said in a statement released last week, "don't wait to put that out and think about it, consider acting in a timely way at whatever cost to yourself . Do what Katharine Gun did."

If you don't know what Katharine Gun did, chalk that up to the media power of the war system.

Ellsberg's video statement went public as this month began, just before the 15th anniversary of when a British newspaper, the Observer , revealed a secret NSA memo – thanks to Katharine Gun. At the UK's intelligence agency GCHQ, about 100 people received the same email memo from the National Security Agency on the last day of January 2003, seven weeks before the invasion of Iraq got underway. Only Katharine Gun, at great personal risk, decided to leak the document.

If more people had taken such risks in early 2003, the Iraq War might have been prevented. If more people were willing to take such risks in 2018, the current military slaughter in several nations, mainly funded by U.S. taxpayers, might be curtailed if not stopped. Blockage of information about past whistleblowing deprives the public of inspiring role models.

That's the kind of reality George Orwell was referring to when he wrote: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

Fifteen years ago, "I find myself reading on my computer from the Observer the most extraordinary leak, or unauthorized disclosure, of classified information that I'd ever seen," Ellsberg recalled, "and that definitely included and surpassed my own disclosure of top-secret information, a history of US decision-making in Vietnam years earlier." The Pentagon Papers whistleblower instantly recognized that, in the Observer article, "I was looking at something that was clearly classified much higher than top secret . It was an operational cable having to do with how to conduct communications intelligence."

What Ellsberg read in the newspaper story "was a cable from the NSA asking GCHQ to help in the intercepting of communications, and that implied both office and home communications, of every member of the Security Council of the UN.

Now, why would NSA need GCHQ to do that? Because a condition of having the UN headquarters and the Security Council in the US in New York was that the US intelligence agencies promised or were required not to conduct intelligence on members of the UN. Well, of course they want that. So, they rely on their allies, their buddies in the British GCHQ, to commit these criminal acts for them. And with this clearly I thought someone very high in access in Britain intelligence services must dissent from what was already clear the path to an illegal war. "

... ... ...

* Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy . His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death .

[Mar 08, 2018] Given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... To be precise, CrowdStrike did provide the FBI with allegedly "certified true images" of the DNC servers allegedly involved in the alleged "hack." They also allegedly provided these images to FireEye and Mandiant, IIRC ..."
"... Of course, given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence. ..."
"... In addition, regardless of whether the images were true or not, the evidence allegedly contained therein is painfully inadequate to confirm that APT28 or APT29 were involved, nor that the Russian government was involved, or even that there was a real hack involved, and even less evidence that any emails that might have been exfiltrated were given to Wikileaks as opposed to another leak such as that alleged by Sy Hersh to have been done by Seth Rich. ..."
Mar 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Richardstevenhack , 07 March 2018 at 06:23 PM

Re this: " In the case of Russian meddling there is no forensic evidence available to the IC because the Democratic National Committee did not permit the FBI to investigate and examine the computers and the network that was allegedly attacked."

To be precise, CrowdStrike did provide the FBI with allegedly "certified true images" of the DNC servers allegedly involved in the alleged "hack." They also allegedly provided these images to FireEye and Mandiant, IIRC .

All three allegedly examined those images and concurred with CrowdStrike's analysis.

Of course, given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence.

In addition, regardless of whether the images were true or not, the evidence allegedly contained therein is painfully inadequate to confirm that APT28 or APT29 were involved, nor that the Russian government was involved, or even that there was a real hack involved, and even less evidence that any emails that might have been exfiltrated were given to Wikileaks as opposed to another leak such as that alleged by Sy Hersh to have been done by Seth Rich.

The "assessment" that Putin ordered any of this is pure mind-reading and can be utterly dismissed absent any of the other evidence Publius points out as necessary.

The same applies to any "estimate" that the Russian government preferred Trump or wished to denigrate Clinton. Based on what I read in pro-Russian news outlets, Russian officials took great pains to not pick sides and Putin's comments were similarly very restrained. The main quote from Putin about Trump that emerged was mistranslated as approval whereas it was more an observation of Trump's personality. At no time did Putin ever say he favored Trump over Clinton, even though that was a likely probability given Clinton's "Hitler" comparison.

As an aside, I also recommend Scott Ritter's trashing of the ICA. Ritter is familiar with intelligence estimates and their reliability based on his previous service as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq and in Russia implementing arms control treaties.

Exposing The Man Behind The Curtain
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/exposing-the-man-behind-the-curtain_us_5877887be4b05b7a465df6a4

Throwing a Curveball at 'Intelligence Community Consensus' on Russia
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/did-17-intelligence-agencies-really-come-to-consensus-on-russia/

His analysis of the NSA document leaked by NSA contractor Reality Winner which supposedly supported the Russia theory is also relevant.

Leaked NSA Report Is Short on Facts, Proves Little in 'Russiagate' Case
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/leaked-nsa-report-is-short-on-facts-proves-little-in-russiagate-case/

[Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

Highly recommended!
The sad but reasonable conclusion from all those Russiagate events is that an influential part of the US elite wants to balance on the edge of war with Russia to ensure profits and flow of taxpayer money. that part of the elite include top honchos on the US intelligence community and Pentagon (surprise, surprise)
The other logical conclusion is that intelligence agencies now determine the US foreign policy and control all major political players (there were widespread suspicions that Clinton, Bush II and Obama were actually closely connected to CIA). Which neatly fits into hypotheses about the "deep state".
This "can of worms" that the US political scene now represents is very dangerous for the future on mankind indeed.
Notable quotes:
"... Most objective observers would concede that the DNI has been a miserable failure and nothing more than a bureaucratic boondoggle. ..."
"... "The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow -- the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities." ..."
"... More telling was the absence of any written document issued from the Office of the DNI that detailed the supposed intel backing up this judgment. Notice the weasel language in this release ..."
"... If there was actual evidence/intelligence, such as an intercepted conversation between Vladimir Putin and a subordinate ordering them to hack the DNC or even a human source report claiming such an activity, then it would have and should have been referenced in the Clapper/Johnson document. It was not because such intel did not exist. ..."
"... "We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election," Clinton said. "I find that deeply disturbing." ..."
"... The basic job of an analyst is to collect as much relevant information as possible on the subject or topic that is their responsibility. There are analysts at the CIA, the NSA, the DIA and State INR that have the job of knowing about Russian cyber activity and capabilities. That is certain. But we are not talking about hundreds of people. ..."
"... Let us move from the hypothetical to the actual. In January of 2017, DNI Jim Clapper release a report entitled, " Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections " (please see here ). In subsequent testimony before the Congress, Clapper claimed that he handpicked two dozen analysts to draft the document . That is not likely. There may have been as many as two dozen analysts who read the final document and commented on it, but there would never be that many involved in in drafting such a document. In any event, only analysts from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI were involved ..."
"... This report includes an analytic assessment drafted and coordinated among The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and The National Security Agency (NSA), which draws on intelligence information collected and disseminated by those three agencies. ..."
"... That is how the process is supposed to work. But the document produced in January 2017 was not a genuine work reflecting the views of the "Intelligence Community." It only represented the supposed thinking (and I use that term generously) of CIA, NSA and FBI analysts. In other words, only three of 16 agencies cleared on the document that presented four conclusions ..."
"... Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow's longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations. ..."
"... We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. ..."
"... We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. ..."
"... We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes. ..."
"... It is genuinely shocking that DNI Jim Clapper, with the acquiescence of the CIA, the FBI and NSA, would produce a document devoid of any solid intelligence. There is a way to publicly release sensitive intelligence without comprising a the original source. But such sourcing is absent in this document. ..."
"... The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they did not do. That lie remains unchallenged. ..."
"... "The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they did not do. That lie remains unchallenged.'" Yes it was and so remains the lie unchallenged. ..."
"... Conjectural garbage appears first to have been washed through the FBI, headquarters no less, then probably it picked up a Triple A rating at the CIA, and then when the garbage got to Clapper, it was bombs away - we experts all agree. There were leaks, but they weren't sufficient to satisfy Steele so he just delivered the garbage whole to the Media in order to make it a sure thing. The garbage was placed securely out there in the public domain with a Triple A rating because the FBI wouldn't concern itself with garbage, would it? ..."
"... Contrast this trajectory with what the Russian policy establishment did when it concluded that the US had done something in the Ukraine that Russia found significantly actionable: it released the taped evidence of Nuland and our Ambassador finishing off the coup. ..."
"... To be precise, CrowdStrike did provide the FBI with allegedly "certified true images" of the DNC servers allegedly involved in the alleged "hack." They also allegedly provided these images to FireEye and Mandiant, IIRC ..."
"... Of course, given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence. ..."
"... In addition, regardless of whether the images were true or not, the evidence allegedly contained therein is painfully inadequate to confirm that APT28 or APT29 were involved, nor that the Russian government was involved, or even that there was a real hack involved, and even less evidence that any emails that might have been exfiltrated were given to Wikileaks as opposed to another leak such as that alleged by Sy Hersh to have been done by Seth Rich. ..."
"... My interpretation is: In 1990 +- Bush 41 sold us the 1st Iraq war using fudged intelligence, then Bush 43 sold us the second Iraq war using fabricated intelligence. And now the Obama Administration tried to sell us fake intelligence in regard to Russia in order to get Clinton elected ..."
"... Mueller has had 18 months and has proceeded to reveal exactly nothing related to either Trump "collusion" with Russia nor Russia as a state actually doing anything remotely described as "meddling." ..."
"... His expected indictment of some Russians for the DNC hack is going to be more of the same in all likelihood. I predict there will be next to zero evidence produced either that the Russians named are in fact members of APT28 or APT29 or that they had any direct connection with either the alleged DNC hack or Wikileaks or the Russian government. ..."
"... It's a witch hunt, nothing more. People holding their breath for the "slam dunk" are going to pass out soon if they haven't already. ..."
"... Mueller is investigating some aspects. But there is another aspect - the conspiracy inside law enforcement and the IC. That is also being investigated. There are Congressional committees in particular Nunes, Goodlatte and Grassley. Then there is the DOJ IG. And today AG Sessions confirms there is a DOJ prosecutor outside Washington investigating. ..."
"... But such evidence (corroborating the Steele dossier) was not forthcoming. If it had existed than Jim Comey could have claimed in his June 2017 testimony before Congress that the parts of the "Dossier" had been verified. He did not do so. Testifying under oath Comey described the "Dossier" as "salacious and unverified." ..."
"... ... was UK Intelligence, or an ex-UK intelligence officer, used to get material through the US evaluation process, material that would not have got through that US evaluation process had it originated within the US itself?" I would say yes and especially yes if the contact for this piece of data was conducted at the highest level within the context of the already tight liaison between the US IC and Mi-6/GCHQ ..."
"... Was it Hitler or Stalin who said "show me the man and I will find his crime?" As I have said before, Trumps greatest vulnerability lies in his previous business life as an entrepreneurial hustler. ..."
"... Re 'baby adoption' meeting between Trump, Jr. and Veselnitskaya, I recall a comment here linking to an article speculating the email initiating the meeting originated in Europe, was set up by the playboy son of a European diplomat, and contained words to trip data-gathering monitors which would have enabled a FISA request to have Trump, Jr. come under surveillance. ..."
"... "We don't have the evidence yet because Mueller hasn't found it yet!" is a classic argument from ignorance, in that is assumes without evidence (there's that pesky word again!) that there is something to be found. ..."
"... The fact is Flynn has pled guilty to perjury. Nothing else like collusion with the Russians. ..."
"... Manafort has been indicted for money laundering, wire fraud, etc for activities well before the election campaign. Sure, it is good that these corrupt individuals should be investigated and prosecuted. However, this corruption is widespread in DC. How come none of these cheering Mueller on to destroy Trump care about all the foreign money flowing to K Street? Why aren't they calling for investigations of the Clinton Foundation or the Podesta brothers where probable cause exist of foreign money and influence? What about Ben Cardin and all those recipients of foreign zionist money and influence? It would be nice if there were wide ranging investigations on all those engaged in foreign influence peddling. But it seems many just want a witch hunt to hobble Trump. It's going to be very difficult to get the Senate to convict him for obstruction of justice or tax evasion or some charge like that. ..."
"... What does "hacking our elections" mean? Does it means breaking into voting systems and changing the outcome by altering votes? Or does it mean information operations to change US voters' minds about for whom they would vote? ..."
"... As for McMasters, I am unimpressed with him. He displays all the symptoms of Russophobia. He has special information? Information can be interpreted many ways depending on one's purpose. pl ..."
"... IMO the perpetrators in the Steel Memo case are and were merely hiding behind claims of sources and methods protection in order to protect themselve. ..."
"... So now we are supposed to believe unquestioningly the word of torturers, perjurers and entrapment artists, all talking about alleged evidence that we are not allowed to see? Did you learn nothing from the "Iraqi WMD" fiasco or the "ZOMG! Assad gassed his own peoples ZOMG!" debacle? Funny how in each of these instances, the intelligence community's lies just happened to coincide with the agenda of empire. ..."
Mar 07, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

The Intel Community Lie About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

Americans tend to be a trusting lot. When they hear a high level government official, like former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, state that Russia's Vladimir ordered and monitored a Russian cyber attack on the 2016 Presidential election, those trusting souls believe him. For experienced intelligence professionals, who know how the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence works, they detect a troubling omission in Clapper's presentation and, upon examining the so-called "Intelligence Community Assessment," discover that document is a deceptive fraud. It lacks actual evidence that Putin and the Russians did what they are accused of doing. More troubling -- and this is inside baseball -- is the fact that two critical members of the Intelligence Community -- the DIA and State INR -- were not asked to coordinate/clear on the assessment.

You should not feel stupid if you do not understand or appreciate the last point. That is something only people who actually have produced a Community Assessment would understand. I need to take you behind the scenes and ensure you understand what is intelligence and how analysts assess and process that intelligence. Once you understand that then you will be able to see the flaws and inadequacies in the report released by Jim Clapper in January 2017.

The first thing you need to understand is the meaning of the term, the "Intelligence Community" aka IC. Comedians are not far off the mark in touting this phrase as the original oxymoron. On paper the IC currently is comprised of 17 agencies/departments:
  1. Air Force Intelligence,
  2. Army Intelligence,
  3. Central Intelligence Agency aka CIA,
  4. Coast Guard Intelligence,
  5. Defense Intelligence Agency aka DIA,
  6. Energy Department aka DOE,
  7. Homeland Security Department,
  8. State Department aka INR,
  9. Treasury Department,
  10. Drug Enforcement Administration aka DEA,
  11. Federal Bureau of Investigation aka FBI,
  12. Marine Corps Intelligence,
  13. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency aka NGIA or NGA,
  14. National Reconnaissance Office aka NRO,
  15. National Security Agency aka NSA,
  16. Navy Intelligence
  17. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

But not all of these are "national security" agencies -- i.e., those that collect raw intelligence, which subsequently is packaged and distributed to other agencies on a need to know basis. Only six of these agencies take an active role in collecting raw foreign intelligence. The remainder are consumers of that intelligence product. In other words, the information does not originate with them. They are like a subscriber to the New York Times. They get the paper everyday and, based upon what they read, decide what is going on in their particular world. The gatherers of intelligence are:

Nine of the other agencies/departments are consumers. They do not collect and package original info. They are the passive recipients. The analysts in those agencies will base their conclusions on information generated by other agencies, principally the CIA and the NSA.

The astute among you, I am sure, will insist my list is deficient and will ask, "What about the FBI and DEA?" It is true that those two organizations produce a type of human intelligence -- i.e., they recruit informants and those informants provide those agencies with information that the average person understandably would categorize as "intelligence." But there is an important difference between human intelligence collected by the CIA and the human source intelligence gathered by the FBI or the DEA. The latter two are law enforcement agencies. No one from the CIA or the NSA has the power to arrest someone. The FBI and the DEA do.

Their authority as law enforcement agents, however, comes with limitations, especially in collecting so-called intelligence. The FBI and the DEA face egal constraints on what information they can collect and store. The FBI cannot decide on its own that skinheads represent a threat and then start gathering information identifying skinhead leaders. There has to be an allegation of criminal activity. When such "human" information is being gathered under the umbrella of law enforcement authorities, it is being handled as potential evidence that may be used to prosecute someone. This means that such information cannot be shared with anyone else, especially intelligence agencies like the CIA and the NSA.

The "17th" member of the IC is the Director of National Intelligence aka DNI. This agency was created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks for the ostensible purpose of coordinating the activities and products of the IC. In theory it is the organization that is supposed to coordinate what the IC collects and the products the IC produces. Most objective observers would concede that the DNI has been a miserable failure and nothing more than a bureaucratic boondoggle.

An important, but little understood point, is that these agencies each have a different focus. They are not looking at the same things. In fact, most are highly specialized and narrowly focused. Take the Coast Guard, for instance. Their intelligence operations primarily hone in on maritime threats and activities in U.S. territorial waters, such as narcotic interdictions. They are not responsible for monitoring what the Russians are doing in the Black Sea and they have no significant expertise in the cyber activities of the Russian Army military intelligence organization aka the GRU.

In looking back at the events of 2016 surrounding the U.S. Presidential campaign, most people will recall that Hillary Clinton, along with several high level Obama national security officials, pushed the lie that the U.S. Intelligence agreed that Russia had unleashed a cyber war on the United States. The initial lie came from DNI Jim Clapper and Homeland Security Chief, Jeb Johnson, who released the following memo to the press on 7 October 2016 :

"The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow -- the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."

This was a deliberate deceptive message. It implied that the all 16 intelligence agencies agreed with the premise and "evidence of Russian meddling. Yet not a single bit of proof was offered. More telling was the absence of any written document issued from the Office of the DNI that detailed the supposed intel backing up this judgment. Notice the weasel language in this release:

If there was actual evidence/intelligence, such as an intercepted conversation between Vladimir Putin and a subordinate ordering them to hack the DNC or even a human source report claiming such an activity, then it would have and should have been referenced in the Clapper/Johnson document. It was not because such intel did not exist.

Hillary Clinton helped perpetuate this myth during the late October debate with Donald Trump, when she declared as fact that:

"We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election," Clinton said. "I find that deeply disturbing."

What is shocking is that there was so little pushback to this nonsense. Hardly anyone asked why would the DEA, Coast Guard, the Marines or DOE have any technical expertise to make a judgment about Russian hacking of U.S. election systems. And no one of any importance asked the obvious -- where was the written memo or National Intelligence Estimate laying out what the IC supposedly knew and believed? There was nothing.

It is natural for the average American citizen to believe that something given the imprimatur of the Intelligence Community must reflect solid intelligence and real expertise. Expertise is supposed to be the cornerstone of intelligence analysis and the coordination that occurs within the IC. That means that only those analysts (and the agencies they represent) will be asked to contribute or comment on a particular intelligence issue. When it comes to the question of whether Russia had launched a full out cyber attack on the Democrats and the U.S. electoral system, only analysts from agencies with access to the intelligence and the expertise to analyze that intelligence would be asked to write or contribute to an intelligence memorandum.

Who would that be? The answer is simple -- the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, State INR and the FBI. (One could make the case that there are some analysts within Homeland Security that might have expertise, but they would not necessarily have access to the classified information produced by the CIA or the NSA.) The task of figuring out what the Russians were doing and planned to do fell to five agencies and only three of the five (the CIA, the DIA and NSA) would have had the ability to collect intelligence that could inform the work of analysts.

Before I can explain to you how an analyst work this issue it is essential for you to understand the type of intelligence that would be required to "prove" Russian meddling. There are four possible sources -- 1) a human source who had direct access to the Russians who directed the operation or carried it out; 2) a signal intercept of a conversation or cyber activity that was traced to Russian operatives; 3) a document that discloses the plan or activity observed; or 4) forensic evidence from the computer network that allegedly was attacked.

Getting human source intel is primarily the job of CIA. It also is possible that the DIA or the FBI had human sources that could have contributed relevant intelligence.

Signal intercepts are collected and analyzed by the NSA.

Documentary evidence, which normally is obtained from a human source but can also be picked up by NSA intercepts or even an old-fashioned theft.

Finally there is the forensic evidence . In the case of Russian meddling there is no forensic evidence available to the IC because the Democratic National Committee did not permit the FBI to investigate and examine the computers and the network that was allegedly attacked.

What Do Analysts Do?

Whenever there is a "judgment" or "consensus" claimed on behalf to the IC, it means that one or more analysts have written a document that details the evidence and presents conclusions based on that evidence. On a daily basis the average analyst confronts a flood of classified information (normally referred to as "cables" or "messages"). When I was on the job in the 1980s I had to wade through more than 1200 messages -- i.e., human source reports from the CIA, State Department messages with embassies around the world, NSA intercepts, DIA reports from their officers based overseas (most in US embassies) and open source press reports. Today, thanks to the internet, the average analyst must scan through upwards of 3000 messages. It is humanly impossible.

The basic job of an analyst is to collect as much relevant information as possible on the subject or topic that is their responsibility. There are analysts at the CIA, the NSA, the DIA and State INR that have the job of knowing about Russian cyber activity and capabilities. That is certain. But we are not talking about hundreds of people.

Let us move from the hypothetical to the actual. In January of 2017, DNI Jim Clapper release a report entitled, " Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections " (please see here ). In subsequent testimony before the Congress, Clapper claimed that he handpicked two dozen analysts to draft the document . That is not likely. There may have been as many as two dozen analysts who read the final document and commented on it, but there would never be that many involved in in drafting such a document. In any event, only analysts from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI were involved :

This report includes an analytic assessment drafted and coordinated among The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and The National Security Agency (NSA), which draws on intelligence information collected and disseminated by those three agencies.

Limiting the drafting and clearance on this document to only the CIA, the NSA and the FBI is highly unusual because one of the key analytical conclusions in the document identifies the Russian military intelligence organization, the GRU, as one of the perpetrators of the cyber attack. DIA's analysts are experts on the GRU and there also are analysts in State Department's Bureau of INR who should have been consulted. Instead, they were excluded.

Here is how the process should have worked in producing this document:

  1. One or more analysts are asked to do a preliminary draft. It is customary in such a document for the analyst to cite specific intelligence, using phrases such as: "According to a reliable source of proven access," when citing a CIA document or "According to an intercept of a conversation between knowledgeable sources with access," when referencing something collected by the NSA. The analyst does more than repeat what is claimed in the intel reports, he or she also has the job of explaining what these facts mean or do not mean.
  2. There always is an analyst leading the effort who has the job of integrating the contributions of the other analysts into a coherent document. Once the document is completed in draft it is handed over to Branch Chief and then Division Chief for editing. We do not know who had the lead, but it was either the FBI, the CIA or the NSA.
  3. At the same time the document is being edited at originating agency, it is supposed to be sent to the other clearing agencies, i.e. those agencies that either provided the intelligence cited in the draft (i.e., CIA, NSA, DIA, or State) or that have expertise on the subject. As noted previously, it is highly unusual to exclude the DIA and INR.
  4. Once all the relevant agencies clear on the content of the document, it is sent into the bowels of the DNI where it is put into final form.

That is how the process is supposed to work. But the document produced in January 2017 was not a genuine work reflecting the views of the "Intelligence Community." It only represented the supposed thinking (and I use that term generously) of CIA, NSA and FBI analysts. In other words, only three of 16 agencies cleared on the document that presented four conclusions:

Sounds pretty ominous, but the language used tells a different story. The conclusions are based on assumptions and judgments. There was nor is any actual evidence from intelligence sources showing that Vladimir Putin ordered up anything or that his government preferred Trump over Clinton.

How do I know this? If such evidence existed -- either documentary or human source or signal intercept -- it would have been cited in this document. Not only that. Such evidence would have corroborated the claims presented in the Steele dossier. But such evidence was not forthcoming. If it had existed than Jim Comey could have claimed in his June 2017 testimony before Congress that the parts of the "Dossier" had been verified. He did not do so. Testifying under oath Comey described the "Dossier" as "salacious and unverified."

It is genuinely shocking that DNI Jim Clapper, with the acquiescence of the CIA, the FBI and NSA, would produce a document devoid of any solid intelligence. There is a way to publicly release sensitive intelligence without comprising a the original source. But such sourcing is absent in this document.

That simple fact should tell you all you need to know. The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they did not do. That lie remains unchallenged.


LeaNder , 07 March 2018 at 05:59 PM

Good summary argument, PT. Thanks. Helpful reminder.

But, makes me feel uncomfortable. Cynical scenario. I'd prefer them to be both drivers and driven, somehow stumbling into the chronology of events. They didn't hack the DNC, after all. Crowdstrike? Steele? ...

********
But yes, all the 17 agencies Clinton alluded to in her 3rd encounter with Trump was a startling experience:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/19/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-blames-russia-putin-wikileaks-rele/

turcopolier , 07 March 2018 at 06:10 PM
LeaNder

One other point on which Tacitus and I differ is the quality of the analysts in the "minors." The "bigs" often recruit analysts from the "minors" so they can't be all that bad. And the analysts in all these agencies receive much the same data feed electronically every day. There are exceptions to this but it is generally true. I, too, read hundreds of documents every day to keep up with the knowledge base of the analysts whom I interrogated continuously. "How do you know that?" would have been typical. pl

Flavius , 07 March 2018 at 06:19 PM
Well done.

"The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they did not do. That lie remains unchallenged.'" Yes it was and so remains the lie unchallenged.

Conjectural garbage appears first to have been washed through the FBI, headquarters no less, then probably it picked up a Triple A rating at the CIA, and then when the garbage got to Clapper, it was bombs away - we experts all agree. There were leaks, but they weren't sufficient to satisfy Steele so he just delivered the garbage whole to the Media in order to make it a sure thing. The garbage was placed securely out there in the public domain with a Triple A rating because the FBI wouldn't concern itself with garbage, would it?

Contrast this trajectory with what the Russian policy establishment did when it concluded that the US had done something in the Ukraine that Russia found significantly actionable: it released the taped evidence of Nuland and our Ambassador finishing off the coup.

The whole sequence reminds me in some ways of the sub prime mortgage bond fiasco: garbage risk progressively bundled, repackaged, rebranded and resold by big name institutions that should have known better.

I have only two questions: was it misfeasance, malfeasance, or some ugly combination of the two? And are they going to get away with it?

Richardstevenhack , 07 March 2018 at 06:23 PM
Re this: " In the case of Russian meddling there is no forensic evidence available to the IC because the Democratic National Committee did not permit the FBI to investigate and examine the computers and the network that was allegedly attacked."

To be precise, CrowdStrike did provide the FBI with allegedly "certified true images" of the DNC servers allegedly involved in the alleged "hack." They also allegedly provided these images to FireEye and Mandiant, IIRC.

All three allegedly examined those images and concurred with CrowdStrike's analysis.

Of course, given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence.

In addition, regardless of whether the images were true or not, the evidence allegedly contained therein is painfully inadequate to confirm that APT28 or APT29 were involved, nor that the Russian government was involved, or even that there was a real hack involved, and even less evidence that any emails that might have been exfiltrated were given to Wikileaks as opposed to another leak such as that alleged by Sy Hersh to have been done by Seth Rich.

The "assessment" that Putin ordered any of this is pure mind-reading and can be utterly dismissed absent any of the other evidence Publius points out as necessary.

The same applies to any "estimate" that the Russian government preferred Trump or wished to denigrate Clinton. Based on what I read in pro-Russian news outlets, Russian officials took great pains to not pick sides and Putin's comments were similarly very restrained. The main quote from Putin about Trump that emerged was mistranslated as approval whereas it was more an observation of Trump's personality. At no time did Putin ever say he favored Trump over Clinton, even though that was a likely probability given Clinton's "Hitler" comparison.

As an aside, I also recommend Scott Ritter's trashing of the ICA. Ritter is familiar with intelligence estimates and their reliability based on his previous service as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq and in Russia implementing arms control treaties.

ann , 07 March 2018 at 11:22 PM
This is a wonderful explanation of the intelligence community. And I thank you for the explanation. My interpretation is: In 1990 +- Bush 41 sold us the 1st Iraq war using fudged intelligence, then Bush 43 sold us the second Iraq war using fabricated intelligence. And now the Obama Administration tried to sell us fake intelligence in regard to Russia in order to get Clinton elected. However inadequate my summary is it looks like the Democrats are less skilled in propaganda than the Repubs. And what else is the difference?
Richardstevenhack , 08 March 2018 at 03:02 AM
Mueller has had 18 months and has proceeded to reveal exactly nothing related to either Trump "collusion" with Russia nor Russia as a state actually doing anything remotely described as "meddling."

His expected indictment of some Russians for the DNC hack is going to be more of the same in all likelihood. I predict there will be next to zero evidence produced either that the Russians named are in fact members of APT28 or APT29 or that they had any direct connection with either the alleged DNC hack or Wikileaks or the Russian government.

It's a witch hunt, nothing more. People holding their breath for the "slam dunk" are going to pass out soon if they haven't already.

blue peacock , 08 March 2018 at 04:12 AM
GZC #12

Mueller is investigating some aspects. But there is another aspect - the conspiracy inside law enforcement and the IC. That is also being investigated. There are Congressional committees in particular Nunes, Goodlatte and Grassley. Then there is the DOJ IG. And today AG Sessions confirms there is a DOJ prosecutor outside Washington investigating.

IMO, the conspiracy is significantly larger in scale and scope than anything the Russians did.

Yes, indeed we'll have to wait and see what facts Mueller reveals. But also what facts these other investigations reveal.

English Outsider , 08 March 2018 at 05:57 AM
Thank you for setting out the geography and workings of this complex world.

Might I ask how liaison with other Intelligence Communities fits in? Is intelligence information from non-US sources such as UK intelligence sources subject to the same process of verification and evaluation?

I ask because of the passage in your article -

"But such evidence (corroborating the Steele dossier) was not forthcoming. If it had existed than Jim Comey could have claimed in his June 2017 testimony before Congress that the parts of the "Dossier" had been verified. He did not do so. Testifying under oath Comey described the "Dossier" as "salacious and unverified." "

Does this leave room for the assertion that although the "Dossier" was unverified in the US it was accepted as good information because it had been verified by UK Intelligence or by persons warranted by the UK? In other words, was UK Intelligence, or an ex-UK intelligence officer, used to get material through the US evaluation process, material that would not have got through that US evaluation process had it originated within the US itself?

turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 07:53 AM
EO,

" ... was UK Intelligence, or an ex-UK intelligence officer, used to get material through the US evaluation process, material that would not have got through that US evaluation process had it originated within the US itself?" I would say yes and especially yes if the contact for this piece of data was conducted at the highest level within the context of the already tight liaison between the US IC and Mi-6/GCHQ. PT may think differently. pl

turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 07:54 AM
GZC

A lot of smoke? Only if you wish to place a negative value on everything the Trump people did or were. pl

jsn -> The Twisted Genius ... , 08 March 2018 at 08:20 AM
The CIA appears to be trying to right the wrongs done them with the creation of the DNI:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/08/dems-m08.html
turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 08:54 AM
jsn

The wrongs done them? I hope that was irony. pl

turcopolier -> Green Zone Café ... , 08 March 2018 at 09:01 AM
GZC

Was it Hitler or Stalin who said "show me the man and I will find his crime?" As I have said before, Trumps greatest vulnerability lies in his previous business life as an entrepreneurial hustler. If he is anything like the many like him whom I observed in my ten business years, then he has cut corners legally somewhere in international business. they pretty much all do that. Kooshy, a successful businessman confirmed that here a while back. These other guys were all business hustlers including Flynn and their activities have made them vulnerable to Mueller. IMO you have to ask yourself how much you want to be governed by political hacks and how much by hustlers. pl

turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 09:24 AM
jsn

hy this socialist pub would fing it surprising that former public servants seek elected office is a mystery to me. BTW, in re all the discussion here of the IC, there are many levels in these essentially hierarchical structures and one's knowledge of them is conditioned by the perspective from which you viewed them. pl

DH , 08 March 2018 at 09:50 AM
Re 'baby adoption' meeting between Trump, Jr. and Veselnitskaya, I recall a comment here linking to an article speculating the email initiating the meeting originated in Europe, was set up by the playboy son of a European diplomat, and contained words to trip data-gathering monitors which would have enabled a FISA request to have Trump, Jr. come under surveillance.

Also, the Seymour Hersh tape certainly seems authentic as far as Seth Rich being implicated in the DNC dump.

Publius Tacitus -> Green Zone Café ... , 08 March 2018 at 09:53 AM
GZC,

Are you really this obtuse?

You insist (I guess you rely on MSNBC as your fact source) that Manafort, Page, etc. all "have connections to Russia or Assange." You are using smear and guilt by association. Flynn's so-called connection to Russia was that he accepted an invite to deliver a speech at an RT sponsored event and was paid. So what? Nothing wrong with that. Just ask Bill Clinton. Or perhaps you are referring to the fact that Flynn also spoke to the Russian Ambassador to the US after the election in his capacity as designated National Security Advisor. Zero justification for investigation.

Stone? He left the campaign before there had even been a primary and only had text exchanges with Assange.

Your blind hatred of Trump makes you incapable of thinking logically.

jsn , 08 March 2018 at 10:15 AM
Sir,

The most sarcastic irony was intended. This is what the real left looks like, its very different from Clintonite Liberals, not that I agree with their ideological program, though I believe parts have their place.

Liberals have, I believe, jumped the shark: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/03/07/progressive-journalists-jump-the-shark-on-russiagate/

If the get their way with the new McCarthyism, the implications for dissent, left or right, seem to me to be about the same:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/federalist-68-the-electoral-college-and-faithless-electors.html#intelligence

jsn , 08 March 2018 at 10:25 AM
Sir,

And to your second comment, yes I agree about the complexity of institutions and how situationally constrained individual experiences are, if that was the point.

I'll also concede my brief comments generalize very broadly, but it's hard to frame things more specific comments without direct knowledge, such as the invaluable correspondents here. I try to avoid confirmation bias by reading broadly and try to provide outside perspectives. My apologies if they're too far outside.

I suppose it would be interesting to see a side by side comparison of how many former IC self affiliated with which party in choosing to run. I'm just guessing but I'll bet there's more CIA in the D column and more DIA among the Rs.

LeaNder said in reply to Flavius... , 08 March 2018 at 10:40 AM
love this coinage Flavius: Yes it was and so remains the lie unchallenged

a lie "circumstantial"? http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.de/2005/05/seven-degrees-of-lie.html

Sid Finster , 08 March 2018 at 11:06 AM
"We don't have the evidence yet because Mueller hasn't found it yet!" is a classic argument from ignorance, in that is assumes without evidence (there's that pesky word again!) that there is something to be found.

That said, I have no doubt that Mueller will find *something*, simply because an aggressive and determined prosecutor can always find *something*, especially if the target is engaged in higher level business or politics. A form unfiled, an irregularity in an official document, and overly optimistic tax position.

If nothing else works, there's always the good old standby of asking question after question until the target makes a statement that can be construed as perjury or lying to investigators.

Sarah B said in reply to turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 11:27 AM
My perspective, after reading that linked article by the WSWS, is that both, the IC and the DoD, are trying to take over the whole US political spectrum, in fact, militarizing de facto the US political life....

Now, tell me that this is not an intend by the MIC ( where all the former IC or DoD people finally end when they leave official positions )to take over the government ( if more was needed after what has happened with Trump´s ) to guarantee their profit rate in a moment where everything is crimbling....

Btw, have you read the recently released paper, "WorldWide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community" by Daniel R. Coats ( DNI )? You smell fear from the four corners....do not you?

Barbara Ann -> turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 11:35 AM
Those immortal words are attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, Colonel and you are not the first to draw the comparison re Mueller's investigation. For those who do not know Beria was head of the NKVD under Stalin.
Sarah B , 08 March 2018 at 11:38 AM
Here is the paper in question I am mentioning above: https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Testimonies/2018-ATA---Unclassified-SSCI.pdf Some neutral analyst is saying that from 28 pages, 24 are dedicated to Russia and China, then Iran and NK, in this order...and that it is an official recognition of the new multipolar order....
Peter VE said in reply to johnf... , 08 March 2018 at 11:55 AM
The BBC reported this morning that a police officer who was amongst the earliest responders to the "nerve gas" poisoning of Col. Skripal is also being treated for symptoms. How was it that many "White Helmets" who were filmed where the sarin gas was dropped on Khan Sheikhoun last April suffered no symptoms?
Jack -> turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 11:59 AM
Sir

That's a good way to present it political hacks vs hustlers. The fact is Flynn has pled guilty to perjury. Nothing else like collusion with the Russians. And his sentencing is on hold now as the judge has ordered Mueller to hand over any exculpatory evidence. Clearly something is going on his case for the judge to do that.

Manafort has been indicted for money laundering, wire fraud, etc for activities well before the election campaign. Sure, it is good that these corrupt individuals should be investigated and prosecuted. However, this corruption is widespread in DC. How come none of these cheering Mueller on to destroy Trump care about all the foreign money flowing to K Street? Why aren't they calling for investigations of the Clinton Foundation or the Podesta brothers where probable cause exist of foreign money and influence? What about Ben Cardin and all those recipients of foreign zionist money and influence? It would be nice if there were wide ranging investigations on all those engaged in foreign influence peddling. But it seems many just want a witch hunt to hobble Trump. It's going to be very difficult to get the Senate to convict him for obstruction of justice or tax evasion or some charge like that.

The Twisted Genius , 08 March 2018 at 12:59 PM
The select group of several dozen analysts from CIA, NSA and FBI who produced the January 2017 ICA are very likely the same group of analysts assembled by Brenner in August 2016 to form a task force examining "L'Affaire Russe" at the same time Brennan brought that closely held report to Obama of Putin's specific instructions on an operation to damage Clinton and help Trump. I've seen these interagency task forces set up several times to address particular info ops or cyberattack issues. Access to the work of these task forces was usually heavily restricted. I don't know if this kind of thing has become more prevalent throughout the IC.

I am also puzzled by the absence of DIA in the mix. When I was still working, there were a few DIA analysts who were acknowledged throughout the IC as subject matter experts and analytical leaders in this field. On the operational side, there was never great enthusiasm for things cyber or info ops. There were only a few lonely voices in the darkness. Meanwhile, CIA, FBI and NSA embraced the field wholeheartedly. Perhaps those DIA analytical experts retired or moved on to CYBERCOM, NSA or CIA's Information Operations Center.

LeaNder said in reply to Richardstevenhack ... , 08 March 2018 at 01:01 PM
I predict there will be next to zero evidence produced either that the Russians named are in fact members of APT28 or APT29 ...

Richard, over here the type of software is categorized under Advanced Persistent Threat, and beyond that specifically labeled the "Sofacy Group". ... I seem to prefer the more neutral description 'Advanced Persistent Threat' by Kaspersky. Yes, they seem to be suspicious lately in the US. But I am a rather constant consumer, never mind the occasional troubles over the years.

APT: Helps to not get confused by all the respective naming patterns in the economic field over national borders. APT 1 to 29 ...? Strictly, What's the precise history of the 'Bear' label and or the specific, I assume, group of APT? ...

Kasperky pdf-file - whodunnit?
https://tinyurl.com/APT-Avanced-Persitent-Treat

Ever used a datebase checking a file online? Would have made you aware of the multitude of naming patterns.

******
More ad-hoc concerning one item in your argument above. To what extend does a standard back-up system leave relevant forensic traces? Beyond the respective image in the present? Do you know?

Admittedly, I have no knowledge about matters beyond purely private struggles. But yes, they seemed enough to get a vague glimpse of categories in the field of attribution. Regarding suspected state actors vs the larger cybercrime scene that is.

LeaNder said in reply to Fred... , 08 March 2018 at 02:29 PM
Even mentioning those is just further evidence that something really did happen.

I appreciate you are riding our partially shared hobby horse, Fred. ;)

But admittedly this reminds me of something that felt like a debate-shift, I may be no doubt misguided here. Nitwit! In other words I may well have some type of ideological-knot in the relevant section dealing with memory in my brain as long-term undisciplined observer of SST.

But back on topic: the argument seemed to be that "important facts" were omitted. In other words vs earlier times were are now centrally dealing with omission as evidence. No?

Dave -> Publius Tacitus ... , 08 March 2018 at 03:18 PM
Ask National Security Advisor General McMaster.
Even Trump now says Putin meddled.
What more evidence do you need
Dave -> Publius Tacitus ... , 08 March 2018 at 03:20 PM
General McMaster has seen the evidence and says the fact of Russian meddling can no longer be credibly denied.
That doesn't stop the right-wing extremists from spinning fairy tales.
turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 03:34 PM
Dave

It is politically necessary for Trump to say that. Tell me, what is meant by "Russian meddling"in this statement by McMaster? pl

Dave -> turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 03:50 PM
Russian meddling is hacking our election systems.

The right wing (re: Hannity and Limbaugh) have been trying mightily to discredit this investigation by smearing Mueller's reputation, even though he is a conservative republican.

They are doing this so that if Mueller's report is damning, they can call it a "witch hunt."

I would think that if Trump is innocent, he would cooperate with this investigation fully.

You are insinuating that McMaster is a liar even though he has access to information that you don't.

Publius Tacitus -> Dave... , 08 March 2018 at 04:02 PM
Just because trump is stupid is not an excuse for you. You accept a lie without one shred of actual evidence. You are a lemming
Fred -> LeaNder... , 08 March 2018 at 04:04 PM
LeaNder,

"omission as evidence. " Incorrect. Among the omissions was the fact that the dossier was paid for by a political campaign and that the wife of a senior DOJ lawyer's wife was working for Fusion GPS. Then there's the rest of the political motivations left out.

Fred -> Dave... , 08 March 2018 at 04:07 PM
Dave,

Putin hired Facebook. That company seems to do well helping out foreign governments.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censorship-tool-china.html

Linda , 08 March 2018 at 04:16 PM
If you have seen the classified information that would be necessary to back up your conclusions, it should not be discussed in this forum. As you are well aware sources and methods cannot be made public so I fail to see how you believe this should have been publically done. Having said that, I pretty much agree with your conclusion except for the indication that the analysts lied.
turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 04:26 PM
Dave

What does "hacking our elections" mean? Does it means breaking into voting systems and changing the outcome by altering votes? Or does it mean information operations to change US voters' minds about for whom they would vote?

If the latter you must know that we (the US) have done this many times in foreign elections, including Russian elections, Israeli elections, Italian elections, German elections, etc., or perhaps you think that a different criterion should be applied to people who are not American.

As for McMasters, I am unimpressed with him. He displays all the symptoms of Russophobia. He has special information? Information can be interpreted many ways depending on one's purpose. pl

turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 04:36 PM
Linda

PT does not have access to the classified information underlying but your argument that "As you are well aware sources and methods cannot be made public so I fail to see how you believe this should have been publicly done." doesn't hold water for me since I have seen sources and methods disclosed by the government of the US many times when it felt that necessary. One example that I have mentioned before was that of the trial of Jeffrey Sterling (merlin) for which I was an expert witness and adviser to the federal court for four years.

In that one the CIA and DoJ forced the court to allow them to de-classify the CIA DO's operational files on the case and read them into the record in open court. I had read all these files when they were classified at the SCI level. IMO the perpetrators in the Steel Memo case are and were merely hiding behind claims of sources and methods protection in order to protect themselve. pl

JamesT -> turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 04:37 PM
I continue to learn things around here that I could never learn anywhere else. It is a privilege to read the Colonel, TTG, and Publius Tacitus.
turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 04:47 PM
Dave

If you use denigrating language like "wild eyed" to attack your interlocutors you will not be welcome here. pl

LeaNder said in reply to Flavius... , 08 March 2018 at 04:49 PM
Mueller cleared his ridiculous indictment relating to the Russian troll farm, a requirement that at one time would have been SOP for any FBI Office or USAtty Office bringing an indictment of this kind.

Not aware of this. Can you help me out?

No doubt vaguely familiar with public lore, in limited ways. As always.

Sid Finster said in reply to Dave... , 08 March 2018 at 05:09 PM
So now we are supposed to believe unquestioningly the word of torturers, perjurers and entrapment artists, all talking about alleged evidence that we are not allowed to see? Did you learn nothing from the "Iraqi WMD" fiasco or the "ZOMG! Assad gassed his own peoples ZOMG!" debacle? Funny how in each of these instances, the intelligence community's lies just happened to coincide with the agenda of empire.
LeaNder said in reply to Fred ... , 08 March 2018 at 05:10 PM
Ok, true. I forgot 'Steele'* was used as 'evidence'. Strictly, Pat may have helped me out considering my 'felt' "debate-shift". Indirectly. I do recall, I hesitated to try to clarify matters for myself.

* ...

m -> turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 06:29 PM
Depends on what crime the "hack" committed. Fudging on taxes or cutting corners? Big whoop. Laundering $500 mil for a buddy of Vlad's? Now you got my attention and should have the voters' attention.

This is a political process in the end game. Clinton lied about sex in the oval Office and was tried for it. Why don't we exercise patience in the process and see if this President should be tried?

m -> Publius Tacitus ... , 08 March 2018 at 06:33 PM
I ain't a lawyer but don't prosecutors hold their cards (evidence) close to their chests until the court has a criminal charge and sets a date for discovery?
Publius Tacitus -> Linda ... , 08 March 2018 at 06:45 PM
Linda,
You betray your ignorance on this subject. You clearly have not understood nor comprehended what I have written. So i will put it in CAPS for you. Please read slowly.

THIS TYPE OF DOCUMENT, IF IT HAD A SOURCE OR SOURCES BEHIND IT, WOULD REFERENCE THOSE SOURCES. AN ANALYST WOULD NOT WRITE "WE ASSESS." IF YOU HAVE A RELIABLE HUMAN SOURCE OR A RELIABLE PIECE OF SIGINT THE YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ASSESS. YOU SIMPLY STATE, ACCORDING TO A KNOWLEDGEABLE AND RELIABLE SOURCE.

GOT IT. And don't come back with nonsense that the sources are so sensitive that they cannot be disclose. News flash genius--the very fact that Clapper put out this piece of dreck would have exposed the sources if they existed (but they do not). In any event, there would be reference to sources that provided the evidence that such activity took place at the direction of Putin.

IT DOES NOT EXIST.

J , 08 March 2018 at 07:08 PM
Colonel,

The granddaddy of them all is #16, and what have they contributed?

Steve McIntyre -> David Habakkuk ... , 08 March 2018 at 07:41 PM
I'm eagerly awaiting your thoughts on the Skripal poisoning. I'm sure I'm not alone in the hope that you will write on it.
The Twisted Genius -> Publius Tacitus ... , 08 March 2018 at 07:59 PM
Publius Tacitus,

I notice other Intelligence Community Assessments also use the term "we assess" liberally. For example, the 2018 Worldwide Threat Assessment and the 2012 ICA on Global Water Security use the "we assess" phrase throughout the documents. I hazard to guess that is why they call these things assessments.

The 2017 ICA on Russian Interference released to the public clearly states: "This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment. This document's conclusions are identical to the highly classified assessment, but this document does not include the full supporting information, including specific intelligence on key elements of the influence campaign. Given the redactions, we made minor edits purely for readability and flow."

I would hazard another guess that those minor edits for readability and flow are the reason that specific intelligence reports and sources, which were left out of the unclassified ICA, are not cited in that ICA.

The Twisted Genius -> Dave... , 08 March 2018 at 08:26 PM
Dave,

As far as I know, no one has reliably claimed that election systems, as in vote tallies, were ever breached. No votes were changed after they were cast. The integrity of our election system and the 2016 election itself was maintained. Having said that, there is plenty of evidence of Russian meddling as an influence op. I suggest you and others take a gander at the research of someone going by the handle of @UsHadrons and several others. They are compiling a collection of FaceBook, twitter and other media postings that emanated from the IRA and other Russian sources. The breadth of these postings is quite wide and supports the assessment that enhancing the divides that already existed in US society was a primary Russian goal.

https://medium.com/@ushadrons

I pointed this stuff out to Eric Newhill a while back in one of our conversations. He jokingly noted that he may have assisted in spreading a few of these memes. I bet a lot of people will recognize some of the stuff in this collection. That's nothing. Recently we all learned that Michael Moore did a lot more than unwittingly repost a Russian meme. He took part in a NYC protest march organized and pushed by Russians. This stuff is open source proof of Russian meddling.

Publius Tacitus -> The Twisted Genius ... , 08 March 2018 at 08:55 PM
TTG
Nice try, but that is bullshit just because recent assessments come out with sloppy language is no excuse. Go back and look at the assessment was done for iraq to justify the war in 2003. Many sources cited because it was considered something Required to justify going to war. As we have been told by many in the media that the Russians meddling was worse or as bad as the attack on Pearl Harbor and 9-11. With something so serious do you want to argue that they would downplay the sourcing?

[Mar 08, 2018] Cue bono question in Scripal case?

Highly recommended!
This case looks more and more like Litvinenko II -- another false flag designed to implicate Russia a fuel anti-russian hysteria. British MI6 are masters in such provocations.
Along with sabotaging Moscow soccer tournament this also can also be an attempt to distract from MI6 role is creation of Steele dossier too.
Notable quotes:
"... Having worked for Russia's Military Intelligence Directorate (GRU) since the Soviet era, Sergey Skripal was recruited in 1995 by the British agent Pablo Miller, who at the time was posing as Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo and working in Britain's embassy in Tallinn. Russia's Federal Security Service says Miller was actually an undercover MI6 agent tasked with recruiting Russians. ..."
"... The first reports about Miller's work in Russia emerged in the early 2000s, after multiple Russians arrested for spying fingered Miller as their recruiter. For example, former tax police Major Vyacheslav Zharko says it was Miller who recruited him. He says it was Boris Berezovsky and former Federal Security Service (FSB) agent Alexander Litvinenko who introduced him to British intelligence agents. Zharko surrendered himself to Russian officials when he learned about the British authorities' suspicions that another former FSB officer, Andrey Lugovoi, had poisoned Litvinenko with polonium. ..."
"... Litvinenko also worked for MI6 ..."
"... Skripal, however, never turned himself in. For nine years, according to the FSB, he collaborated actively with British intelligence, transmitting information about Russian agents. ..."
"... Who/what paid Skripal a $472,000 house and a pension? That is way more than the reported $100,000 he earlier got. What did he do to earn the higher pay? ..."
"... Seems Skripal was a British spy at the end. If he required killing, it would have happened long ago as b asserts. Clearly, he knew something dangerously compromising to make himself a target. ..."
"... If b is too moral to consider killing injuring unrelated, innocent people for propaganda as it was 9/11 whoever did it, he must wake up. These days, days of phony YT,FB Twitter reality, the only value is propaganda value nothing else, anybody will be thrown under the bus if this fits aims of ruling elite even some oligarchs who are rich only because their submit to rape of ruling elite as high paid prostitute while the rest are raped for free ..."
"... If fact they will supress details of that crime just to obfuscate obvious perpetrators in a cloud of conspiracy theories in fact mining people's brains busy them up like little ants like Bitcoin miners waste electricity and computer power for delusional quest of riches ..."
"... Sources close to Orbis, the business intelligence firm run by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who was behind a dossier of compromising allegations against Donald Trump, said Mr Skripal did not contribute to the file. But they could not say whether Mr Skripal was involved in different investigations into the US President for other interested parties. ..."
"... It's interesting how quickly the denial from steele comes out... Is skripal dead yet, or still alive? i wonder if he comes back, what he says? i guess we will never know either way... ..."
"... Media management and playing the old "backs to the wall boys & girls, its the blitz all over again" is what the 'counter-terror' mob do. ..."
"... The initial cops played the whole thing really low key, it seemed as though they wanted to get to the bottom of whatever happened, but their replacements 'counter-terror' appear to devote more time and energy to seducing credulous journos than they do trying to find out what actually did occur. ..."
"... Over in the states there have been reports about carfentanil poisoning responders to overdoses because of trace amounts. It is reported as 100 x as powerful as fentanyl. So maybe a chemical cousin is a possible consideration. ..."
"... B's suggestion that Skripal might be longing to return to and die in Russia, and that he was offering a "gift" to Moscow via his daughter (or maybe even a letter apologising for his treachery and begging for forgiveness, Berezovsky-style) is a stroke of genius. Makes me think that Boris Berezovsky's death merits more attention and cannot be brushed off as a suicide. ..."
"... On a park bench, they were discovered. I'll bet my best fishing lure that location's covered by a CCTV whose footage will provide all the answers--unless we aren't to be shown, due to national security or some such. ..."
"... Meanwhile The Guardian is spewing its usual bilge : Russian spy attack inquiry widens after medics treat 21 people ..."
"... The longer Skripal and his daughter stay alive, the more propaganda can be rung out of his death. Be worth watching to see how many sanctions and laws the UK can push through before he finally snuffs it. ..."
Mar 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Spy Poisons Spy And The Anti-Trump Campaign

On Sunday a former British-Russian double agent and his daughter were seriously injured in a mysterious incident in Salisbury, England. The British government says that both were hurt due to "exposure to a nerve agent". Speculative media reports talk of Sarin and VX, two deadly nerve-agents used in military chemical weapons. Anonymous officials strongly hint that 'Russia did it'.

New reports though point to a deep connection between the case and the anti-Trump/anti-Russia propaganda drive run by the Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton election campaign.

Sergei Skripal once was a colonel in a Russian military intelligence service. In the early 1990s he was recruited by the MI6 agent Pablo Miller. He continued to spy for the Brits after his 1999 retirement. The Russian FSB claims that the British MI6 paid him $100,000 for his service. At that time a Russian officer would only make a few hundred bucks per month. Skripal was finally uncovered in 2004 and two years later convicted for spying for Britain. He was sentenced to 18 years and in 2010 he and other agents ware exchanged in a large spy swap between the United States and Russia. Skripal was granted refuge in Britain and has since lived openly under his own name in Salisbury. His wife and his son died over the last years of natural causes. The only near relative he has left is his daughter who continued to live in Russia.

Last week his daughter flew to Britain and met him in Salisbury. On Sunday they went to a pub and a restaurant. At some point they were poisoned or poisoned themselves. They collapsed on a public bench. They are now in intensive care. A policeman one the scene was also seriously effected.

Authorities have declined to name the substance to which the pair is suspected to have been exposed, but :

Local media had on Monday reported the substance found at the scene to be similar to fentanyl: a lethally strong opioid available even on Salisbury's soporific streets.

The British government is hinting at Russian involvement :


Whorin Piece , Mar 8, 2018 4:30:36 PM | 1

Seth Rich.

Awesome, thank you b,

I think this event is a ramp to offing Knesia Sobchak prior to or just after the national poll. She is a pawn of the West. She has been directed to consolidate the disparate liberal opposition campaigns by the use of primaries...which would just happen to result in her primacy. The idea is to have her win enough vote it can be alleged that she has embarrassed Putin...and then they six her using VX. Her father was close go Putin during Putin's early years in St Pete. The BBC has been running chaff out the foot saying Putin killed his mentor Anatoly Sobchak. Knesia has been moved into position. She will be offed to harm Putin's reputation but also to place e a complex wound in him. The West are monsters

yoffa , Mar 8, 2018 4:35:34 PM | 2
The Orbis consultant / analyst living in Salisbury is identified as Pablo Miller. He had recruited Skripal in 1995 ( https://meduza.io/en/feature/2018/03/06/a-hundred-grand-and-hundreds-of-betrayed-agents).
notheonly1 , Mar 8, 2018 4:40:39 PM | 3
Ms Rudd told MPs it was an "outrageous crime", adding that the government would "act without hesitation as the facts become clearer".

Yeah, right.

Like the illegal invasion of a sovereign foreign country based on the lies by the same 'government', with a million+ casualties among the middle eastern population.

That kind of outrageous crime , correct?

One day the pendulum will swing back hard and merciless at these criminal warmongers and war profiteers. Disgusting how low what goes for 'homo sapiens' can sink.

Christian Chuba , Mar 8, 2018 4:43:02 PM | 4
I was wondering if Grigory Rodchenkov was in danger of meeting the same fate by some of the more unsavory elements of U.S. Intelligence Agencies. He would become a poster boy for Russian assassinations on U.S. soil.

One thing about Rodchenkov, if the doping was not state sponsored, what motive would have have for doing it on his own, is there enough money in the Olympics that individual athletes would bribe him or would it make him look better if his athletes did better? I don't buy that it was state sponsored, or at least there is no evidence to that affect.

Oyyo , Mar 8, 2018 4:51:46 PM | 6
21 people were affected.

https://news.sky.com/story/live-poisoned-salisbury-cop-talking-and-engaging-11280674

xLemming , Mar 8, 2018 5:05:53 PM | 7
Sadly @3 we may have to wait for Judgement Day for that to happen. But if it comes about sooner, and in our lifetime, it will be a day of rejoicing!
b , Mar 8, 2018 5:07:11 PM | 8
@yoffa @2 - thank you. Your link does not work, here is a good one: A hundred grand and hundreds of betrayed agents What was former GRU Colonel Sergey Skripal's treason against Russia?
Having worked for Russia's Military Intelligence Directorate (GRU) since the Soviet era, Sergey Skripal was recruited in 1995 by the British agent Pablo Miller, who at the time was posing as Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo and working in Britain's embassy in Tallinn. Russia's Federal Security Service says Miller was actually an undercover MI6 agent tasked with recruiting Russians.

The first reports about Miller's work in Russia emerged in the early 2000s, after multiple Russians arrested for spying fingered Miller as their recruiter. For example, former tax police Major Vyacheslav Zharko says it was Miller who recruited him. He says it was Boris Berezovsky and former Federal Security Service (FSB) agent Alexander Litvinenko who introduced him to British intelligence agents. Zharko surrendered himself to Russian officials when he learned about the British authorities' suspicions that another former FSB officer, Andrey Lugovoi, had poisoned Litvinenko with polonium.

Litvinenko also worked for MI6 ..
Skripal, however, never turned himself in. For nine years, according to the FSB, he collaborated actively with British intelligence, transmitting information about Russian agents.

Nikolai Luzan, who calls himself a colonel and a veteran of Russia's security agencies, wrote a detailed book about how the British recruited Sergey Skripal. Luzan says his book, "A Devil's Counterintelligence Dozen," is an "artistic-documentary production."

If we assume that Luzan's account is generally accurate, then Skripal was recruited during a long-term assignment in Malta and Spain, where he "got greedy."
...

Further on:
Skripal led a quiet life in Salisbury, where he reportedly bought an average house for 340,000 British pounds (about $472,000). His neighbors describe him as an ordinary, reasonably friendly pensioner. When he moved to the area, he even invited the whole street over for a housewarming party.

It's unclear why Skripal decided to resettle specifically in Salisbury, but LinkedIn indicates that Pablo Miller -- the MI6 agent who recruited him -- lives in the same town. In 2015, the year he retired, Miller received the Order of the British Empire for services to Her Majesty's Government.

Skripal's wife, Lyudmila, lived with him in Salisbury until her death a few years ago. His son died from liver failure in 2017 in St. Petersburg.

It must be Pablo Miller who worked with Steele ...

Who/what paid Skripal a $472,000 house and a pension? That is way more than the reported $100,000 he earlier got. What did he do to earn the higher pay?

karlof1 , Mar 8, 2018 5:12:03 PM | 9
Seems Skripal was a British spy at the end. If he required killing, it would have happened long ago as b asserts. Clearly, he knew something dangerously compromising to make himself a target. The UK's fairly well covered by CCTV; I'd be very interested in what those in Salisbury observed. The incident has La Carre written all over it.
Kalen , Mar 8, 2018 5:21:30 PM | 10
If someone like MI6 for FSB wanted him dead they would be instantly in a car accident of robbery attempt, they whoever they are, wanted this to thing to prolong in time to feed the press Russia gate and wanted people like b to follow the trap since most of the info here can be found just after few clicks, will be picked up by rational people.

If b is too moral to consider killing injuring unrelated, innocent people for propaganda as it was 9/11 whoever did it, he must wake up. These days, days of phony YT,FB Twitter reality, the only value is propaganda value nothing else, anybody will be thrown under the bus if this fits aims of ruling elite even some oligarchs who are rich only because their submit to rape of ruling elite as high paid prostitute while the rest are raped for free .

If fact they will supress details of that crime just to obfuscate obvious perpetrators in a cloud of conspiracy theories in fact mining people's brains busy them up like little ants like Bitcoin miners waste electricity and computer power for delusional quest of riches .

In the society of control ruling elite controls everything it needs to control and hence is responsible for this. Case closed.

b , Mar 8, 2018 5:39:21 PM | 12
The Independent: Sergei Skripal: Former double agent may have been poisoned with nerve agent over 'freelance' spying, sources say
The Russian double agent poisoned in Salisbury may have become a target after using his contacts in the intelligence community to work for private security firms, investigators believe.

Sergei Skripal could have come to the attention of certain people in Russia by attempting to "freelance" for companies run by former MI5, MI6 and GCHQ spies, security sources say.
...
Sources close to Orbis, the business intelligence firm run by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who was behind a dossier of compromising allegations against Donald Trump, said Mr Skripal did not contribute to the file. But they could not say whether Mr Skripal was involved in different investigations into the US President for other interested parties.

A very believable denial by Steele. Not.
james , Mar 8, 2018 5:56:08 PM | 13
It's interesting how quickly the denial from steele comes out... Is skripal dead yet, or still alive? i wonder if he comes back, what he says? i guess we will never know either way...
Debsisdead , Mar 8, 2018 6:02:23 PM | 14
For me it was particularly suss when the Leceister Police who are the coppers on the ground in Salisbury were heavied by Scotland Yuk ( or 'the met' as englander papers call that gang of proven torturers & murderers) to turn the Skripsky investigation over to the 'counter-terror squad' - the mob of thugs whose skillful manipulation of england's media combined with evidence falsification made their indicted murder of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes seem like an heroic act by playing the old honest whitefella card - "all those brownfellas look the same, who can tell the difference?" . No copper, not the killers or the idiot in charge suffered any disciplinary actiion, much less a criminal one. IIRC the policeperson in charge who claimed to be 'in the bathroom' at the time of de Menzeses murder, one Cressida Dick, is now chief commissioner, the boss of Scotland Yuk.

The local coppers know the area and will have a rapport with witnesses that a mob of arseholes in sharp suits backed by balaclava wearing armed heavies is unlikely to enjoy, so why grab the gig especially since it is certain to remain unsolved?

Well partly that, to make sure it remains unsolved, but also because counter-terror plays the press release regurgitators who are englander 'journos' like a fine old violin. Questions about fentanyl being a nerve agent get tricky? Spin the chooks a yarn about evil a-rabs you have met.

Uncoy , Mar 8, 2018 6:21:20 PM | 15
Kalen is right. Such a flamboyant killing is not how modern intelligence agencies dispose of problems. Unless they want to draw attention to their work.

Maybe there's a bunch of people around the Christopher Steele dossier thinking of talking. What better way to shut them up than to knock off a Steele source.

Peter , Mar 8, 2018 6:33:27 PM | 16
Very good work, B. Thanks for your website, best on the web.
sadness , Mar 8, 2018 6:41:55 PM | 17
It could always be a simple & rather human explanation - The daughter was struggling for cash at home, dad was old but refused to die & had a stash of cash from his past, she knocked him off to get an earlier inheritance but being an amateur at this she did herself in too, which would be poetic justice...?
sadness , Mar 8, 2018 6:49:11 PM | 18
....oh i forgot to add....or it was a sad suicide pact between them when all else was lost & over
ToivoS , Mar 8, 2018 7:08:41 PM | 19
It is highly unlikely that fentanyl was the toxin that poisoned Skribal and his daughter. That hypothesis should be excluded at this point.

The main reason for this is that the patrol man who discovered them also came down with similar symptoms. Fentanyl is extremely toxic when injected intravenously. But not to any one coming into contact with them, touching them or even performing mouth to mouth resusication.

There are numerous acetyl choline inhibitors (e.g. sarin, vx, and many other similar compounds that have never been approved for chemical warfare) that can cause symptoms if someone comes into contact with an intoxicated patient especially one has be exposed externally.

Also the Portland Down lab has identified an ACE inhibitor (of course, that is part of the British military and they could very easily be lying.)

In any case, this looks like a nerve toxin poison, fentanyl is not in that class.

Fatima Manoubia , Mar 8, 2018 7:08:44 PM | 20
Fentanyl patchs are used to control intense chronic pain...If he resigned from GRU because of health issues, as the "Meduzas" affirm, it might be related to this chronic pain and so he could well be a patient using this drug for pain control.....

Thus, fentanyl is not a nerve agent, but an anesthesic in any case....All could well be a performance...to blame the Russians and contribute to scare the population about them previous to some machination to be mounted at......Do not forget that that factory of mannequin challenges broadcasts, the White Helmets, is also a British "enterprise", creation of "former" MI6 LeMesurier....

Debsisdead , Mar 8, 2018 7:40:41 PM | 21
Yesterday when questions about fentanyl were raised, the sick policeman was identified, up until that point all that had been said was that the bill first on the scene were admitted to be checked out by medics. Today the close to death's door copper is in fine fettle once again. I leave it up to others to decide whether he was crook (sick - an Oz term) or the imported police were crooks (lying).

Media management and playing the old "backs to the wall boys & girls, its the blitz all over again" is what the 'counter-terror' mob do. If they were really opposed to scaring the bejeezuz outta englanders which is what their name implies they would A) be better at preventing actions which they hadn't cranked up themselves for entrapment and B) not imagine it was on the up and up to terrify the burghers of Salisbury with yarns about possible 'nerve agent' on the loose that were placing the town's population at risk.

The initial cops played the whole thing really low key, it seemed as though they wanted to get to the bottom of whatever happened, but their replacements 'counter-terror' appear to devote more time and energy to seducing credulous journos than they do trying to find out what actually did occur. The form of this gang of sleek deceitful killers means that just because they claim this local woodentop was poisoned, it doesn't mean that is what actually befell him.

Duck1 , Mar 8, 2018 7:49:18 PM | 22
Over in the states there have been reports about carfentanil poisoning responders to overdoses because of trace amounts. It is reported as 100 x as powerful as fentanyl. So maybe a chemical cousin is a possible consideration.
Jen , Mar 8, 2018 7:54:30 PM | 23
It seems that MI6 was keeping Sergei Skripal on a tight leash by having him live in Salisbury close to Pablo Miller who must be the old fellow's minder as well as recruiter. One way of keeping Skripal on this leash must be to supply him with an addictive painkiller, for whatever pain he is suffering (physical, perhaps psychological?), and fentanyl fits the bill.

Fentanyl also fits the bill for a poisoning agent that also affected the police officer who attended the Skripals. The fentanyl epidemic is apparently forcing emergency and first-response personnel to re-evaluate procedures in handling patients so that they themselves are not affected by sniffing fentanyl accidentally.

B's suggestion that Skripal might be longing to return to and die in Russia, and that he was offering a "gift" to Moscow via his daughter (or maybe even a letter apologising for his treachery and begging for forgiveness, Berezovsky-style) is a stroke of genius. Makes me think that Boris Berezovsky's death merits more attention and cannot be brushed off as a suicide.

karlof1 , Mar 8, 2018 7:59:42 PM | 24
sadness @17 & 18--

Nobody died. Only 3 remain in hospital and are not endangered.

On a park bench, they were discovered. I'll bet my best fishing lure that location's covered by a CCTV whose footage will provide all the answers--unless we aren't to be shown, due to national security or some such.

Briar Patch , Mar 8, 2018 8:05:32 PM | 25
The question raised by the link offered by Oyyo at 6 (at least 21 affected by the "neurotoxin"), the comments offered by Debisdead at 21, and the note from Craig Murry about the nearby chemical site: Was this an attack targeting Skripal at all, or some other kind of "misadventure"? There are so many opportunities to use this kind of incident, by entities capable of spinning it this way and that, that it doesn't give to us individuals reading the news much hope of ever learning the truth.
Ghost Ship , Mar 8, 2018 8:16:50 PM | 26
>>>>> ToivoS | Mar 8, 2018 7:08:41 PM | 19

Fentanyl can enter the body through the skin :

A police officer in East Liverpool, Ohio, collapsed and was rushed to the hospital after he brushed fentanyl residue off his uniform, allowing the drug to enter his system through his hands. The officer had apparently encountered the opioid earlier in the day while making a drug bust.
Fenatanyl acts on the nervous system so could be described as a "nerve agent", particularly by a British politician or civil servant.
WorldBLee , Mar 8, 2018 8:49:38 PM | 30
I love it when the UK media call it a "professional hit job." No, it's not. In a professional hit job the person ends up dead.
Ghost Ship , Mar 8, 2018 9:02:37 PM | 31
Meanwhile The Guardian is spewing its usual bilge: Russian spy attack inquiry widens after medics treat 21 people

Statement from Wiltshire Police :

In addition to the three inpatients**** who are currently receiving treatment in relation to the incident, in line with Public Health England guidance, which asked anyone who was in the area and is concerned because they feel unwell to come forward, the Trust has seen and assessed a number of people who did not need treatment.

**** - These are Sgt Nick Bailey & the two original victims.

Peter AU 1 , Mar 8, 2018 9:04:33 PM | 32
The longer Skripal and his daughter stay alive, the more propaganda can be rung out of his death. Be worth watching to see how many sanctions and laws the UK can push through before he finally snuffs it.

[Mar 08, 2018] Several respected journalists have cast serious doubt on CrowdStrike s report on the DNC servers

Looks like Brennan was the architect of DNS false flag operation: "Hersh also told Butowsky that the DNC made up the Russian hacking story as a disinformation campaign -- directly pointing a finger at former CIA director (and now MSNBC/NBC contributor ) John Brennan as the architect."
Now all this staff started to remind me 9/11 investigation. Also by Mueller.
Notable quotes:
"... Notably, Crowdstrike has been considered by many to be discredited over their revision and retraction of a report over Russian hacking of Ukrainian military equipment ..."
"... Also notable is that Crowdstrike founder and anti-Putin Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch sits on the Atlantic Council - which is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk. Who else is on the Atlantic Council? Evelyn Farkas - who slipped up during an MSNBC interview with Mika Brzezinski and disclosed that the Obama administration had been spying on the Trump campaign: ..."
"... Hersh also told Butowsky that the DNC made up the Russian hacking story as a disinformation campaign -- directly pointing a finger at former CIA director (and now MSNBC/NBC contributor ) John Brennan as the architect. ..."
"... I have a narrative of how that whole f*cking thing began. It's a Brennan operation, it was an American disinformation , and the fu*kin' President, at one point, they even started telling the press -- they were backfeeding the Press, the head of the NSA was going and telling the press, fu*king c*cksucker Rogers, was telling the press that we even know who in the Russian military intelligence service leaked it. ..."
"... Listen to Seymour Hersh leaked audio: https://www.youtube.com/embed/giuZdBAXVh0 (full transcription here and extended audio of the Hersh conversation here ) ..."
"... As we mentioned last week, Dotcom's assertion is backed up by an analysis done last year by a researcher who goes by the name Forensicator , who determined that the DNC files were copied at 22.6 MB/s - a speed virtually impossible to achieve from halfway around the world, much less over a local network - yet a speed typical of file transfers to a memory stick. ..."
"... Last but not least, let's not forget that Julian Assange heavily implied Seth Rich was a source: ..."
"... Given that a) the Russian hacking narrative hinges on Crowdstrikes's questionable reporting , and b) a mountain of evidence pointing to Seth Rich as the source of the leaked emails - it stands to reason that Congressional investigators and Special Counsel Robert Mueller should at minimum explore these leads. ..."
"... As retired U.S. Navy admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. asks: why aren't they? ..."
Mar 03, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

... ... ...

In addition to several odd facts surrounding Rich's still unsolved murder - which officials have deemed a "botched robbery," forensic technical evidence has emerged which contradicts the Crowdstrike report. The Irvine, CA company partially funded by Google , was the only entity allowed to analyze the DNC servers in relation to claims of election hacking:

Notably, Crowdstrike has been considered by many to be discredited over their revision and retraction of a report over Russian hacking of Ukrainian military equipment - a report which the government of Ukraine said was fake news.

In connection with the emergence in some media reports which stated that the alleged "80% howitzer D-30 Armed Forces of Ukraine removed through scrapping Russian Ukrainian hackers software gunners," Land Forces Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine informs that the said information is incorrect .

Ministry of Defence of Ukraine asks journalists to publish only verified information received from the competent official sources. Spreading false information leads to increased social tension in society and undermines public confidence in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. -- mil.gov.ua (translated) (1.6.2017)

In fact, several respected journalists have cast serious doubt on CrowdStrike's report on the DNC servers:

Pay attention, because Mueller is likely to use the Crowdstrike report to support the rumored upcoming charges against Russian hackers.

Also notable is that Crowdstrike founder and anti-Putin Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch sits on the Atlantic Council - which is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk. Who else is on the Atlantic Council? Evelyn Farkas - who slipped up during an MSNBC interview with Mika Brzezinski and disclosed that the Obama administration had been spying on the Trump campaign:

The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods , meaning we would not longer have access to that intelligence. - Evelyn Farkas

... ... ...

Brennan and Russian disinformation

Hersh also told Butowsky that the DNC made up the Russian hacking story as a disinformation campaign -- directly pointing a finger at former CIA director (and now MSNBC/NBC contributor ) John Brennan as the architect.

I have a narrative of how that whole f*cking thing began. It's a Brennan operation, it was an American disinformation , and the fu*kin' President, at one point, they even started telling the press -- they were backfeeding the Press, the head of the NSA was going and telling the press, fu*king c*cksucker Rogers, was telling the press that we even know who in the Russian military intelligence service leaked it.

Listen to Seymour Hersh leaked audio: https://www.youtube.com/embed/giuZdBAXVh0 (full transcription here and extended audio of the Hersh conversation here )

Hersh denied that he told Butowsky anything before the leaked audio emerged , telling NPR " I hear gossip [Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of it. "

Technical Evidence

As we mentioned last week, Dotcom's assertion is backed up by an analysis done last year by a researcher who goes by the name Forensicator , who determined that the DNC files were copied at 22.6 MB/s - a speed virtually impossible to achieve from halfway around the world, much less over a local network - yet a speed typical of file transfers to a memory stick.

The big hint

Last but not least, let's not forget that Julian Assange heavily implied Seth Rich was a source:

Given that a) the Russian hacking narrative hinges on Crowdstrikes's questionable reporting , and b) a mountain of evidence pointing to Seth Rich as the source of the leaked emails - it stands to reason that Congressional investigators and Special Counsel Robert Mueller should at minimum explore these leads.

As retired U.S. Navy admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. asks: why aren't they?

Liberal -> Stan522 Fri, 03/02/2018 - 21:26 Permalink

Relax you conspiracy theory-loving extremists. Our 336 spy agencies are just busy trying to solve the Michael Hasting's murder first. But it's just really hard to find the culprits because they're all hiding in Siberia.

[Mar 08, 2018] I dunno I think the whole air of ineptitude around The Company is just a cover. Why else would GHW Bush have been in Dallas at the time and then rocket just a few years later to its top job? Yeah, I know, it could have been KBR pulling all the strings, but I would still assert The Company was used as the vehicle to pre-position all the other necessary elements

Mar 08, 2018 | www.unz.com

The Alarmist , March 8, 2018 at 1:30 pm GMT

@Anon

I dunno I think the whole air of ineptitude around The Company is just a cover. Why else would GHW Bush have been in Dallas at the time and then rocket just a few years later to its top job? Yeah, I know, it could have been KBR pulling all the strings, but I would still assert The Company was used as the vehicle to pre-position all the other necessary elements, like Papa Cruz, a former anti-Batista foot soldier, showing up a few years to UT just in time to radicalise LHO and set him up as the fall guy. And at the centre of all this, though I'm not sure how except that he ran against Jeb! and Ted, is Donald J Trump.

[Mar 06, 2018] In Her Majesty's Secret Service: How an Agent of British Intelligence Tried (and Failed) to Prevent the Election of Donald Trump

Notable quotes:
"... Another new point in the Mayer piece, not in the above list, is an alleged meeting between the head of the British spy service GCHQ and the head of the CIA John Brennan in which GCHQ briefs Brennan about alleged interceptions of communication between Trump campaign associates and Russia. This is curious because the usual contact for such a case should have been the FBI, not the CIA. ..."
"... But some have suggested that the Brennan came up with the idea or at least directed the campaign of smearing Trump over made-up connections with Russia. For legal reasons and deniability the affair the creation of "evidence" was outsourced to the British partners. As Pat Lang, who has led large intelligence spying and counter-intelligence operations, opines : ..."
"... An unnamed, unknown, unvetted "government official" source is reported by, say, WP, which is then reported by the Times (? since when did competing newspapers use each other as confirmation?), so that official government spokespeople now report "as confirmed by multiple newspaper stories..." ..."
"... Use big words to conceal nonsense and say nothing. ..."
"... Robert Hannigan, head of GCHQ, resigned for "personal reasons" on Jan. 23 2017, a week after Trump's inauguration. ..."
Mar 06, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

... ... ...

Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller (yes, I know it is not deemed reputable) looked into some claims Mayer makes in her piece which, if true, contain new morsels on the issue. They support the standpoint that the whole dossier is fake. These points are:

  1. Steele likely knew who funded the dossier
  2. Steele used dozens of paid confidential 'collectors', not unpaid ones
  3. Steele may have earlier worked for a Kremlin-connected oligarch
  4. The salacious claims in the dossier were based on secondhand information
  5. Steele briefed Jane Mayer during the campaign
  6. A John McCain associate wanted to use dossier to force Trump to resign

Another new point in the Mayer piece, not in the above list, is an alleged meeting between the head of the British spy service GCHQ and the head of the CIA John Brennan in which GCHQ briefs Brennan about alleged interceptions of communication between Trump campaign associates and Russia. This is curious because the usual contact for such a case should have been the FBI, not the CIA.

But some have suggested that the Brennan came up with the idea or at least directed the campaign of smearing Trump over made-up connections with Russia. For legal reasons and deniability the affair the creation of "evidence" was outsourced to the British partners. As Pat Lang, who has led large intelligence spying and counter-intelligence operations, opines :

IMO there was a criminal conspiracy among various parts of the government, the Clinton Campaign and the MSM to rig the election against Trump, and it continues. pl

Posted by b on March 6, 2018 at 05:12 AM | Permalink

Comments


Pictorex , Mar 6, 2018 6:04:54 AM | 1

Very astute observations, as usual.

A more fitting title for Jane Mayer's piece would have been:

"In Her Majesty's Secret Service: How an Agent of British Intelligence Tried (and Failed) to Prevent the Election of Donald Trump"

By the way, please correct this: "They pledged guilty on unrelated issues." should read: "They pleaded guilty on unrelated issues."

J Swift , Mar 6, 2018 6:41:08 AM | 2
Nicely written piece. It just leaves you shaking your head in disbelief sometimes, the brazen repetition of utter nonsense and total lies in hopes that it will eventually start to stick. And I had also noticed some time back the rampant circular citations bootstrapped into being called evidence. An unnamed, unknown, unvetted "government official" source is reported by, say, WP, which is then reported by the Times (? since when did competing newspapers use each other as confirmation?), so that official government spokespeople now report "as confirmed by multiple newspaper stories..."

No wonder the New Yorker and their ilk stick to print rather than video...with AV media, you would be able to hear the heavy breathing and wiki-wiki-wiki sounds of turd polishing in the background.

ELRIUS , Mar 6, 2018 7:12:54 AM | 4
common core education. Use big words to conceal nonsense and say nothing.
Christian Chuba , Mar 6, 2018 7:19:27 AM | 5
And of course this one assertion by Steele is used by the Hannity's of the world to assert that Trump was the victim of a Russian misinformation campaign ...
"In the reports Steele had collected, the names of the sources were omitted, but they were described as "a former top-level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin,""

The beauty of it is that this alleged source never has to be revealed because it would endanger the source so we have to take this Boy Scouts word for it.

lysias , Mar 6, 2018 11:49:39 AM | 21
Robert Hannigan, head of GCHQ, resigned for "personal reasons" on Jan. 23 2017, a week after Trump's inauguration.
dahoit , Mar 6, 2018 12:18:58 PM | 22
How about the report graun had today; The Russians had poisoned their ex-spy? Another made up crap. The NYer is another web of deceit, the web of zionism. All of msm is.
Ike , Mar 6, 2018 1:20:15 PM | 26
@22
The possible poisoned spy case is now being used by Boris Johnson for a possible boycott of the Moscow World Cup. It is obvious bullshit and a rerun of the litvinenko affair some years ago.

Also an Mi6 setup in my opinion. The Russians provided a shipload of LNG to alleviate gas shortages in Britain. Boris Johnson is an ungrateful sack of S--t

Erelis , Mar 6, 2018 5:35:39 PM | 49

Max Blumenthal has observed that much of what is in the "dossier" was available in the public sphere. The dossier is touted as being deep revelation totally missed a figure like Papadopoulos, who only appeared to the public after the dossier was published. Strange that.

What seems strange is that so many people in Russia were willing to divulge what would have been closely held secrets like the golden showers tape. Putin is described in the Western press as somebody who would disappear you if you even criticized his shoe laces.

[Mar 03, 2018] Glenn Greenwald to Tucker Carlson Journalists Eagerly Being Manipulated By Intelligence Community On Russia

Notable quotes:
"... So, you and I don't agree on a lot of issues but I think we share the same concern about this story, and that is that American journalists are being manipulated for whatever reason by the intelligence community in the United States, and I'm wondering why after years of having this happen to American journalists, they are allowing this to happen again. ..."
"... Well, that's the thing I would refrain that a little bit. I don't actually think so much that journalists are the victims in the sense of that formulation that they're being manipulated. I think at best what you can say for them is they are willingly and eagerly being manipulated. ..."
"... Because what you see is over and over they publish really inflammatory stories that turn out to be totally false and what happens in those cases? Nothing. They get enormous benefits when they publish recklessly. They get applause on social media from their peers, they get zillions of re-tweets, huge amounts of traffic, they end up on TV. They get applauded across the spectrum because people are so giddy and eager to hear more about this Russia and Trump story. ..."
Mar 03, 2018 | www.realclearpolitics.com
Greenwald Journalists 'eagerly manipulated' on Russia story - YouTube

Tucker Carlson interviews Green Greenwald of The Intercept about journalists "willingly" being taken advantage of by the intelligence community on stories about Russia to reap the benefits, even when they know what they are publishing is "totally false."

From Tuesday's broadcast of Tucker Carlson Tonight on the FOX News Channel:

TUCKER CARLSON: So, Glenn, just to get to the facts of this story, it is conclusively shown that the story about the 21 voting systems being hacked is untrue, correct?
GLENN GREENWALD, JOURNALIST: It's false in two ways, one is that several of the states included in the list, such as Wisconsin, California, and Texas, said that the websites that the Homeland Security Department cited had nothing to do with voting systems, they are entirely unrelated.

And it's false in a second way, which is a lot of the stories, in fact, most of them said that Russia tried to hack into the voting systems when in fact even Homeland Security, it can only show that what they did was scan those computer systems, which is basically casing something to say for vulnerabilities and made no attempts to actually hack into them. So, it was false on various levels.

CARLSON: So, you and I don't agree on a lot of issues but I think we share the same concern about this story, and that is that American journalists are being manipulated for whatever reason by the intelligence community in the United States, and I'm wondering why after years of having this happen to American journalists, they are allowing this to happen again.

GREENWALD: Well, that's the thing I would refrain that a little bit. I don't actually think so much that journalists are the victims in the sense of that formulation that they're being manipulated. I think at best what you can say for them is they are willingly and eagerly being manipulated.

(LAUGHTER)

Because what you see is over and over they publish really inflammatory stories that turn out to be totally false and what happens in those cases? Nothing. They get enormous benefits when they publish recklessly. They get applause on social media from their peers, they get zillions of re-tweets, huge amounts of traffic, they end up on TV. They get applauded across the spectrum because people are so giddy and eager to hear more about this Russia and Trump story.

And when their stories get completely debunked, it just kind of, everybody agrees to ignore it and everyone moves on and they pay no price. At the same time, they are feeling and pleasing their sources by publishing these sources that their sources want them to publish. And so, there is huge amounts of career benefits and reputational benefits and very little cost when they publish stories that end up being debunked because the narrative they are serving is a popular one, at least within their peer circles.

CARLSON: Gosh! That is so dishonest. I mean, I think all of us and journalism have gotten things wrong, I certainly have. If you feel bad about it, I mean, you really do and there's a consequence. Do you really think there's that level of dishonesty in the American press?

GREENWALD: I think what it is more than dishonesty is a really warped incentive scheme bolstered by this very severe groupthink that social media is fostering in ways that we don't yet fully understand.

CARLSON: Yes.

GREENWALD: Most journalists these days are in Congressional Committees or at zoning board meetings or using -- they're sitting on Twitter talking to one another and this produces this extreme groupthink where these orthodoxies arise in deviating from them or questioning them or challenging, believe me, results in all kinds of recrimination and scorn. And embracing them produces this sort of in group mentality where you are rewarded, and I think a lot of it is about that kind of behavior.

CARLSON: That is really deep. I mean, you live in a foreign country, I'm not on social media, so maybe we have a little bit of distance from this, where do you think the story is going? What's the next incarnation of it?

GREENWALD: Well, the odd part about it, and about the inpatients that journalists have in trying to just jump to the finish line is that there are numerous investigations underway in the city, including by credible investigators, including Senator Burr and Warner and the Senate Intelligence Committee, which most people seem to trust and certainly Robert Mueller who is armed with subpoena power, and everyone is really eager to lavish with praise.

So, we are going to find out presumably one way or the other soon enough. I guess that one thing that is so odd to me Tucker, is that, this has been going on now for a year, this accusation that the Trump administration or the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to hack the DNC and John Podesta's email and we know that there are huge numbers of people inside the government who are willing to leak, even at the expense of committing crimes in order to undermine Trump and yet, there has been no leaks so far showing any evidence of that kind of collusion leading one to wonder why that is.

So, I hope that everybody is willing to wait until the actual investigation reveals finally the real answers. But it doesn't seem that will be the case.

CARLSON: Bravery is when you disagree in public with your peers. And by that definition, you are a very brave man. Glenn Greenwald, thanks for joining us tonight. I appreciate it.

[Feb 24, 2018] Russian Espionage, or Clickbait (1-2)

The reality of Russiagate is that the corrupt neoliberal system and its institutions were laid bare in an unprecedented way. The Democratic Party is toast. The Republican Party is a vile sham. And the MSM has exposed itself as attack dogs of intelligence agencies like never before. People are waking up to the corrupt and useless system in place. The reality of the system was exposed in magnifying Russiagate lens. That's probably the only good thing about it
Notable quotes:
"... John Sipher (ha ha) starts out by re-asserting the lie that Russians "hacked" the DNC ..."
"... Why are the people who work for this guy trying to sell opinions being called trolls? This is just another way to give credence to the FBI narrative that trolls tried to sway the election. If anyone was a troll, ..."
"... And Rachel? Quit lying to yourself and others. My gawd! You have come a long way from your time at Air America that I don't even recognize you anymore. You are creating hysteria and you have become a raving lunatic. Enjoy your $30,000/day, $7 million a month salary for selling out to the people who you used to despise. I despise you! ..."
"... He retorts that 'there's enough hot spots -- Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, China' -- but fails to acknowledge that for example, the Iraq invasion and subsequent insurgency/civil war/rise-of-ISIS is all about what Aaron pointed to, the ginning up intelligence to create the Iraq invasion - which then spilled over into Syria. The role that the US is playing in all the other place he mentions, they have constantly resorted to lethal force and refused negotiation. ..."
"... The establishment media leaves out the essential context: The US is on a single superpower, Pax Americana global empire gambit; with everyone else playing for time while building their defences. ..."
"... And 'Russian Doctrine' is just recycled Soviet Doctrine - but the US always lead arms escalations during the old cold war - the so called soviet doctrine was in fact defence against US pressure and aggression. ..."
"... The Democratic Party is toast. The Republican Party is a vile sham. And the main stream media has exposed itself like never before. People are waking up to the corrupt and useless system in place. The reality of the system is being laid bare in an unprecedented way. As bad as things seem, this is a good thing, if we can keep those in power from destroying the earth before we can recover it. ..."
"... Unless something more comes of this, the Dems and their media cohorts will do a repeat of the Repubs and that same media when the WMD failed to materialize in Iraq. The wonderful thing about The Homeland, though, is that being wrong, all the time, in no way disqualifies you for remaining an important and serious person. ..."
"... Black Lives Matter ..."
"... Bernie Sanders ..."
"... Yeah, I think the point of this is not to change opinions, the point was to try to either suppress voters on one side, or to get people to hardened opinions, and get people to come out to vote, and we've even seen the same troll farm, looks like they're doing this now around the Parkland shooting in Florida. They were going around Black Lives Matter, they're trying to spin up divisions to get us working against each other, as much as electing Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders. ..."
Feb 24, 2018 | therealnews.com

AARON MATÉ: Now, Maddow makes at least one error here. The indictment does say that the operation had a monthly budget of $1.25 million dollars, but that was for its entire global operations, of which the U.S. was only a part. And more importantly, can we say conclusively that this was the work of Russian intelligence? Well, joining me is John Sipher, national security analyst with Cipher Brief, and a former member of the CIA's clandestine service.

John Sipher (@john_sipher) is a former Chief of Station for the C.I.A. He worked for over 27 years in Russia, Europe and Asia and now writes for various publications and works as a consultant with CrossLead and New Media Frontier.


Nixak*77*, February 24, 2018 2:04 AM

Here's what Mr CIA guy 'Sipher' is selling: The indicted 13 Russian trollers interfered w the 2016 POTUS election- NOT by hacking US voting machines & flipping votes to Repug Trump, but by sowing discord among the US electorate which even 'Sipher' admits already existed. Most of the Face-Book posts by these alleged Russian trollers were either posted AFTER Nov 8, 2016 &/or were seen by virtually NO-One, thus 'Sipher' effectively admits he now ilk in the US intel biz can even assess how much alleged impact these alleged Russian trollers had on the 2016 POTUS election -But- I can: Virtually ZERO!!

Now compare that to the US' notorious track-record of nefariously 'meddling' in other countries' political processes- Mainly by Mr CIA guy 'Sipher's' so-called 'ex' employer:

- In 1996 the US actively & blatantly interfered in Russia's presidential election to get Slick Willy's pal & chum(p) that drunk Boris Yeltsin guy elected, & even openly bragged about it. And then orchestrated a fire-sale of Russia's resources, that resulted in great hardship to the Russian people.

In 2014 while Putin's attention was on the Winter-Olympics in Sochi, Killary Clinton's protege' Vikky Nuland actively stoked a Neo-NAZI coup vs Ukraine's democratically elected president -- In an blatant attempt to push NATO right up into Russia's face / west-flank & to try to grab Russia's naval base in Crimea [which up till the 1950s was actually officially Russian territory].

And oh let's NOT forget the US' & it allies [UK, the Saudis, the Turks, the IAF, etc] actively involvement in the on-going Syrian disaster- In yet another Neo-CONian / Neo-Liberal nefarious regime-change scheme!! And how Mr CIA guy Sipher's CIA & other intel' agencies have been trying to bait first Dim OBomber & now Repug Trump into an all out attack on Syria to accomplish it, using dubious 'intel' ala 'WMD redux'!!

I mean seriously Mr CIA guy 'Sipher' & all you other Russia-Gaters [IE: Rachael Mad-cow & even Bernie]?? All this BS hype over 13 Russians trolling click-bait on Face-Book, vs all that I've outlined above [just a short-list] that the CIA & even so-called 'liberal' Dims have actively supported, w DISASTROUS results- Literally destroying MILLIONS of lives in the process!! PLEASE!!

gregorylkruse , February 23, 2018 5:27 PM

"I tend to believe them". That's the problem.

Robert Johnson , February 23, 2018 1:08 PM

John Sipher (ha ha) starts out by re-asserting the lie that Russians "hacked" the DNC. Everything that follows is just blah, blah,blah....Why is TRN interviewing this buffoon?

Robert Johnson gregorylkruse , February 23, 2018 11:37 PM

No, sorry. I have great respect for Aaron, but TRN is not doing us any favors by helping spread this noxious propaganda. They legitimize it by acknowledging it. Meanwhile, there is other news they could be giving us.Check this out: http://bit.ly/2EMOl4S Sad we have to depend upon comedians to give us the news....

Robert Johnson , February 23, 2018 1:06 PM

Rachel Maddow is American "intelligence" at its least ambitious....

Richard Burt Robert Johnson , February 23, 2018 5:50 PM

LOL

beaglebailey , February 23, 2018 1:28 AM

BTW. Why are the people who work for this guy trying to sell opinions being called trolls? This is just another way to give credence to the FBI narrative that trolls tried to sway the election. If anyone was a troll,

I'd say it was the Correct the Record folks who were the trolls. Hillary's campaign paid over a million dollars for people to go into websites and if anyone was being critical of Hillary, they tried to get them to change their minds. How is that not election interference? And was that even legal? It was unethical if not against campaign finance laws.

Jay Hansen beaglebailey , February 23, 2018 1:47 AM

It arose inside the country, though Hillary is, without a doubt, scum. Hillbots were actual 'Murkins, a lot of them still suffering from Hillbotulism. Elections featuring two absolutely unacceptable candidates are a real drag, and, unfortunately, probably the OFFICIAL end of the United States (though in reality, the US died in March 2003).

beaglebailey , February 23, 2018 1:19 AM

Unbelievable. Aaron: I don't believe that the Mueller investigation has delivered solid proof that Russia did anything against the country.

Sipher:

Well I think that he and the FBI are reputable sources and I'm going to believe them and what they tell me. Even if they haven't proven anything, we know that Putin is a bad man and he wants to sow divisions here and besides he's using chemical weapons in Syria (even though that's so totally off topic) and when I go to bed at night I see Putin in my dreams and yackity, yack, yack! So there. I'm a poopy head and you're not.

Good grief, how can people believe anything by this time? And Rachel? Quit lying to yourself and others. My gawd! You have come a long way from your time at Air America that I don't even recognize you anymore. You are creating hysteria and you have become a raving lunatic. Enjoy your $30,000/day, $7 million a month salary for selling out to the people who you used to despise. I despise you!

Michael Holloway , February 22, 2018 10:37 PM

This guys arguments are so weak he must be interacting the very ignorant audience most of the time (I think the great majority of Americans don't pay attention to what their own foreign policy is -- and MSM the vast majority of the time offers nothing but safe softball foreign policy questions).

He retorts that 'there's enough hot spots -- Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, China' -- but fails to acknowledge that for example, the Iraq invasion and subsequent insurgency/civil war/rise-of-ISIS is all about what Aaron pointed to, the ginning up intelligence to create the Iraq invasion - which then spilled over into Syria. The role that the US is playing in all the other place he mentions, they have constantly resorted to lethal force and refused negotiation.

The establishment media leaves out the essential context: The US is on a single superpower, Pax Americana global empire gambit; with everyone else playing for time while building their defences.

And 'Russian Doctrine' is just recycled Soviet Doctrine - but the US always lead arms escalations during the old cold war - the so called soviet doctrine was in fact defence against US pressure and aggression.

Vincent Berg , February 22, 2018 6:50 PM

MoonofAlabama gives a good analysis of the marketing scheme aspect of these "meddlings". Max Blumenthal mentions it in his discussion with Mate from earlier in the week, but this is a very detailed look into the matter: http://www.moonofalabama.or...

Bill Conklin , February 22, 2018 6:40 PM

I suppose it is ok for Aaron to interview guys like this CIA agent but the agent clearly doesn't understand the validity of an indictment. An indictment doesn't prove anything; If it did, we wouldn't need trial courts.

The Department of Justice could indict a ham sandwich if they wanted.

The DOJ knows that this case will never go to trial and they will never have to prove anything. It is depressing that the Democrats and MSNBC have lost all credibility. We are very lucky to have Aaron and Max looking at this sutff.

beaglebailey Bill Conklin , February 23, 2018 1:20 AM

Not according to Rachel. She's seeing Russian bots in her dreams. Just like Sipher.

Sillyputta , February 22, 2018 4:25 PM

The Democratic Party is toast. The Republican Party is a vile sham. And the main stream media has exposed itself like never before. People are waking up to the corrupt and useless system in place. The reality of the system is being laid bare in an unprecedented way. As bad as things seem, this is a good thing, if we can keep those in power from destroying the earth before we can recover it.

michael nola Sillyputta , February 22, 2018 5:47 PM

I just got done reading the Mueller indictment. For the MSM and the Dems to continue their pathetic witch hunt is a true indictment of the corruption at the heart of this country's political and media elites. No doubt there was an attempt, weak as it was, to influence Americans, but for anyone to think this is the smoking gun that proves it was decisive in determining the 2016 election, or that the Russian government definitely orchestrated it, or that Trump, whom I despise as much as anyone else, colluded with them, reveals a startling lack of intellectual honesty.

The effort put forth by the Russians involved seemed to have two objectives; first to take advantage of the tribalization of American society to advance the Trump campaign, and secondly, to make money off it.

Worst of all, if nothing more comes out of this, then the Dems, as corrupt as they are incompetent, will have added more fuel to the Trump charges of fake news and will have served only to weaken any resistance they claim to represent as this clown leads this country on an ever accelerating demise.

Saint Jimmy (Russian American) michael nola , February 22, 2018 6:15 PM

I take issue with advancing the Trump campaign as an objective. Some ads, etc., were anti-Trump and some were about kittens. I haven't seen any predominant political message, at all, in that "effort". Also, it was so paltry that they had to know that it would have no effect, at all, and never could have any effect. Implying otherwise is part of what makes the whole story look like a bumbling, comedic farce to most thinking people.

michael nola Saint Jimmy (Russian American) , February 22, 2018 7:52 PM

If you read the Mueller indictment, it's clearly stated that they did contact various American groups working for Trump, locally, that is, and arranged events, paid for various materials, even someone to dress up as HRC and be in a jail, and also travel to the states to do some first hand research, but as you say, the effort was minor, at best, and was no factor in Trump winning, especially compared to the billions of $ of free air time he got when running in the Repub primary, he was a cash cow for the networks, after all, and the DNC advancing his cause during those same primaries, thinking he was an easier opponent than Cruz or Rubio.

Unless something more comes of this, the Dems and their media cohorts will do a repeat of the Repubs and that same media when the WMD failed to materialize in Iraq. The wonderful thing about The Homeland, though, is that being wrong, all the time, in no way disqualifies you for remaining an important and serious person.

Saint Jimmy (Russian American) michael nola , February 22, 2018 8:16 PM

I haven't seen ANY evidence of traveling to the US for "first hand research". WHERE does this crap come from? It comes from people desperate to keep the war budget higher than any war budget in the history of planet earth. I still see nothing in that "indictment" that serves as any real evidence that Trump colluded with any Russians, much less any Russians definitively working for the Government of Russia, or any evidence that the campaign was affected or that Russians were trying to create "discord" in the US.

If they bothered to look at the same types of activities and even direct money given to candidates by Israeli, Saudi, UK, and other nationals, I think it would dwarf anything Russian citizens used to fund or further any campaign. They won't look elsewhere, though, because nothing perpetrates the fraud on the American people that is the Defense budget like the word "Russians" and most of the "defense" (i.e., war) budget is completely unnecessary. They should be cut by a third right now, with further cuts pending.

michael nola Saint Jimmy (Russian American) , February 23, 2018 6:28 PM

The indictment gives the names and dates of two Russians who made it here for a few days; a third was unable to secure a visa. There are dates and places named in the indictment, but nothing that could of had any influence on the election. If the Dems are so worked up over having lost two elections this century even though their candidate had more popular votes, you'd think they'd be screaming for a change in determining the presidential election. We all know the Repubs would.

We are in total agreement as to what really mattered and matters regarding this issue and the reasons behind the Dems sudden embrace of McCarthyism and their overall need to point to Russia or anyone else to maintain the unmaintainable American empire. If you haven't read the indictment, it's not that long, 37 short pages, several of which can be skipped because they simply list names or laws broken.

Saint Jimmy (Russian American) michael nola , February 23, 2018 6:41 PM

If the dems really cared, they would be calling for publicly funded elections, cuts of a quarter or more of the war budget (i.e., "defense"), and public health care and education, and jobs programs with benefits. They care about nothing but their own butts.

Sillyputta , February 22, 2018 4:21 PM

Aaron Mate is an excellent, intelligent, sincere, and questioning journalist--in short, what everything one would expect from a real journalist. So, what is it the naysayers don't like about him? Is it because he does not support their narrative. Is it his laid back style? What in particular?

Vern La Vernon Sillyputta , February 23, 2018 1:49 AM

this site is controlled by quitiplas.

Saint Jimmy (Russian American) , February 22, 2018 3:28 PM

This guy gets it. As a Russian American, it looks as though I'll have company in the coming American political gulags.

https://blackagendareport.c...

bacvlvs Saint Jimmy (Russian American) , February 23, 2018 10:09 PM

Yes, Glen Ford is outstanding.

michael nola Saint Jimmy (Russian American) , February 22, 2018 6:03 PM

Glen Ford penetrates all the BS and gets right down to the real agenda, Black or otherwise. He called out Obama back in 2007, when nearly everyone else on the so called left were coming in their pants over that fake.

bacvlvs michael nola , February 23, 2018 10:08 PM

"The more effective evil."

Saint Jimmy (Russian American) michael nola , February 22, 2018 6:07 PM

Yeah. I noticed.

Palimpsestuous , February 22, 2018 2:19 PM

CIA staff exhibit two qualities in abundance: 1) Suspicious incredulity regarding all apparent statements, actions and motivations of subjects in the field, and 2) Studied, refined, and highly purposeful public mendacity regarding their and their government's apparent statements, actions and motivations.

Mr Sipher is lying and the tell is his amazing degree of credulity regarding numerous US entities paired with across the board mistrust and outright defamation of numerous non-US entities. Virtually every accusation Sipher made against Russia, Putin and the indicted, is a menu item on standard CIA operational plans for disrupting the elections of foreign nations and has been practiced continuously for several decades, technology permitting.

As a companion to this interview it might be nice to solicit an interview with a CIA antagonist who knows how to expose--point by point, in policy, practice and tradition--one of the most destructive covert entities in world history.

p.munkey Palimpsestuous , February 22, 2018 9:57 PM

Hi Palimpsestuous, your assessment is spot on!

Mr. Sipher is throwing everything at the wall to see what might stick, attempting to conflate what he laughably refers to as the "Russian Black Arts" with the Parkland shooting. He talks in circles; on one hand acknowledging pre-existing social "hyperpartisan", "tribal", divisions", while on the other hand dismissing genuine political movements Black Lives Matter , Democratic Socialism ( Bernie Sanders ), and the Environmental Movement ( Jill Stein ) as products of Russian propaganda that is at once both sophisticated and simple.

JOHN SIPHER: Yeah, I think the point of this is not to change opinions, the point was to try to either suppress voters on one side, or to get people to hardened opinions, and get people to come out to vote, and we've even seen the same troll farm, looks like they're doing this now around the Parkland shooting in Florida. They were going around Black Lives Matter, they're trying to spin up divisions to get us working against each other, as much as electing Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders.

His assessment lacks any measure of self/social-awareness or self/social-consciousness that should be a pre-requisite before laying out criticism of another. It seems to me Mr. Sipher might be protecting his CIA pension.

Palimpsestuous p.munkey , February 22, 2018 10:35 PM

Hey there Munk! True believers will lay down their lives for their preferred criminal syndicate because they are of one body; pensions are just icing. Your observations among others are exactly why I said Sipher is lying.

Vincent Berg Palimpsestuous , February 22, 2018 6:03 PM

Bill Binney, Ray McGovern and John Kiriakou are the first three that come to mind as potential contrarians, although I am sure there are others as well. Perhaps the Clapper lyings will come up in part two?

Saint Jimmy (Russian American) Palimpsestuous , February 22, 2018 3:11 PM

He even looks like a square headed, red neck Nazi.

Pacemaker4 Palimpsestuous , February 22, 2018 2:34 PM

Shouldve asked him about Clapper lying to congress. That wouldve been a lot of fun.

michael nola Pacemaker4 , February 22, 2018 6:04 PM

That 's not called lying anymore; just being parsimonious with the truth, a very precious commodity, not to be over used.

Pacemaker4 michael nola , February 22, 2018 6:23 PM

hehe I hope youre being facetious, But In case youre not]
Lying James Clapper
https://www.youtube.com/wat...

michael nola Pacemaker4 , February 22, 2018 7:54 PM

A few months ago, while waiting for wifey to come out of Target, I saw a preteen kid wearing a T shirt that said, "I speak fluent sarcasm." I want one of those.

Seedee Vee , February 22, 2018 2:16 PM

I am glad you gave John Sipher enough rope.

Southern , February 22, 2018 2:11 PM

It's a sad day for TRRN now that it's been confirmed that Aaron Mate takes this cue from the CIA.

gustave courbet Southern , February 22, 2018 3:51 PM

Takes a cue by prosecuting a hostile interview? I'd rather say the opposite.

Southern gustave courbet , February 23, 2018 2:44 AM

Russians are being accused of involvement in activity that Israel engages in openly.

https://disqus.com/home/dis...

Parvin , February 22, 2018 1:59 PM

This guy is full of it. Come on Real News, please don't waste our time with this nonsense. We, the people are intelligent unlike our media.

Pacemaker4 Parvin , February 22, 2018 2:06 PM

disagree...I like to see schills like Sipher go on the record, and lose the debate, and lose their credibility.

Basle , February 22, 2018 1:45 PM

Whose idea what is to invite this nut on the show?

stan van houcke , February 22, 2018 1:41 PM

is this 'interview' a joke? if not, what is it?

Southern stan van houcke , February 22, 2018 2:15 PM

Propaganda.

Aaron Mate appears to be another gekaufte Journalist.

michael nola Southern , February 22, 2018 7:57 PM

Muhammad Ali used rope a dope to defeat George Foreman; Mate let's these idiots expose themselves with their own words; nothing is more effective than letting a fool speak.

[Feb 24, 2018] State Insecurity Why Are Top NSA Personnel Leaving in Droves by Kate Harveston

Feb 24, 2018 | www.truth-out.org

US intelligence bodies haven't particularly enjoyed their time in the spotlight these last few years. The National Security Agency, or NSA, occupies a particularly complicated and frustrating place in the collective unconscious: It's an institution we must trust with our wellbeing on a daily basis, but it is also fundamentally unaccountable and untrustworthy. When was the last time you voted for an NSA director?

Beginning with the Edward Snowden leaks in summer 2013, we've watched this formerly hidden bureaucratic appendage grow more and more visible to the public -- and what we've seen isn't encouraging. We now know that the NSA regularly colludes with domestic internet service providers and spies indiscriminately on the heads of foreign governments , usually without justification. We also know that low morale within the agency has resulted in the leak of sensitive state secrets. Some of those secrets involve the way the NSA holds basic freedoms like privacy in contempt .

So it might feel like schadenfreude to watch this feared and reviled agency fall into disarray over the past half decade. But the truth is that the NSA still serves a vital purpose, now more than ever, yet it is barely any longer able to do its job (ie. monitoring malign foreign actors, anticipating the future moves of national governments, and keeping America's intel safe from prying eyes). The latest crisis: the NSA's hemorrhaging of talent.

Hey, Where's Everyone Going?

Of the country's 17 intelligence-gathering apparatuses, the NSA is the most prolific. The agency's headquarters, located in Fort Meade, Md., staffs some 21,000 individuals. But their heavy workload is now imperiled by a chronic flight of talent from the agency, described from within as an "epidemic". It's hard to know exactly how bad of a situation we're talking about because, of course, the NSA won't tell us details. But we do have some rough numbers:

• The NSA's current attrition rate for science, math and technology specialists is 5.6 percent.

• The attrition rate for hackers and cyberattack specialists is as high as 9 percent.

• And some teams within the NSA have lost as much as half their staff .

Interestingly, between 2016 and 2017, the agency made the conspicuous decision to remove all references to "openness," "honor" and "trust" from its core values and mission statements. Which begs the question: Is it any wonder nobody wants to work there?

... ... ...

Kate Harveston is a journalist and a member of the CODEPINK communications team.

[Feb 22, 2018] Ray McGovern's First Day as CIA Director

Notable quotes:
"... The low-calorie Jan. 6 ICA was clumsily cobbled together: "We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks." ..."
"... Binney and other highly experienced NSA alumni, as well as other members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), drawing on their intimate familiarity with how the technical systems and hacking work, have been saying for a year and a half that this CIA/FBI/NSA conclusion is a red herring , so to speak. Last summer, the results of forensic investigation enabled VIPs to apply the principles of physics and the known capacity of the internet to confirm that conclusion. ..."
"... Oddly, the FBI chose not to do forensics on the so-called "Russian hack" of the Democratic National Committee computers and, by all appearances, neither did the drafters of the ICA. ..."
"... What troubles me greatly is that the NYT and other mainstream print and TV media seem to be bloated with the thin gruel-cum-Kool Aid they have been slurping at our CIA trough for a year and a half; and then treating the meager fare consumed as some sort of holy sacrament. That goes in spades for media handling of the celebrated ICA of Jan. 6, 2017 cobbled together by those "handpicked" analysts from CIA, FBI, and NSA. It is, in all candor, an embarrassment to the profession of intelligence analysis and yet, for political reasons, it has attained the status of Holy Writ. ..."
"... And Democrats like Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, were kicking the ball hard down the streets of Washington. On Jan. 25, 2017, I had a chance to confront Schiff personally about the lack of evidence -- something that even Obama had acknowledged just before slipping out the door. I think our two-minute conversation speaks volumes. ..."
"... Now I absolutely look forward to dealing with Adam Schiff from my new position as CIA director. I will ask him to show me the evidence of "Russian hacking" that he said he could not show me on Jan. 25, 2017 – on the chance his evidence includes more than reports from the New York Times ..."
"... Intelligence analysts put great weight, of course, on sources. The authors of the lede, banner-headlined NYT article of Jan. 7, 2017 were Michael D. Shear and David E. Sanger; Sanger has had a particularly checkered career, while always landing on his feet. Despite his record of parroting CIA handouts (or perhaps partly because of it), Sanger is now the NYT's chief Washington correspondent. ..."
"... More instructive still, in May 2005, when firsthand documentary evidence from the now-famous "Downing Street Memorandum" showed that President George W. Bush had decided by early summer 2002 to attack Iraq, the NYT ignored it for six weeks until David Sanger rose to the occasion with a tortured report claiming just the opposite. The title given his article of June 13 2005 was "Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made." ..."
"... Against this peculiar reporting record, I was not inclined to take at face value the Jan. 7, 2017 report he co-authored with Michael D. Shear – "Putin Led a Complex Cyberattack Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Finds." ..."
"... Nor am I inclined to take seriously former National Intelligence Director James Clapper's stated views on the proclivity of Russians to be, well, just really bad people – like it's in their genes. I plan to avail myself of the opportunity to discover whether intelligence analysts who labored under his "aegis" were infected by his quaint view of the Russians. ..."
"... I shall ask any of the "handpicked" analysts who specialize in analysis of Russia (and, hopefully, there are at least a few): Do you share Clapper's view, as he explained it to NBC's Meet the Press on May 30, 2017, that Russians are "typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever"? I truly do not know what to expect by way of reply. ..."
"... In sum, my priority for Day One is to hear both sides of the story regarding "Russian hacking" with all cards on the table. All cards. That means no questions are out of order, including what, if any, role the "Steele dossier" may have played in the preparation of the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment. ..."
Feb 22, 2018 | www.antiwar.com

Now that I have been nominated again – this time by author Paul Craig Roberts – to be CIA director, I am preparing to hit the ground running.

Last time my name was offered in nomination for the position – by The Nation publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel – I did not hold my breath waiting for a call from the White House. Her nomination came in the afterglow of my fortuitous, four-minute debate with then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, when I confronted him on his lies about the attack on Iraq , on May 4, 2006 on national TV. Since it was abundantly clear that Rumsfeld and I would not get along, I felt confident I had royally disqualified myself.

This time around, on the off-chance I do get the nod, I have taken the time to prepare the agenda for my first few days as CIA director. Here's how Day One looks so far:

Get former National Security Agency Technical Director William Binney back to CIA to join me and the "handpicked" CIA analysts who, with other "handpicked" analysts (as described by former National Intelligence Director James Clapper on May 8, 2017) from the FBI and NSA, prepared the so-called Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017. That evidence-impoverished assessment argued the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his minions "to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton."

When my predecessor, CIA Director Mike Pompeo invited Binney to his office on Oct. 24, 2017 to discuss cyber-attacks, he told Pompeo that he had been fed a pack of lies on "Russian hacking" and that he could prove it. Why Pompeo left that hanging is puzzling, but I believe this is the kind of low-hanging fruit we should pick pronto.

The low-calorie Jan. 6 ICA was clumsily cobbled together: "We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks."

Binney and other highly experienced NSA alumni, as well as other members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), drawing on their intimate familiarity with how the technical systems and hacking work, have been saying for a year and a half that this CIA/FBI/NSA conclusion is a red herring , so to speak. Last summer, the results of forensic investigation enabled VIPs to apply the principles of physics and the known capacity of the internet to confirm that conclusion.

Oddly, the FBI chose not to do forensics on the so-called "Russian hack" of the Democratic National Committee computers and, by all appearances, neither did the drafters of the ICA.

Again, Binney says that the main conclusions he and his VIPs colleagues reached are based largely on principles of physics – simple ones like fluid dynamics. I want to hear what that's all about, how that applies to the "Russian hack," and hear what my own CIA analysts have to say about that.

I will have Binney's clearances updated to remove any unnecessary barriers to a no-holds-barred discussion at a highly classified level. After which I shall have a transcript prepared, sanitized to protect sources and methods, and promptly released to the media.

Like Sisyphus Up the Media Mountain

At that point things are bound to get very interesting. Far too few people realize that they get a very warped view on such issues from the New York Times . And, no doubt, it would take some time, for the Times and other outlets to get used to some candor from the CIA, instead of the far more common tendentious leaks. In any event, we will try to speak truth to the media – as well as to power.

I happen to share the view of the handful of my predecessor directors who believed we have an important secondary obligation to do what we possibly can to inform/educate the public as well as the rest of the government – especially on such volatile and contentious issues like "Russian hacking."

What troubles me greatly is that the NYT and other mainstream print and TV media seem to be bloated with the thin gruel-cum-Kool Aid they have been slurping at our CIA trough for a year and a half; and then treating the meager fare consumed as some sort of holy sacrament. That goes in spades for media handling of the celebrated ICA of Jan. 6, 2017 cobbled together by those "handpicked" analysts from CIA, FBI, and NSA. It is, in all candor, an embarrassment to the profession of intelligence analysis and yet, for political reasons, it has attained the status of Holy Writ.

The Paper of (Dubious) Record

I recall the banner headline spanning the top of the entire front page of the NYT on Jan. 7, 2017: "Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says;" and the electronic version headed "Putin Led a Complex Cyberattack Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Finds." I said to myself sarcastically, "Well there you go! That's exactly what Mrs. Clinton – not to mention the NY Times, the Washington Post and The Establishment – have been saying for many months."

Buried in that same edition of the Times was a short paragraph by Scott Shane: "What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies' claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. That is a significant omission."

Omission? No hard evidence? No problem. The publication of the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment got the ball rolling. And Democrats like Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, were kicking the ball hard down the streets of Washington. On Jan. 25, 2017, I had a chance to confront Schiff personally about the lack of evidence -- something that even Obama had acknowledged just before slipping out the door. I think our two-minute conversation speaks volumes.

Now I absolutely look forward to dealing with Adam Schiff from my new position as CIA director. I will ask him to show me the evidence of "Russian hacking" that he said he could not show me on Jan. 25, 2017 – on the chance his evidence includes more than reports from the New York Times .

Sources

Intelligence analysts put great weight, of course, on sources. The authors of the lede, banner-headlined NYT article of Jan. 7, 2017 were Michael D. Shear and David E. Sanger; Sanger has had a particularly checkered career, while always landing on his feet. Despite his record of parroting CIA handouts (or perhaps partly because of it), Sanger is now the NYT's chief Washington correspondent.

Those whose memories go back more than 15 years may recall his promoting weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as flat fact. In a July 29, 2002 article co-written with Them Shanker, for example, Iraq's (nonexistent) "weapons of mass destruction" appear no fewer than seven times as flat fact.

More instructive still, in May 2005, when firsthand documentary evidence from the now-famous "Downing Street Memorandum" showed that President George W. Bush had decided by early summer 2002 to attack Iraq, the NYT ignored it for six weeks until David Sanger rose to the occasion with a tortured report claiming just the opposite. The title given his article of June 13 2005 was "Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made."

Against this peculiar reporting record, I was not inclined to take at face value the Jan. 7, 2017 report he co-authored with Michael D. Shear – "Putin Led a Complex Cyberattack Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Finds."

Nor am I inclined to take seriously former National Intelligence Director James Clapper's stated views on the proclivity of Russians to be, well, just really bad people – like it's in their genes. I plan to avail myself of the opportunity to discover whether intelligence analysts who labored under his "aegis" were infected by his quaint view of the Russians.

I shall ask any of the "handpicked" analysts who specialize in analysis of Russia (and, hopefully, there are at least a few): Do you share Clapper's view, as he explained it to NBC's Meet the Press on May 30, 2017, that Russians are "typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever"? I truly do not know what to expect by way of reply.

End of Day One

In sum, my priority for Day One is to hear both sides of the story regarding "Russian hacking" with all cards on the table. All cards. That means no questions are out of order, including what, if any, role the "Steele dossier" may have played in the preparation of the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment.

I may decide to seek some independent, disinterested technical input, as well. But it should not take me very long to figure out which of the two interpretations of alleged "Russian hacking" is more straight-up fact-based and unbiased. That done, in the following days I shall brief both the Chair, Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and ranking member Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee, as well as the Chair and ranking member of its counterpart in the Senate. I will then personally brief the NYT's David Sanger and follow closely what he and his masters decide to do with the facts I present.

On the chance that the Times and other media might decide to play it straight, and that the "straight" diverges from the prevailing, Clapperesque narrative of Russian perfidy, the various mainstream outlets will face a formidable problem of their own making. Mark Twain put it this way: "It is easier to fool people than it is to convince them they have been fooled."

And that will probably be enough for Day One.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and CIA analyst for a total of 30 years and now servers on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Reprinted with permission from Consortium News .

[Feb 19, 2018] Fearless Adversarial Journalism Doesn't Work When You Are Funded By A Billionaire

Feb 19, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Via Disobedient Media

Disobedient Media previously opined on the dagger-in-the-back publication of a hit piece against Wikileaks' Julian Assange just one day after a UK magistrate, with blatant conflict of interest in the matter, shot down his legal representatives' attempt to finally free him from the confines of the Ecuadorian embassy.

What that article did not address was the patently obvious terminal illness suffered by The Intercept. That is, the outlet claims to publish "fearless, adversarial" reporting, while it is funded by a billionaire. Ken Silverstein , formerly employed at The Intercept and by Omidyar's First Look Media, has described endemic problems at the outlet that have risen directly out of Omidyar's leadership or lack thereof.

The fundamental problem facing The Intercept is not ultimately about how or why the outlet published a smear specifically timed to cut support away from Assange, even though that is in and of itself despicable. It's that doing so acts in support of the very deep state and moneyed, military interests that The Intercept purports to critique "fearlessly."

Adding to a sense of betrayal of The Intercept's principals in the wake of the outlet's hit-piece is the fact that a number of writers at the publication are by all accounts on good terms with Assange, and have worked with mutual supporters including the superb Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi. Maurizi collaborated with Wikileaks on the verification of documents for many years, and worked with Glenn Greenwald on preparation for the disclosure of the Snowden files.

Adding to the years of support Greenwald has shown Assange, the Wikileaks co-founder also sent Wikileaks' own Sarah Harrison to the aid of Snowden after he was marooned in Hong Kong in 2013, an act which Stefania Maurizi revealed very likely cost the publisher his freedom.

After the publication of the Snowden files, the UK ceased any attempt to create a legal process by which Assange might have been safely freed , and in the same year pressured Sweden to continue its investigation after the country's authorities expressed their intent to drop the matter. Likewise, in the wake of Assange's actions towards Snowden, the Obama White House changed its stance from a reluctant acceptance that prosecution of WikiLeaks for publishing might not be possible given that US publishers had also published the same material.

Snowden's revelations also provided much of the impetus for the launch of The Intercept as an outlet, after Glenn Greenwald departed from The Guardian . In this way, Assange's story and his fate in the Ecuadorian embassy is inextricably linked with the origin of The Intercept's rise on the back of the Snowden revelations.

Only a few months later, in October 2013 while Snowden was still stuck in a Moscow airport and out of reach of US authorities and The Intercept was gearing up for launch, the UK made it clear to the Swedish prosecutor that she should not drop her investigation and European Arrest Warrant for Assange, even though Sweden's law on proportionality required her to do so.

In the wake of Snowden's escape to Russia, Assange remained trapped in 30 square meters of an embassy and lost any hope that had existed earlier in 2013 that he would soon be released from that space, where we now know he cannot receive even the most basic medical care. Meanwhile, The Intercept has become what it set out to destroy.

The relationship between Assange and The intercept makes it impossible to see the organization's publication of an intrinsically flawed smear piece aimed at Assange as anything other than a deep betrayal.

Which brings us inevitably to Pierre Omidyar . That the multi-billionaire Ebay founder despises Trump and would have preferred former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to assume the mantle of the Presidency is an understatement, but to focus only on his political outlook also misses the point of the larger issue facing The Intercept.

The billionaire's incoherent vision of the First Amendment (disturbing for someone who funds journalistic endeavors) aside, the nature of The Intercept's fatal catch-22 would remain if Omidyar woke up tomorrow to become a MAGA-hat wearing, NRA-supporting conservative. That is, a media outlet cannot perform as an 'independent and adversarial' entity when it is birthed within and nurtured by the very establishment it must confront.

When USA Today reported that Omidyar would contribute $250 million to pursue "independent journalism," a genetic malfunction was written into the Intercept's DNA. One cannot operate in an adversarial manner when one is supported directly by the same moneyed interests that require the most scrutiny and transparency of all.

That the magnate's influence would seep, tide-like, into the reporting and editorial decisions of The Intercept seems difficult to ignore, but it is that inevitable creep itself and not the flavor of his beliefs which makes the situation so damning for The Intercept.

I've previously written at length in an effort to describe the chilling uniformity that ultimately pervades the plutocratic class. Being a billionaire makes Pierre Omidyar much more like one of the Koch Brothers than any liberal without access to the same magnitude of wealth and influence in the US political sphere. The fact that wealth translates to political influence was described in a Princeton University study, indicating that the United States operates as a plutocracy. In that light, it is the wealth that binds Omidyar, the Kochs and their ilk, as opposed to political outlook.

When Omidyar made use of Citizens' United to supply an anti-Trump super PAC with $100,000 in 2016, it's not the flavor of the political activism that he bought – it's that he bought it at all. Omidyar is a power-player within the same corrupt establishment that WikiLeaks and The Intercept – in principle – aim to critique regularly.

Omidyar has also provided funds to the Clinton Foundation. As indicated by Wikileaks via Twitter , the Freedom Of The Press Foundation recently made the controversial decision to terminate processing of Wikileaks donations. The move represented an end to the role that was a central cause for the Foundation's creation, according to a statement by Assange.

Ironically, the initial financial blockade that made the Freedom Of The Press necessary was in part initiated by Paypal, which was a spin-off from Ebay, a company that Omidyar founded. Omidyar served on the board of the company until last year.

Sarah Harisson expressed the conflict of interest that Omidyar's involvement with The Intercept represents to German Press , saying: " How can you take something seriously when the person behind this platform went along with the financial boycott against WikiLeaks?"

Here lies the gulf between an adversarial organization like WikiLeaks and a news outlet that purports to be fearless while subsisting on the payroll of a member of the plutocratic elite.

The issue here goes beyond Omidyar's politics and the petty, obsessively personal derangement of The Intercept's Micah Lee towards Julian Assange. The crux of the terminal illness suffered by The Intercept is that it cannot stand as an outlet that wishes to both participate in adversarial, anti-establishment reporting while it also relies on the funds of a billionaire – any billionaire.

The rough beast born of the marriage between Omidyar's funds and the yearning for freedom that surrounded the release of the Snowden Files cannot help but spiral towards its inevitable fate.

At The Intercept, the center cannot hold in the widening gyre between its best journalists and its worst impulses.

[Feb 18, 2018] Opinion Fearless Adversarial Journalism Doesn't Work When You Are Funded By A Billionaire Zero Hedge Zero Hedge

Feb 18, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Via Disobedient Media

Disobedient Media previously opined on the dagger-in-the-back publication of a hit piece against Wikileaks' Julian Assange just one day after a UK magistrate, with blatant conflict of interest in the matter, shot down his legal representatives' attempt to finally free him from the confines of the Ecuadorian embassy.

What that article did not address was the patently obvious terminal illness suffered by The Intercept. That is, the outlet claims to publish "fearless, adversarial" reporting, while it is funded by a billionaire. Ken Silverstein , formerly employed at The Intercept and by Omidyar's First Look Media, has described endemic problems at the outlet that have risen directly out of Omidyar's leadership or lack thereof.

The fundamental problem facing The Intercept is not ultimately about how or why the outlet published a smear specifically timed to cut support away from Assange, even though that is in and of itself despicable. It's that doing so acts in support of the very deep state and moneyed, military interests that The Intercept purports to critique "fearlessly."

Adding to a sense of betrayal of The Intercept's principals in the wake of the outlet's hit-piece is the fact that a number of writers at the publication are by all accounts on good terms with Assange, and have worked with mutual supporters including the superb Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi. Maurizi collaborated with Wikileaks on the verification of documents for many years, and worked with Glenn Greenwald on preparation for the disclosure of the Snowden files.

Adding to the years of support Greenwald has shown Assange, the Wikileaks co-founder also sent Wikileaks' own Sarah Harrison to the aid of Snowden after he was marooned in Hong Kong in 2013, an act which Stefania Maurizi revealed very likely cost the publisher his freedom.

After the publication of the Snowden files, the UK ceased any attempt to create a legal process by which Assange might have been safely freed , and in the same year pressured Sweden to continue its investigation after the country's authorities expressed their intent to drop the matter. Likewise, in the wake of Assange's actions towards Snowden, the Obama White House changed its stance from a reluctant acceptance that prosecution of WikiLeaks for publishing might not be possible given that US publishers had also published the same material.

Snowden's revelations also provided much of the impetus for the launch of The Intercept as an outlet, after Glenn Greenwald departed from The Guardian . In this way, Assange's story and his fate in the Ecuadorian embassy is inextricably linked with the origin of The Intercept's rise on the back of the Snowden revelations.

Only a few months later, in October 2013 while Snowden was still stuck in a Moscow airport and out of reach of US authorities and The Intercept was gearing up for launch, the UK made it clear to the Swedish prosecutor that she should not drop her investigation and European Arrest Warrant for Assange, even though Sweden's law on proportionality required her to do so.

In the wake of Snowden's escape to Russia, Assange remained trapped in 30 square meters of an embassy and lost any hope that had existed earlier in 2013 that he would soon be released from that space, where we now know he cannot receive even the most basic medical care. Meanwhile, The Intercept has become what it set out to destroy.

The relationship between Assange and The intercept makes it impossible to see the organization's publication of an intrinsically flawed smear piece aimed at Assange as anything other than a deep betrayal.

Which brings us inevitably to Pierre Omidyar . That the multi-billionaire Ebay founder despises Trump and would have preferred former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to assume the mantle of the Presidency is an understatement, but to focus only on his political outlook also misses the point of the larger issue facing The Intercept.

The billionaire's incoherent vision of the First Amendment (disturbing for someone who funds journalistic endeavors) aside, the nature of The Intercept's fatal catch-22 would remain if Omidyar woke up tomorrow to become a MAGA-hat wearing, NRA-supporting conservative. That is, a media outlet cannot perform as an 'independent and adversarial' entity when it is birthed within and nurtured by the very establishment it must confront.

When USA Today reported that Omidyar would contribute $250 million to pursue "independent journalism," a genetic malfunction was written into the Intercept's DNA. One cannot operate in an adversarial manner when one is supported directly by the same moneyed interests that require the most scrutiny and transparency of all.

That the magnate's influence would seep, tide-like, into the reporting and editorial decisions of The Intercept seems difficult to ignore, but it is that inevitable creep itself and not the flavor of his beliefs which makes the situation so damning for The Intercept.

I've previously written at length in an effort to describe the chilling uniformity that ultimately pervades the plutocratic class. Being a billionaire makes Pierre Omidyar much more like one of the Koch Brothers than any liberal without access to the same magnitude of wealth and influence in the US political sphere. The fact that wealth translates to political influence was described in a Princeton University study, indicating that the United States operates as a plutocracy. In that light, it is the wealth that binds Omidyar, the Kochs and their ilk, as opposed to political outlook.

When Omidyar made use of Citizens' United to supply an anti-Trump super PAC with $100,000 in 2016, it's not the flavor of the political activism that he bought – it's that he bought it at all. Omidyar is a power-player within the same corrupt establishment that WikiLeaks and The Intercept – in principle – aim to critique regularly.

Omidyar has also provided funds to the Clinton Foundation. As indicated by Wikileaks via Twitter , the Freedom Of The Press Foundation recently made the controversial decision to terminate processing of Wikileaks donations. The move represented an end to the role that was a central cause for the Foundation's creation, according to a statement by Assange.

Ironically, the initial financial blockade that made the Freedom Of The Press necessary was in part initiated by Paypal, which was a spin-off from Ebay, a company that Omidyar founded. Omidyar served on the board of the company until last year.

Sarah Harisson expressed the conflict of interest that Omidyar's involvement with The Intercept represents to German Press , saying: " How can you take something seriously when the person behind this platform went along with the financial boycott against WikiLeaks?"

Here lies the gulf between an adversarial organization like WikiLeaks and a news outlet that purports to be fearless while subsisting on the payroll of a member of the plutocratic elite.

The issue here goes beyond Omidyar's politics and the petty, obsessively personal derangement of The Intercept's Micah Lee towards Julian Assange. The crux of the terminal illness suffered by The Intercept is that it cannot stand as an outlet that wishes to both participate in adversarial, anti-establishment reporting while it also relies on the funds of a billionaire – any billionaire.

The rough beast born of the marriage between Omidyar's funds and the yearning for freedom that surrounded the release of the Snowden Files cannot help but spiral towards its inevitable fate.

At The Intercept, the center cannot hold in the widening gyre between its best journalists and its worst impulses.

[Feb 15, 2018] Tucker You have to be a moron to believe Steele dossier

Impressive dissection of Steele dossier
Notable quotes:
"... What kind of a moron would believe the Steele dossier on Trump and Russia? Lots of Democrat and hollywood elite morons and lots of morons at MSNBC and CNN. It's so transparently partisan, outrageous and full of fictitious claims, the dossier reads like a parody of a badly written spy novel. ..."
"... It is funny to watch how they are divided (republicans and democrats) on domestic issues but they are as one on aggressive and militaristic foreign policies. Bomb, invade, bomb... rinse and repeat. No objection from either side. ..."
"... Watch Jerome Corsi and James Kalstrom great video's about all the felony crimes Barry's DNC/DOJ/FBI were involved in including the dossier. ..."
"... to deflect the Seth Rich /WikiLeaks affair...and the Keystone Kops have been tripping all over as well as tripping up themselves ever since trying to "make it happen"...and if it was not for almost the "entire" mainstream media 'covering' for them many more people would actually realize that they are the biggest 'comedy' in town... ..."
Feb 15, 2018 | theduran.com

What kind of a moron would believe the Steele dossier on Trump and Russia? Lots of Democrat and hollywood elite morons and lots of morons at MSNBC and CNN. It's so transparently partisan, outrageous and full of fictitious claims, the dossier reads like a parody of a badly written spy novel.

Amazingly, the dossier is what the FBI used to justify spying on American citizens.

Tucker Carlson easily debunks the many claims that Democrats in Congress repeatedly cited as reason to stop the normal functioning of government, so that millions of tax payer dollars can be spent trying to figure out if Trump has been a Russian spy for the last 10 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29vHVcXVN_M


Melotte 22 , February 14, 2018 5:48 PM

It is funny to watch how they are divided (republicans and democrats) on domestic issues but they are as one on aggressive and militaristic foreign policies. Bomb, invade, bomb... rinse and repeat. No objection from either side.

Joseph Sobecki , February 14, 2018 1:29 PM

Watch Jerome Corsi and James Kalstrom great video's about all the felony crimes Barry's DNC/DOJ/FBI were involved in including the dossier.

john vieira , February 15, 2018 1:06 AM

No need to convince me Tucker...have been calling them morons with regards to "Putin did it" since the ex "moron in chief"...who by the way is now a certified fifth columnist with the blessing of the treasonous mainstream media...insinuated as much after the "loser" lost....to deflect the Seth Rich /WikiLeaks affair...and the Keystone Kops have been tripping all over as well as tripping up themselves ever since trying to "make it happen"...and if it was not for almost the "entire" mainstream media 'covering' for them many more people would actually realize that they are the biggest 'comedy' in town...

Vierotchka , February 14, 2018 1:28 PM

I can only concur.

[Feb 14, 2018] BuzzFeed Suing DNC For Proof They Were Hacked Zero Hedge

Notable quotes:
"... As part of their defense, BuzzFeed issued a subpoena to the DNC for information which might help them defend against Gubarev's lawsuit by verifying claims in the dossier - including "digital remnants left by the Russian state operatives," as well as a full version of the hacking report prepared by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. ..."
"... Since the DNC wouldn't let the FBI look at the server and instead relied on the report prepared by CrowdStrike (founded by Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch - who sits on the very Anti-Russian Atlantic Council along with Evelyn " oops! " Farkas. The AC is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk, who apparently owns the Ukrainian gas company Joe Biden's son is on the board of). ..."
"... If the DNC is compelled to turn over the full CrowdStrike report and "digital remnants," perhaps Gubarev would then present a counter-analysis by researcher Forensicator which CrowdStrike apparently "missed" - revealing that the DNC files were copied at 22.6 MB/s - all but confirming that the files had to have been copied locally by an inside source. Many have speculated that DNC IT staffer Seth Rich, whose murder is still unsolved, was the source of the emails provided to WikiLeaks. ..."
"... Word of BuzzFeed's suit against the DNC comes on the heels of a Monday revelation that the news outlet hired a former top FBI and White House cybersecurity official to fly around the globe on a secret mission to corroborate various claims in the dossier. ..."
"... The probe is being conducted by Anthony Ferrante - formerly the FBI's top official in charge of "cyber incident response" at the U.S. National Security Council under the Obama administration. Ferrante is leading the investigation from his new employer, D.C.-based business advisory firm, Forensic Technologies International (FTI) consulting reports Foreign Policy ..."
"... Wouldn't it be funny if BuzzFeed proves the DNC wasn't hacked? ..."
Feb 14, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

BuzzFeed is suing the cash-strapped Democratic National Committee (DNC) to force them to hand over information related to the "Steele Dossier" that might help the news outlet defend itself against a lawsuit lodged by a Russian businessman who was named in the document. Three separate lawsuits have been launched against BuzzFeed in connection to the January 11, 2017 publication of the dossier, which states that Russian tech executive Aleksej Gubarev used his web hosting companies to hack into the DNC's computer systems.

The dossier, without substantiation, said Gubarev's U.S.-based global web-hosting companies, XBT and Webzilla, planted digital bugs, transmitted viruses and conducted altering operations against the Democratic Party leadership.

While one key name in the dossier was blackened out by BuzzFeed, Gubarev's was not. He alleges that he was never contacted for comment, suffering reputational harm in the process. - Foreign Policy

As part of their defense, BuzzFeed issued a subpoena to the DNC for information which might help them defend against Gubarev's lawsuit by verifying claims in the dossier - including "digital remnants left by the Russian state operatives," as well as a full version of the hacking report prepared by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

Since the DNC wouldn't let the FBI look at the server and instead relied on the report prepared by CrowdStrike (founded by Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch - who sits on the very Anti-Russian Atlantic Council along with Evelyn " oops! " Farkas. The AC is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk, who apparently owns the Ukrainian gas company Joe Biden's son is on the board of).

"As part of the discovery process, BuzzFeed is attempting to verify claims in the dossier that relate to the hacking of the DNC," said BuzzFeed spokesman Matt Mittenhal in a statement. "We're asking a federal court to force the DNC to follow the law and allow BuzzFeed to fully defend its First Amendment rights."

Last month, the DNC claimed that providing the requested information would expose the DNC's internal operations and harm the party politically (it's always someone else's fault, no?).

"If these documents were disclosed, the DNC's internal operations, as well as its ability to effectively achieve its political goals, would be harmed ," said DNC lawyers.

If the DNC is compelled to turn over the full CrowdStrike report and "digital remnants," perhaps Gubarev would then present a counter-analysis by researcher Forensicator which CrowdStrike apparently "missed" - revealing that the DNC files were copied at 22.6 MB/s - all but confirming that the files had to have been copied locally by an inside source. Many have speculated that DNC IT staffer Seth Rich, whose murder is still unsolved, was the source of the emails provided to WikiLeaks.

Word of BuzzFeed's suit against the DNC comes on the heels of a Monday revelation that the news outlet hired a former top FBI and White House cybersecurity official to fly around the globe on a secret mission to corroborate various claims in the dossier.

The probe is being conducted by Anthony Ferrante - formerly the FBI's top official in charge of "cyber incident response" at the U.S. National Security Council under the Obama administration. Ferrante is leading the investigation from his new employer, D.C.-based business advisory firm, Forensic Technologies International (FTI) consulting reports Foreign Policy .

At FTI, Ferrante launched what's now been a months-long stealth effort chasing down documents and conducting interviews on the ground in various countries around the world. His team directed BuzzFeed lawyers to subpoena specific data and testimony from dozens of agencies or companies across the country and assembled a cyber ops war room to analyze that dat a, according to sources familiar with the work.

Considering that much of the Steele dossier came from a collaboration with high level Kremlin officials (a collusion if you will), one has to wonder exactly what channels Ferrante and FTI have tapped in order to access such information.

Wouldn't it be funny if BuzzFeed proves the DNC wasn't hacked?

[Feb 12, 2018] I am wondering why it is that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... How did Simpson know with such confidence what the "Intelligence Community" was "saying", and who were Simpson's and Steele's sources in the "Intelligence Community"? Rooney failed to inquire. Instead, he and Simpson exchanged question and answer regarding the approach Simpson and Steele made to the FBI when they delivered their dossier. In the details of that, Simpson repeated what he had already told the Senate Judiciary Committee. ..."
"... Sources in London are divided on the question of where Steele's sources came from -- CIA, MI6, or elsewhere. What has been clear for the year in which the dossier's contents have been in public circulation is that the sources the dossier referred to as "Russian" were not. For details of the sourcing . The subsequent identification of the Maltese source Joseph Mifsud, and the Greek-American George Papadopoulos, corroborates their lack of direct Russian sources. Instead, the sources identified in the dossier were either Americans, Americans of Russian ethnic origin, or Russians with no direct knowledge repeating hearsay three or four times removed from source. ..."
"... Another reported version of the FIFA contract is that Steele, Burrows and Orbis were hired by the British Football Association to collect materials on FIFA corruption, and provide them to the FBI and other US investigators, and then to the press. The scheme's objective was reportedly to advance the British bidding for the World Cup in 2018 or 2022 by discrediting the rival bids from Russia and Qatar. Click to read . Were MI6 and CIA sources mobilized by Orbis to feed the FBI with evidence the US investigators were unable to turn up, or was Orbis the conduit through which disinformation targeting Russia was fed to make it appear more credible to the FBI, and to the media? ..."
"... US Congressional investigators have so far failed to notice the similarities between the FIFA and the Trump dossier operations. Early this month two Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that they have called for a Justice Department and FBI investigation of Steele for providing false information to the FBI. The provision of the US code making lying a federal crime requires the falsehoods occur "within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States." Simpson has testified that when Steele briefed the FBI on the dossier, he did so at meetings in Rome, Italy. ..."
"... With Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, there is some evidence that Clinton and Co. actually wanted to run against Donald Trump, and tried to get their allies to manipulate the Republican primary in favor of a Trump victory (hence all the free corporate media coverage of the Donald). The dossier, fabricated or not, seems to have been one of many 'ace in the holes' that the Clinton campaign thought they could use to discredit Trump (including the Access Hollywood tape, etc.) in the general election. If so, this strategy really blew up in their face – they thought they could manipulate the process, so they could ignore the Rust Belt concerns, and that's what handed Trump the presidency. ..."
"... If the Clintonites were to admit this, however, they'd have to step down from party leadership and let the Sanders Democrats take over, and that's what this is really all about now, their effort to prevent that outcome. ..."
"... And I say "fed to him" when I'm in a generous mood, giving him the benefit of the doubt, because usually I am of the opinion that he's either a really crappy CIA agent posing as a journalist or just a garden variety rat f*!@er. A black job political operative, stitching together a few almost-believable "facts" and out-and-out fabrications with squishy words like "collusion" and "ties." ..."
"... The London experts believe the Senate Committee transcript shows Simpson and Steele were hired for the black job of discrediting the target of their research, Trump; did a poor job; failed in 2016; and now are engaged in bitter recriminations against each other to avoid multi-million dollar court penalties. ..."
"... A source at a London firm which is larger and better known than Steele's Orbis says "standard due diligence means getting to the truth. It's confidential to the client, and not leaked. There are also black jobs, white jobs, and red jobs. Black means the client wants you to dig up dirt on the target, and make it look credible for publishing in the press. White means the client wants you to clear him of the wrongdoing which he's being accused of in the media or the marketplace; it's also leaked to the press. A red job is where the client pays the due diligence firm to hire a journalist to find out what he knows and what he's likely to publish, in order to bribe or stop him. The Steele dossier on Trump is an obvious black job. Too obvious." ..."
"... A bigger bombshell, which of course none of them mentioned, is that Simpson, with his client's consent, was secretly briefing Clinton-friendly reporters on information from Steele's memos, and they used it to write stories based on "unnamed sources." He even admitted that he didn't verify the information before feeding it to the media, said he didn't feel he needed to, because it came from a trustworthy source. Where have we heard that before? ..."
"... I'm wondering why it's that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing. It's well-established that the State Department often acts as a cover for the CIA, and the agency under Secretary Clinton had a strong anti-Russia faction that's on the record as meddling in Ukraine's presidential election. And how much doubt could there be that both Clintons kept the CIA connections they made while in office? ..."
"... Then there was the whole "Grizzly Steppe" report just before Trump's inauguration, presented as a consensus among "17 intelligence agencies" that the Russians "hacked the election" to help Trump win. ..."
"... I'm not 100-percent convinced that U.S. intelligence was behind the dossier, but it's enough of a possibility that I'm not writing it off as some nutty "conspiracy theory." ..."
"... Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I'm wondering why it's that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing. ..."
"... In fact I am fairly certain that it is the case, although from what I understand the FBI and MI6 were also involved. ..."
Feb 12, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

According to Simpson, "foreign intelligence services hacking American political operations is not that unusual, actually, and there's a lot of foreign intelligence services that play in American elections." He mentioned the Chinese and the Indians, not the Israelis. The Mossad, Simpson did tell the Committee, was his source for his belief that Russian intelligence has been operating through the Jewish Orthodox Chabad movement, and the Russian Orthodox Church. "The Orthodox church is also an arm of the Russian State now the Mossad guys used to tell me about how the Russians were laundering money through the Orthodox church in Israel, and that it was intelligence operations."

There are just two references in the Committee transcript to the CIA. One was a passing remark to imply the Russians cannot "break[ing] into the CIA, [so instead] you are breaking into, you know, places where, you know, an open society leaves open."

The second was a bombshell. It dropped during questioning by Congressman Thomas Rooney (right), a 3-term Republican representative from Florida with a career as an army lawyer. Rooney asked Simpson: "Do you or anyone else independently verify or corroborate any information in the dossier?"

Simpson replied by saying, "Yes. Well, numerous things in the dossier have been verified. You know, I don't have access to the intelligence or law enforcement information that I see made reference to, but, you know, things like, you know, the Russian Government has been investigating Hillary Clinton and has a lot of information about her."

Then Simpson contradicted himself, disclosing what he had just denied. "When the original memos came in saying that the Kremlin was mounting a specific operation to get Donald Trump elected President , that was not what the Intelligence Community was saying. The Intelligence Community was saying they are just seeking to disrupt our election and our political process, and that this is sort of kind of just a generally nihilistic, you know, trouble-making operation. And, you know, Chris turned out to be right, it was specifically designed to elect Donald Trump President."

How did Simpson know with such confidence what the "Intelligence Community" was "saying", and who were Simpson's and Steele's sources in the "Intelligence Community"? Rooney failed to inquire. Instead, he and Simpson exchanged question and answer regarding the approach Simpson and Steele made to the FBI when they delivered their dossier. In the details of that, Simpson repeated what he had already told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Rooney then asked what contact had been made with the CIA or "any other intelligence officials". Simpson claimed he didn't understand the question at first, then he stumbled.

Source: http://docs.house.gov/meetings/IG/IG00/20180118/106796/HMTG-115-IG00-20180118-SD002.pdf -- page 61 .

What Simpson was concealing in the two pauses, reported in the transcript as hyphens, Rooney did not realize. Simpson was implying that none from Fusion GPS, his consulting company, had been in contact with the CIA, nor him personally. But Simpson left open that Steele had been in contact with the CIA. Rooney followed with a question about "anyone", but that was so imprecise, Simpson recovered his confidence to say "No". That was a cover-up -- and the House Intelligence Committee let it drop noiselessly.

Intelligence community sources and colleagues who know Simpson and Steele say Simpson was notorious at the Wall Street Journal for coming up with conspiracy theories for which the evidence was missing or unreliable. He told the Committee that disbelief on the part of his editors and management had been one of his reasons for leaving the newspaper. "One of the reasons why I left the Wall Street Journal was because I wanted to write more stories about Russian influence in Washington, D.C., on both the Democrats and the Republicans eventually the Journal lost interest in that subject. And I was frustrated that was where I left my journalism career."

When Simpson was asked "do you -- did you find anything to -- that you verified as false in the dossier, since or during?" Simpson replied: "I have not seen anything -- ". Note the hypthen, the stenographer's signal that Simpson was pausing.

"[Question]. So everything in that dossier, as far as you're concerned, is true or could be true?"

"MR. SIMPSON: I didn't say that. What I said was it was credible at the time it came in. We were able to corroborate various things that supported its credibility."

Sources in London are divided on the question of where Steele's sources came from -- CIA, MI6, or elsewhere. What has been clear for the year in which the dossier's contents have been in public circulation is that the sources the dossier referred to as "Russian" were not. For details of the sourcing . The subsequent identification of the Maltese source Joseph Mifsud, and the Greek-American George Papadopoulos, corroborates their lack of direct Russian sources. Instead, the sources identified in the dossier were either Americans, Americans of Russian ethnic origin, or Russians with no direct knowledge repeating hearsay three or four times removed from source.

So were the allegations of the dossier manufactured by a CIA disinformation unit, and fed back to the US through the British agent, Steele? Or were they a Simpson conspiracy theory of the type that failed to pass veracity testing when Simpson was at the Wall Street Journal? The House Intelligence Committee failed to inquire.

One independent clue is what financial and other links Simpson and Steele and their consulting firms, Fusion GPS and Orbis Business Intelligence, have had with US Government agencies other than the FBI, and what US Government contracts they were paid for, before the Republican and Democratic Party organizations commissioned the anti-Trump job?

The House Committee has subpoenaed business records from Fusion, but Simpson's lawyers say they will refuse to hand them over. The financial records of Steele's firm are openly accessible through the UK government company registry, Companies House. Click to read here .

Because the Trump dossier work ran from the second half of 2015 to November 2016, the financial reports of Orbis for the financial years ending March 31, 2016, and March 31, 2017, are the primary sources. For FY 2016 and FY 2017, open this link to read.

The papers reveal that Orbis was a small firm with no more than 7 employees. Steele's business partner and co-shareholder, Christopher Burrows, is another former MI6 spy. They had been hoping for MI6 support of their private business, but it failed to materialize, says an London intelligence source. "Chris Burrows is another from the same background. They all hope to be Hakluyt [a leading commercial intelligence operation in London] but didn't get the nod on departure."

They do not report the Orbis income. Instead, for 2016 the company filings indicate Ł155,171 in cash at the bank, and income of Ł245,017 owed by clients and contractors. Offsetting that figure, Orbis owed Ł317,848 -- to whom and for what purposes is not reported. The unaudited accounts show Orbis's profit jumped from Ł121,046 in 2015 to Ł199,223 in 2016, and Ł441,089 in 2017.

The financial data are complicated by the operation by Steele and Burrows of a second company, Orbis Business Intelligence International, a subsidiary they created in 2010, a year after the parent company was formed. Follow its affairs here .

According to British press reports , Orbis and Steele were paid Ł200,000 for the dossier. Simpson told the House Intelligence Committee the sum was much less -- $160,000 (about Ł114,000). Simpson's firm, he also testified, was being paid at a rate of about $50,000 per month for a total of about $320,000. If the British sources are more accurate than Simpson's testimony, Steele's takings from the dossier represented roughly half the profit on the Orbis balance-sheet.

British sources also report that a US Government agency paid for Orbis to work on evidence and allegations of corruption at the world soccer federation, Fédération Internationale de Football (FIFA). Indictments in this case were issued by the US Department of Justice in May 2015 , and the following December . What role the two-partner British consultancy played in the complex investigations by teams from the Justice Department, the FBI and also the Internal Revenue Service is unclear. That Steele, Burrows and Orbis depended on US government sources for their financial well-being appears to be certain.

Another reported version of the FIFA contract is that Steele, Burrows and Orbis were hired by the British Football Association to collect materials on FIFA corruption, and provide them to the FBI and other US investigators, and then to the press. The scheme's objective was reportedly to advance the British bidding for the World Cup in 2018 or 2022 by discrediting the rival bids from Russia and Qatar. Click to read . Were MI6 and CIA sources mobilized by Orbis to feed the FBI with evidence the US investigators were unable to turn up, or was Orbis the conduit through which disinformation targeting Russia was fed to make it appear more credible to the FBI, and to the media?

US Congressional investigators have so far failed to notice the similarities between the FIFA and the Trump dossier operations. Early this month two Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that they have called for a Justice Department and FBI investigation of Steele for providing false information to the FBI. The provision of the US code making lying a federal crime requires the falsehoods occur "within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States." Simpson has testified that when Steele briefed the FBI on the dossier, he did so at meetings in Rome, Italy.

Now then, Part I and this sequel of the Simpson-Steele story having been read and thoroughly mulled over, what can the meaning be?

In the short run, this case was a black job assigned by Republican Party candidates for president, then the Democratic National Committee, for the purpose of discrediting Trump in favour of Hillary Clinton. It failed on Election Day in 2016; the Democrats are still trying.

In the long run, the case is a measurement of the life, or the half-life, of truth. Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote once that nowhere has truth so short a life as in Sicily. On his clock, that was five minutes. He didn't know the United States, or shall we say the stretch from Washington through New York to the North End of Boston. There, truth has an even shorter life. Scarcely a second.


nonsense factory , January 22, 2018 at 3:35 pm

"The primary reason I generally don't believe in conspiracies is that they can usually be better explained as the result of sheer incompetence and hubris."

I divide conspiracy notions into two categories: grand mal and petit mal . The former are generally implausible due to the large number of participants involved and while occassionally attempted, they are typically exposed pretty quickly. They may still have significant effects – for example, there was a large conspiracy to sell the Iraqi WMD story to the public, involving top levels of the British and American governments and a good section of the corporate media. That's the grand mal version.

Petit mal is your typical small criminal conspiracy. The FBI, for example, almost always includes 'conspiracy to commit mail fraud' on the list of federal charges.

With Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, there is some evidence that Clinton and Co. actually wanted to run against Donald Trump, and tried to get their allies to manipulate the Republican primary in favor of a Trump victory (hence all the free corporate media coverage of the Donald). The dossier, fabricated or not, seems to have been one of many 'ace in the holes' that the Clinton campaign thought they could use to discredit Trump (including the Access Hollywood tape, etc.) in the general election. If so, this strategy really blew up in their face – they thought they could manipulate the process, so they could ignore the Rust Belt concerns, and that's what handed Trump the presidency.

If the Clintonites were to admit this, however, they'd have to step down from party leadership and let the Sanders Democrats take over, and that's what this is really all about now, their effort to prevent that outcome.

Rhondda , January 22, 2018 at 3:57 pm

I pay pretty close attention to this topic and I must say I sometimes wonder if the Russians haven't sold the rope to the American political elite. I read all 311 pages of Simpson's testimony. I was struck that much of what he was "fed" by Steele confirmed his "OMG Russia corruption" biases.

And I say "fed to him" when I'm in a generous mood, giving him the benefit of the doubt, because usually I am of the opinion that he's either a really crappy CIA agent posing as a journalist or just a garden variety rat f*!@er. A black job political operative, stitching together a few almost-believable "facts" and out-and-out fabrications with squishy words like "collusion" and "ties."

From the embedded link in Helmer's text above: http://johnhelmer.net/glenn-simpson-chases-his-shadow-into-a-black-hole/

London due diligence firms say the record of Simpson's firm Fusion GPS and Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence operations in the US has discredited them in the due diligence market. The London experts believe the Senate Committee transcript shows Simpson and Steele were hired for the black job of discrediting the target of their research, Trump; did a poor job; failed in 2016; and now are engaged in bitter recriminations against each other to avoid multi-million dollar court penalties.

A source at a London firm which is larger and better known than Steele's Orbis says "standard due diligence means getting to the truth. It's confidential to the client, and not leaked. There are also black jobs, white jobs, and red jobs. Black means the client wants you to dig up dirt on the target, and make it look credible for publishing in the press. White means the client wants you to clear him of the wrongdoing which he's being accused of in the media or the marketplace; it's also leaked to the press. A red job is where the client pays the due diligence firm to hire a journalist to find out what he knows and what he's likely to publish, in order to bribe or stop him. The Steele dossier on Trump is an obvious black job. Too obvious."

Emphasis mine.

3.14e-9 , January 22, 2018 at 6:49 pm

Rhondaa writes:

I read all 311 pages of Simpson's testimony. I was struck that much of what he was "fed" by Steele confirmed his "OMG Russia corruption" biases.

Same here, but not just about what he was fed by Steele. Simpson claimed to have done some of his own research and said it was consistent with what he got from Steele.

I'm about three-quarters of the way through the transcript of Simpson's interrogation by the House Intelligence Committee, and I've read all 312 pages of the Senate Judiciary Committee transcript, which bears little resemblance to what was reported in the major media – shocking, I know.

Among the "bombshells" the mainstream reported was "proof" that it wasn't the dossier that launched the FBI's investigation of Trump, and therefore the dossier couldn't have been used as justification for a FISA warrant. A bigger bombshell, which of course none of them mentioned, is that Simpson, with his client's consent, was secretly briefing Clinton-friendly reporters on information from Steele's memos, and they used it to write stories based on "unnamed sources." He even admitted that he didn't verify the information before feeding it to the media, said he didn't feel he needed to, because it came from a trustworthy source. Where have we heard that before?

Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I'm wondering why it's that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing. It's well-established that the State Department often acts as a cover for the CIA, and the agency under Secretary Clinton had a strong anti-Russia faction that's on the record as meddling in Ukraine's presidential election. And how much doubt could there be that both Clintons kept the CIA connections they made while in office?

Then there was the whole "Grizzly Steppe" report just before Trump's inauguration, presented as a consensus among "17 intelligence agencies" that the Russians "hacked the election" to help Trump win.

I'm not 100-percent convinced that U.S. intelligence was behind the dossier, but it's enough of a possibility that I'm not writing it off as some nutty "conspiracy theory."

integer , January 23, 2018 at 4:16 am

Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I'm wondering why it's that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing.

FWIW this NC commenter has never had any problem believing that this may be the case. In fact I am fairly certain that it is the case, although from what I understand the FBI and MI6 were also involved.

Adding: Heh. I posted this before looking at Rev Kev's link to the Raimondo article, which comes to the same conclusions. Interesting times!

Scott1 , January 22, 2018 at 4:37 pm

I believe that Seth Abramson or someone put photographs to the Steele dossier showing people in the places & at the times delineated in the Steele dossier. From the very first Steele said he would not & could not reveal his sources. It was from the first indicated that it would be to the FBI & CIA to discover. He said he believed that his sources were credible.

When I was studying Intelligence services the CIA was said to be the private army of the CIA. These days I don't know exactly who the CIA works for, or answers to. I certainly don't think well of the CIA believing they are wrapped up working for their Front businesses more than focusing on the mission of spying in the interests of the American people. Of private intelligence companies I get what I can from IHS Jane's. That the CIA lost 20 assets, human beings, in China for incompetent secret communications methods would lead professionals to withhold as much of identities as possible.

For awhile there I believe Steele was worried about his own health.

David Corn at Mother Jones was reticent to break the story. So now what I see to look for is what Steele said needed to be done, & that being what Mueller is doing at the behest of the DOJ.

The US has been at war, albeit Hybrid war since the imposition of sanctions for their violations of international law as regarded the annexation of Crimea & the attack on the Ukraine. Sanctions are Economic Warfare.

That the US feels the right to engage in warfare of any kind Economic or Hot over violations of International Law leads me to believe that the UN will fail to prevent the apocalyptic riot. But that as regards Trump becomes neither here nor there, correct?

The Rev Kev , January 23, 2018 at 12:29 am

Justin Raimondo has weighed in on this story at https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2018/01/22/russsia-gate-implodes/ and he does not sound like a happy camper.

John Gilberts , January 24, 2018 at 12:25 am

William Binney, former NSA technical official and whistleblower, comments on the FISA memo, that has apparently just been released. Obviously, a major development in 'Russia-gate'.

William Binney Exposes Secret FISA Memo
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48650.htm

[Feb 12, 2018] The Age of Lunacy: The Doomsday Machine

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The world had a great opportunity in March of 1953 to reverse course rather than this insane military spending that was beginning. On March 5th, 1953, Stalin died. The Soviet leaders reached out to the United States. They offered the Americans an olive branch. They talked about changing the direction of our relations. They talked about, basically, ending the Cold War. We could've ended the Cold War as early as March 5, 1953, taken a different route. Eisenhower and the others in his administration debate what to do, how to respond. Churchill, who was now re-elected and back in office in England, begged the United States to hold a summit with the Soviet leaders and move toward peace, rather than belligerence and hostility. Eisenhower doesn't say anything publicly in response for six weeks. Then he makes a speech. It's a visionary speech. It's the kind of vision that Eisenhower represented at his best, and he says there ..."
"... PRESIDENT EISENHOWER: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. ..."
"... two days later, John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, makes a speech reversing the whole thing. Instead of an olive branch, he gives the Soviets a middle finger and he accuses the Soviet Union of trying to overthrow every Democratic government in the world. The exact wrong message. ..."
"... Did Eisenhower speak for it or did Dulles speak for it? Was Eisenhower the militarist or was Dulles the militarist? In many ways, the '50s was a very, very dangerous time. And there were so many harebrained schemes that were going on. ..."
"... The great independent journalist I.F. Stone mentioned that the word for lunar, for moon, in Latin is Luna. And he said, we should have a new department in the cabinet and call it the Department of Lunacy because of the crazy ideas that were being promulgated at the time. ..."
"... Well, the Cuban Missile Crisis is very important because now we're going through the Korean Missile Crisis, and if Trump has his way, we'll also go through the Iranian Missile Crisis. And the last time we were this close to nuclear war was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What happens there is that Khrushchev, in order to try to accomplish two things, or three things, really. ..."
"... And so, we were planning, we had the plans in place to overthrow the Cuban government, number one. Number two, Khrushchev wanted a credible deterrent. The Americans learned, Kennedy says, "Let's find out what the reality of the Missile Gap is." And he has McNamara do the study. We find out that there is a Missile Gap. By October of '61, we find out that there is a Missile Gap, and it's in our favor. The United States is ahead between 10 to 1 and 100 to 1 over the Soviet Union in every important category. ..."
"... He said, "We would've definitely destroyed Cuba and probably wiped out the Soviet Union as well." So, that's how close we came at this time. Which is again, as Robert Gates, another hawk, warns, "The United States should not invade Syria," he said. "Or should not bomb Syria because haven't we learned anything from Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, that whenever these things happen, you never know what the consequences are going to be. It's always the unintended consequences that are going to get you." ..."
"... It takes two to tango. The idea that the US is solely to blame for the continuation of the Cold War, or that the US is solely to blame for a revival is Soviet/Russian propaganda. Great powers are aggressive, and rarely circumspect. ..."
"... And given Churchill's anathema toward Communism in general, and the Soviet Union in particular, and given that he was the architect of the Cold War from the West I find the idea of him being a peacenik to be bizarre. ..."
"... They do not appreciate that there are different manifestations of both economic models. (Neoliberalism is eating us alive.) They do not appreciate that communism was probably the salvation of both post-war Russia and China. They conflate socialism with communism, view high taxes as communistic, and ignore that the countries with the highest standard of living are quite socialist. ..."
"... Ike was so right about the Military-Industrial complex, and yet we have only enabled it to grow to the point that it dominates every political decision – every law – every regulation in ways that ensure weapons are expended so more can take their place; and more weapons need to be developed because the boogeyman out there (pick a regime) probably, maybe, could be building an even nastier weapon. Make no mistake, Sputnik was viewed as evidence that the Russians already had better weapons and that they would take over "outer space" and we would thus be at their mercy. Back in the 60s the US did worry that communism was working better than capitalism, and that fear enabled a lot of foreign policy (gunboat diplomacy). ..."
"... Capitalism has fatal flaws, but we should all thank Communism died the way it did. ..."
"... not like capitalism didn't murder a few proletarians if murder is the standard, both are condemned ..."
"... the vast bulk of provocations and exacerbations in that now-reprised Cold War were a pas de deluxe, not mostly driven by our own insane US leaders, like the ones discussed in small detail in the post. Conveniently ignoring the whole escalation process of the Exceptional Empire doing the "policies" of the Dulleses and their clan, the craziness of stuff like the John Birchers and the McCarthy thing, and the madness of MAD (which I believe was a notion coined by that nest of vipers called RAND, that "we have to be understood to be insane enough to commit suicide, to kill the whole planet, for the 'deterrent effect' of Massive Retaliation (forget that the US policy and military structure very seriously intended a first strike on the Evil Soviets for quite a long time, and are now building "small nukes" for 'battlespace use' as if there are no knock-on consequences.) ..."
"... Russia suffered 20 million dead in WW II, pretty much won that war against fascism, and the leaders there get dang little decrepit for being (so far) so much more the "grownups in the room" in the Great Game Of RISK! ™ that our idiot rulers are playing. Go look up how many times, however, beyond that vast set of slapstick plays that led to the "Cuban Missile Crisis", the human part of the world skated up, by combinations of accident and error, to getting its death wish. And the main impetus for the nuclear "standoff" has been the US and the "policies" forwarded by "our" insane rulers and militarists. ..."
"... Guys, I generally treasure the NC comments section, and I am not singling anyone out, but some of the rhetoric here is starting to remind me of ZeroHedge doomp&rn. Let's please recover some perspective. ..."
"... Every year of human history since the expulsion from Eden will let us cherry pick overwhelming evidence that the lunatics were running the asylum. Or that every generation of our forebears gleefully built our civilization atop heaps of skulls of [insert oppressed groups here]. ..."
"... Such faith we have in ourselves, and such little evidence other than maybe a couple of world wars and long histories of the loonies playing stupid with whole populations, that we don't need to worry about the concentrated efforts of the sociopathic lunatics to rise to positions of great power and do stupid stuff. ..."
"... "It's the kind of vision that Eisenhower represented at his best, and he says there" Was he subsequently co-opted, or BSing? ..."
"... But that doesn't help the millions who would die on the peninsula. Further, whats known as a Nuclear Famine could still occur, which would be pretty damn devastating for civilization, even if mankind itself manages to survive. ..."
"... Science is about doubt and skepticism. That's what the scientific process is. Doubt a nuclear winter: Ok, I'll bite. We have examples – Large Volcanic eruptions, and we have the year without a summer sometime in the 1830s I believe – that is in recorded History. The we searched to archeological record for more evidence, and found large die-offs following a layer of volcanic dust. Again and again, I believe. Quoting scientists who "doubt nuclear winter" requires more examination: ..."
"... Humanity might survive as a species but not as an idea. Am about halfway through the Ellsberg book and, yes, it does make Dr. Strangelove look like a documentary. Current thinking does not seem much changed. ..."
"... Something missing from the sequence of events here is that the main reason that the Kremlin put nuclear missiles in Cuba was the fact that more than 100 Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles were deployed in Italy and Turkey in 1961 by the US, thus cutting down any reaction time by Moscow to minutes in case of a US attack. ..."
"... The main – unacknowledged – part of the climb down from the Cuba missile crisis was that as Russia pulled its nuclear missiles out of Cuba, the US would do the same in Europe. It cooled things down again until Reagan was electe ..."
"... I had forgotten that the 50s had just as many crazies as present times – the Dulles brothers, Curtis LeMay, Edward Teller, J. Edgar Hoover – really scary people and probably founding members of the deep state. ..."
"... The Jupiter missile agreement was a secret at the time. Kennedy wanted to minimize the appearance of a quid-pro-quo. The subsequent presence of Pershings and Tomahawks in Europe (but not Turkey) was a reaction to the mobile IRBMs deployed by the Soviet Union. Which they still have. France and Britain have their own independent deterrents. Which is just as well, since the Pershings and Tomahawks were traded away as part of START/SALT. ..."
"... The more recent escalation of NATO into E Europe, the Baltics and the Ukraine are a definite violation of the spirit of the Cuban Missile Crisis agreement, and are pure aggression against a Russia that was seen as too weak to do anything about it until they did do something about it in 2014. ..."
"... An aggressive NATO is something I view with horror. One does not poke the bear. But Kissinger (the German) and Berzhinski (the Pole) are fanatically anti-Russian. They made up for the passing of Churchill. ..."
"... LeMay had suggested that we should perhaps wipe out the Soviet Union before they had the chance to catch up to us in nukes. It was an era ruled by fear of nuclear war–a fear that was unleashed by the use of the bomb in Japan. Truman and Byrnes (the latter in a meeting in his hometown–my hometown) rejected calls by some of the Los Alamos scientists to share the nuclear secrets with the Russians and forestall this arms race or so they hoped. ..."
"... This isn't accurate. Stalin tried repeatedly and even towards the end, desperately, to sign a treaty with the Britain and France. They rebuffed him because [he was a] Commie. He signed up with Hitler only after those efforts had clearly failed. It was a self-preservation move. It probably did buy him less time than he thought. But let's not kid ourselves: Hitler's first move otherwise would have been to the East. What were later the Allies would have been delighted to see him take over the USSR. This was why British aristos were so keen on Hitler, that he was seen as an answer to Communism and therefore "our kind of man". ..."
"... General LeMay was responsible for the death of a fifth (some say a third) of the North Korean population by saturation bombing with napalm, was he not? A third? Isn't that one in three? ..."
"... Additional books that shed light on both leaving the new deal behind and the Cuban missile crisis are (1) "The Devil's Chessboard" by Talbot and (2) "JFK and The Unspeakable" by Douglass. The first is mostly about Allen Dulles but has interesting chapters on McCarthy, Eisenhower, Nixon, etc. It is reasonably well foot-noted. The second is about the assassination and has loads of detail about the missile crisis and its power players. It is meticulously foot-noted. ..."
Feb 11, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Posted on February 11, 2018 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield

Jerri-Lynn here: Lest anyone be deluded into thinking that the current lunacy of Trump foreign policy is unprededented and ahistoric, part eight of an excellent Real News Network series on Undoing the New Deal reminds us this simply isn't so.

That series more generally discuses who helped unravel the New Deal and why. That was no accident, either. In this installment, historian Peter Kuznick says Eisenhower called for decreased militarization, then Dulles reversed the policy; the Soviets tried to end the cold war after the death of Stalin; crazy schemes involving nuclear weapons and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba put the world of the eve of destruction.

Three things I've seen recently made me think readers might appreciate this interview. First, I recently finished reading Stephen Kinzer's The Brothers , about the baleful consequences of the control over US foreign policy by Dulles brothers– John Foster and Alan. These continue to reverberate to today. Well worth your time.

Over the hols, I watched Dr. Strangelove again. And I wondered, and this not for the first time: why has the world managed to survive to this day? Seems to me just matter of time before something spirals out of control– and then, that's a wrap.

Queued up on my beside table is Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner . Haven't cracked the spine of that yet, so I'll eschew further commentary, except to say that I understand Ellsberg's provides vivid detail about just how close we've already come to annihilation.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3ejpFDjks9M

PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network, I'm Paul Jay. We're continuing our series of discussions on the Undoing of the New deal, and we're joined again by Professor Peter Kuznick, who joins us from Washington. Peter is a Professor of History, and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. Thanks for joining us again Peter.

PETER KUZNICK: My pleasure, Paul.

PAUL JAY: So, before we move on to Kennedy, and then we're going to get to Johnson, you wanted to make a comment about Eisenhower, who made a couple of great sounding speeches about reducing military expenditure but I'm not sure how much that actually ever got implemented. But talk about this speech in, I guess, it's 1953, is it?

PETER KUZNICK: Yes. The world had a great opportunity in March of 1953 to reverse course rather than this insane military spending that was beginning. On March 5th, 1953, Stalin died. The Soviet leaders reached out to the United States. They offered the Americans an olive branch. They talked about changing the direction of our relations. They talked about, basically, ending the Cold War. We could've ended the Cold War as early as March 5, 1953, taken a different route. Eisenhower and the others in his administration debate what to do, how to respond. Churchill, who was now re-elected and back in office in England, begged the United States to hold a summit with the Soviet leaders and move toward peace, rather than belligerence and hostility. Eisenhower doesn't say anything publicly in response for six weeks. Then he makes a speech. It's a visionary speech. It's the kind of vision that Eisenhower represented at his best, and he says there

PRESIDENT EISENHOWER: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

PETER KUZNICK: This is not a way of life at all. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.� What a great speech and the Soviets were thrilled. They republished this. They reprinted it. They broadcast it over and over, and then two days later, John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, makes a speech reversing the whole thing. Instead of an olive branch, he gives the Soviets a middle finger and he accuses the Soviet Union of trying to overthrow every Democratic government in the world. The exact wrong message.

And so, it's sort of like Trump, where Tillerson says something sane and then Trump will undermine it two days later when it comes to North Korea. The same thing happened in 1953 with Eisenhower and Dulles. We're really much more on the same page, but if you look at the third world response, you've got the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955, and the third world leaders are all saying, "We have to be independent. We have to be neutral." They say, "It is insane to spend all these dollars and all these rubles on the military when we need money for development."

PAUL JAY: So, what went on with Eisenhower, making that kind of speech? He's not known for any big increase in social spending domestically. He helps build, as you said, the military industrial complex, especially the nuclear side of it. So, what was that speech about, and then how does he allow Dulles to contradict him two days later?

PETER KUZNICK: That's one of the mysteries. That's why writing books on the debate, what was going on in that administration. Did Eisenhower speak for it or did Dulles speak for it? Was Eisenhower the militarist or was Dulles the militarist? In many ways, the '50s was a very, very dangerous time. And there were so many harebrained schemes that were going on.

We talked a little bit about Sputnik but one of the proposals after that was to blast a hydrogen bomb on the surface of the moon to show the world that we really are the strongest. And they talked about putting missile bases on the moon, and then the idea was to have the Soviets respond by putting their own missile bases on the moon. We could put ours on distant planets, so that we could then hit the Soviet bases on the moon. The great independent journalist I.F. Stone mentioned that the word for lunar, for moon, in Latin is Luna. And he said, we should have a new department in the cabinet and call it the Department of Lunacy because of the crazy ideas that were being promulgated at the time.

This comes across, really, with the nuclear policies. So, when McGeorge Bundy asks Dan Ellsberg in 1961 to find out from the Joint Chiefs what would be, how many people would die as a result of America's nuclear launch in the event of a war with the Soviet Union, the Pentagon comes back with the idea that between 600 and 650 million people would die from America's weapons alone in our first PSYOP. And that doesn't even account for nuclear winter, which would have killed us all, or the numbers who would be killed by the Soviet weapons. That includes at least 100 million of our own allies in Western Europe.

We are talking about a period the lunacy and insanity was captured best by Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove in 1964. That policy was so close to what was actually occurring at the time. Did Eisenhower speak for this? When Eisenhower wanted to, one of his visions was for planetary excavation using hydrogen bombs. People should study the lunacy of Project Plowshare.

PAUL JAY: They used to have tourism to go look at nuclear tests outside of Las Vegas and people would sit just a few miles away with sunglasses on.

PETER KUZNICK: And we sent American soldiers into the blast area, knowing that they were going to be irradiated. Yeah, the irrationality in these times. People are going to look back at the Trump administration and if we're here later, maybe they'll laugh at us. If we survive this period, they'll laugh. They'll look back and say, "Look at the craziness of this period." Well, if you look at the history of the '50s and early '60s, you see a lot of that same kind of craziness in terms of the policies that were actually implemented at the time, and the ones, for example, one of the ideas was to melt the polar ice caps using hydrogen bombs. We wanted to increase polar melting. We wanted to increase the temperature on the planet by exploding nuclear bombs.

PAUL JAY: And this was to do, to what end?

PETER KUZNICK: For what end? I'm not sure. I mean, one-

PAUL JAY: Well, they may get their way, the way things are heading right now. They may get that.

PETER KUZNICK: And one of the things from Trump's National Security speech was to not talk about, or to say that global warming is not a National Security concern as Obama and others had believed it was. But they wanted to actually redirect hurricanes by setting off hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere in the path of the hurricane, so they could redirect hurricanes. They wanted to build new harbors by setting off hydrogen bombs. They wanted to have a new canal across the, instead of the Panama canal, with hydrogen bombs and reroute rivers in the United States.

I mean, crazy, crazy ideas that was considered American policy. And actually, it was the Soviets who saved us because Eisenhower wanted to begin to do these programs, but the Soviets would not allow, would not give the United States the right to do that because there was a temporary test ban in the late 1950s. And Eisenhower would have had to abrogate that in order to begin these projects.

PAUL JAY: Okay. Let's catch up. So, we had just, the last part dealt with some of Kennedy. We get into the 1960s. Kennedy is as preoccupied with the Cold War, the beginning of the Vietnam War, Cuba, the Missile Crisis. And we had left off right at the moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Give us a really quick recap because I think on this issue of militarization and former policy, we kind of have to do a whole nother series that focuses more on that. We're trying to get more into this issue of the New Deal and what happened to domestic social reforms in the context of this massive military expenditure. But talk a bit about that moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

PETER KUZNICK: Well, the Cuban Missile Crisis is very important because now we're going through the Korean Missile Crisis, and if Trump has his way, we'll also go through the Iranian Missile Crisis. And the last time we were this close to nuclear war was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What happens there is that Khrushchev, in order to try to accomplish two things, or three things, really.

One is to, he knows the United States is planning an invasion of Cuba. The United States had been carrying out war games, massive war games, 40,000 people participating in these war games. Like now, we're carrying out war games off the Korean coast. And the war game that was planned for October of '62 was called Operation Ortsac. Anybody who doesn't get it? Certainly the Soviets did. Ortsac is Castro spelled backwards.

And so, we were planning, we had the plans in place to overthrow the Cuban government, number one. Number two, Khrushchev wanted a credible deterrent. The Americans learned, Kennedy says, "Let's find out what the reality of the Missile Gap is." And he has McNamara do the study. We find out that there is a Missile Gap. By October of '61, we find out that there is a Missile Gap, and it's in our favor. The United States is ahead between 10 to 1 and 100 to 1 over the Soviet Union in every important category.

Still, the pressure was to increase America's missiles and so, the Strategic Air Command in the Air Force wanted to increase our missiles by 3,000. McNamara figures that the least number he can get away with is to increase our intercontinental ballistic missiles by 1,000 even though we're ahead 10 to 1 already at that point. The Kremlin interpreted that, and said, "Why is the US increasing its missiles when it's so far ahead of us?" They said, "Obviously, the United States is preparing for a first strike against the Soviet Union." That was the Kremlin interpretation. It needed a credible deterrent.

They knew that, initially they thought, "Well, the fact that we can take out Berlin will be a credible enough deterrent. The Americans will never attack." Then they realized that that wouldn't be a sufficient deterrent to some of the hawks in the American military, the Curtis LeMays, who had a lot of influence at the time. Or before that, the Lemnitzers. And so, they decide, "Well, we've got to put missiles in Cuba, which is a more credible deterrent."

And the third is that Khrushchev wanted to appease his hawks. Khrushchev's strategy was to build up Soviet consumer economy. He said, "The Soviet people want washing machines. They want cars. They want houses. That's what we need." And so, he wanted to decrease defense spending and one of the cheap ways to do that was to put the missiles in Cuba. So, they do that foolishly. It's a crazy policy because they don't announce it. It's very much like the movie Strangelove, where Khrushchev was planning to announce that the missiles were in Cuba on the anniversary of the Soviet Revolution. That was coming up in a couple-

PAUL JAY: You mean Dr. Strangelove, meaning what's the point of a doomsday machine if you don't tell people you've got it?

PETER KUZNICK: As Strangelove says, "Well what's the point of the doomsday machine if you don't announce that you have it?" And then, the Americans didn't, the Soviets didn't announce that they had the, if they had announced that the missiles were there, then the United States could not have invaded Cuba the way the military wanted. They could not have bombed Cuba. It would've been an effective deterrent, especially if they announced that also, that the missiles were there, that the warheads were there and that they also had put 100 battlefield nuclear weapons inside Cuba.

That would have meant that there was no possibility of the United States invading and that the deterrent would've actually worked. But they didn't announce it. And so, the United States plans for an invasion and we got very close to doing so. But again, the intelligence was abysmal. We knew where 33 of the 42 missiles were. We didn't find the other missiles. We didn't know that the battlefield nuclear weapons were there. We didn't know that the missiles were ready to be armed.

And so, the United States was operating blind. We thought that there were 10,000 armed Soviets in Cuba. Turns out, there were 42,000 armed Soviets. We thought that there were 100,000 armed Cubans. Turns out, there were 270,000 armed Cubans. Based on the initial intelligence, McNamara said, "If we had invaded, we figured we'd suffer 18,000 casualties, 4,500 dead." When he later finds out how many troops there actually were there, he says, "Well, that would've been 25,000 Americans dead." When he finds out that there were 100 battlefield nuclear weapons as well, he doesn't find that out until 30 years later, and then he turns white, and he says, "Well that would've meant we would've lost 100,000 American Troops." Twice as many, almost, as we lost in Vietnam.

He said, "We would've definitely destroyed Cuba and probably wiped out the Soviet Union as well." So, that's how close we came at this time. Which is again, as Robert Gates, another hawk, warns, "The United States should not invade Syria," he said. "Or should not bomb Syria because haven't we learned anything from Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, that whenever these things happen, you never know what the consequences are going to be. It's always the unintended consequences that are going to get you."

Which we learned in Cuba. We learned in Iraq and Afghanistan or we should've learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Obviously, Trump hasn't learned it and we had better learn before we do something crazy now in Korea.

PAUL JAY: All right, thanks, Peter. And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.


Disturbed Voter , February 11, 2018 at 5:28 am

It takes two to tango. The idea that the US is solely to blame for the continuation of the Cold War, or that the US is solely to blame for a revival is Soviet/Russian propaganda. Great powers are aggressive, and rarely circumspect. The existence of nuclear weapons, was what prevented either the US or the Soviet Union/Russia from attacking each other. Otherwise the sport of kings would have continued as usual.

And given Churchill's anathema toward Communism in general, and the Soviet Union in particular, and given that he was the architect of the Cold War from the West I find the idea of him being a peacenik to be bizarre.

Chris , February 11, 2018 at 9:49 am

It's always that word, "communism", isn't it? As long as that word is used, everything is justifiable. If you look at it closely, it would seem that the Russians have discovered that communism is every bit as susceptible to corruption as capitalism. Communism has been, in fact, MORE discredited than capitalism (for now.) With Russia on the other side of the planet, what would be the harm in letting whatever failed ideologies they have fail like Kansas failed? As Jesus might say, "Ah Ye of little faith."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/beltway/2017/06/07/the-great-kansas-tax-cut-experiment-crashes-and-burns/

Tomonthebeach , February 11, 2018 at 1:03 pm

The vast majority of Americans today have no idea what communism is. Most cannot even thing about communism in terms of it being just another economic system different from capitalism. (No, it is slavery!) They do not appreciate that there are different manifestations of both economic models. (Neoliberalism is eating us alive.) They do not appreciate that communism was probably the salvation of both post-war Russia and China. They conflate socialism with communism, view high taxes as communistic, and ignore that the countries with the highest standard of living are quite socialist.

In many cases, Americans vote against their own interests just because some pol labels a new social program as communist so he can give his new bill and edge.

Ike was so right about the Military-Industrial complex, and yet we have only enabled it to grow to the point that it dominates every political decision – every law – every regulation in ways that ensure weapons are expended so more can take their place; and more weapons need to be developed because the boogeyman out there (pick a regime) probably, maybe, could be building an even nastier weapon. Make no mistake, Sputnik was viewed as evidence that the Russians already had better weapons and that they would take over "outer space" and we would thus be at their mercy. Back in the 60s the US did worry that communism was working better than capitalism, and that fear enabled a lot of foreign policy (gunboat diplomacy).

Trump is anything if he is not politically and strategically a dim wit. Thus he probably buys into the communist boogeyman scenario common in our culture. He is likely attracted to the economic stimulus that more guns and less butter offer in the short run. Our problems seems to hinge on leaders who limit their action to the short run, and the long run (ensuring survival of the human species?), well, they never get around to that.

Moocao , February 11, 2018 at 8:09 pm

I would not be so loving over the "communistic ideals". My great grandparents were murdered for the fact that one was a postal office manager, another was a sock factory owner. Believe what you want, but communism is far from just an economic theory.

Communism, once you force the politics into the economic theory, is this: equality of all men, regardless of abilities, and damn if you started off well because everything will be taken from you. Your life is not your own, your family is not your own, your work is not your own: it belongs to the state.

Capitalism has fatal flaws, but we should all thank Communism died the way it did.

Duck1 , February 11, 2018 at 11:10 pm

not like capitalism didn't murder a few proletarians if murder is the standard, both are condemned

JTMcPhee , February 11, 2018 at 9:55 am

Yaas, it's just Putin friendly propaganda, that's all. Let us persuade ourselves that the vast bulk of provocations and exacerbations in that now-reprised Cold War were a pas de deluxe, not mostly driven by our own insane US leaders, like the ones discussed in small detail in the post. Conveniently ignoring the whole escalation process of the Exceptional Empire doing the "policies" of the Dulleses and their clan, the craziness of stuff like the John Birchers and the McCarthy thing, and the madness of MAD (which I believe was a notion coined by that nest of vipers called RAND, that "we have to be understood to be insane enough to commit suicide, to kill the whole planet, for the 'deterrent effect' of Massive Retaliation (forget that the US policy and military structure very seriously intended a first strike on the Evil Soviets for quite a long time, and are now building "small nukes" for 'battlespace use' as if there are no knock-on consequences.)

How does one break the cycle of ever-increasing vulnerability and eventual destruction, that includes the extraction and combustion and all the other decimations of a livable planet? how to do that when the Imperial Rulers are insane, by any sensible definition of insanity? And the Russians sure seem to be wiser and more restrained (barring some provocation that trips one of their own Doomsday Devices that they have instituted to try to counter the ridiculous insane provocations and adventures of the Empire?

Maybe revert to "Duck and cover?" Or that Civil Defense posture by one of the Reaganauts, one T.K. Jones, who wanted Congress to appropriate $252 million (1980 dollars) for Civil Defense, mostly for SHOVELS: in the firmly held belief that "we can fight and win a nuclear war with the Soviet Union:"

Three times Mr. Jones – or someone speaking in his name – agreed to testify. Three times he failed to appear. The Pentagon finally sent a pinch-hitter, Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle. But the Senate wants Mr. Jones. It wants an authoritative explanation of his plan to spend $252 million on civil defense. Evidently, most of that money will go for shovels.

For this is how the alleged Mr. Jones describes the alleged civil defense strategy: "Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It's the dirt that does it."

Mr. Jones seems to believe that the United States could recover fully, in two to four years, from an all-out nuclear attack. As he was quoted in The Los Angeles Times: "Everybody's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around."

Dig on, Senator Pressler. We're all curious.

Russia suffered 20 million dead in WW II, pretty much won that war against fascism, and the leaders there get dang little decrepit for being (so far) so much more the "grownups in the room" in the Great Game Of RISK! ™ that our idiot rulers are playing. Go look up how many times, however, beyond that vast set of slapstick plays that led to the "Cuban Missile Crisis", the human part of the world skated up, by combinations of accident and error, to getting its death wish. And the main impetus for the nuclear "standoff" has been the US and the "policies" forwarded by "our" insane rulers and militarists.

"Tu Quoque" is an especially weak and inapposite and insupportable argument in this context.

Chris , February 11, 2018 at 10:28 am

SPOT ON! IF Robby Mook and the gang can stir up a Russian frenzy from hell based on nothing more than sour grapes, and IF what we know about the deep state is only the tip of the iceberg, and IF the media is largely under the control of the 'Gov, THEN a logical human must at least be open to the possibility that there is also such a thing as American propaganda, must (s)he not?

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2018/01/08/hillarys-campaign-manager-the-russia-investigation-is-not-a-winning-strategy-n2429189

Summer , February 11, 2018 at 12:30 pm

Indeed, WWII was never a war against fascism, just particular fascists that ventured off the establishment reservation.

rd , February 11, 2018 at 2:51 pm

Yes. Nobody invaded Argentina when Juan Peron et al took over. Hitler and Mussolini could have died as dictators decades later if they had simply kept their armies home.

ObjectiveFunction , February 11, 2018 at 11:20 am

Guys, I generally treasure the NC comments section, and I am not singling anyone out, but some of the rhetoric here is starting to remind me of ZeroHedge doomp&rn. Let's please recover some perspective.

Every year of human history since the expulsion from Eden will let us cherry pick overwhelming evidence that the lunatics were running the asylum. Or that every generation of our forebears gleefully built our civilization atop heaps of skulls of [insert oppressed groups here].

Yet during the Cold War, there were plenty of prominent people calling out the McCarthys and Lemays of the world as loons (and behind the Curtain, even Stalin was removed from key posts before his death). Guess what, sane generally wins out over the mad king. The arc of history indeed bends toward justice, though never without sacrifice and diligent truthseeking. The ones to worry about are the snake oil merchants, who pee on our shoes and tell us it's raining.
g.

Here endeth my catechism.

JTMcPhee , February 11, 2018 at 12:19 pm

Keep whistling past the graveyard: http://nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/accidents/20-mishaps-maybe-caused-nuclear-war.htm

Such faith we have in ourselves, and such little evidence other than maybe a couple of world wars and long histories of the loonies playing stupid with whole populations, that we don't need to worry about the concentrated efforts of the sociopathic lunatics to rise to positions of great power and do stupid stuff.

Summer , February 11, 2018 at 12:48 pm

Yes, this is what the world gets when technological advancement is combined with a socio-economic system that rewards sociopathic tendencies. A system advanced by propaganda (disguised as entertainment and education) backed up with the barrell of a gun and cameras everywhere.

bob , February 11, 2018 at 12:59 pm

"The arc of history indeed bends toward justice"

You're going to need some proof for that wild, completely baseless claim.

oaf , February 11, 2018 at 6:57 am

"It's the kind of vision that Eisenhower represented at his best, and he says there" Was he subsequently co-opted, or BSing?

Don Midwest , February 11, 2018 at 6:58 am

This article is not scary enough. Find out that in 1983 there was almost a nuclear war. Both sides have a first strike strategy and a Russian general thought that actions of Reagan were getting ready for the first strike and he was going to strike first. And during the Cuban missile crisis, Russian subs had nuclear weapons on them and we dropped low level depth charges on them and we didn't know that they were armed.

This is a very long interview of Daniel Ellsberg in Seattle on Jan 9, 2018.

Daniel Ellsberg with Daniel Bessner:
The Doomsday Machine

Now that everyone, except many in the USA, knows that when the USA changes a government that the country is ruined, this may have forced North and South Korea to get together.

Ellsberg says that any nukes used in the Korean Peninsula would result in at least 1 million dead and while 60 million in WWII were killed during the course of the war, with nukes that many cold be killed in a week. And then, nuclear winter would finish off the rest of us.

I am scared.

Massinissa , February 11, 2018 at 10:13 am

To be fair, there are now doubts among scientists that Nuclear Winter as classically described would even be a thing.

But that doesn't help the millions who would die on the peninsula. Further, whats known as a Nuclear Famine could still occur, which would be pretty damn devastating for civilization, even if mankind itself manages to survive.

JTMcPhee , February 11, 2018 at 1:15 pm

Some scientists doubt global warming too. Got support for your assertion? https://www.popsci.com/article/science/computer-models-show-what-exactly-would-happen-earth-after-nuclear-war

Synoia , February 11, 2018 at 2:21 pm

Science is about doubt and skepticism. That's what the scientific process is. Doubt a nuclear winter: Ok, I'll bite. We have examples – Large Volcanic eruptions, and we have the year without a summer sometime in the 1830s I believe – that is in recorded History. The we searched to archeological record for more evidence, and found large die-offs following a layer of volcanic dust. Again and again, I believe. Quoting scientists who "doubt nuclear winter" requires more examination:

List them, together with their credentials and "donor$."

Donald , February 11, 2018 at 3:07 pm

You can google nuclear winter early enough. And yes, there are scientists who are skeptical for various reasons. The only group that has written a paper on it in recent years is composed of some of the same scientists who originally proposed it and they think it is real.

Reasons for skepticism include doubt about the amount of smoke that would be produced. And the volcano and asteroid comparisons are imperfect because the details are different. People used to talk about volcanic dust, and now it is mostly sulfuric acid droplets. With asteroids the initial thought was the KT boundary layer represented trillions of tons of submicron size dust and then Melosh proposed ejects blasted around the world heated the upper atmosphere and ignited global fires and created soot and then his grad student Tamara Goldin wrote her dissertation saying the heat might not be quite enough to do that and then people suggested it was ( I won't go into why) and others suggested the bolide hit sulfur layers .

The point is that there is not a consensus about the detailed atmospheric effects of either large asteroid impacts or of super volcanoes like Toba and yet we do have some evidence because these things happened. We don't have an example to study in tge geologic record where hundreds of cities were hit simultaneously with nuclear weapons.

I could go on, but I don't want to give the impression I have a strong opinion either way, because I don't. But I think the case for global warming is overwhelming because vastly more people are working on it and it is happening in front of us. It is not just computer models.

Sy Krass , February 11, 2018 at 5:18 pm

Forget possible nuclear winter, the economic effects alone would be worth 10 Lehman brothers (2008 meltdowns). And then the knock on effects would cause other knock on effects like other wars. Even without a nuclear winter, civilization would probably collapse within 18 months anyway.

JBird , February 11, 2018 at 5:32 pm

All this, while true, only change the details not the results. The Chicxulub impact almost certainly exterminated the majority of then living species, and the Toba Supervolcano probably almost caused our extinction. That suggest throwing massive amounts of anything into the atmosphere is not good.

As a student I would like to know the details, but in practice, it's like arguing whether a snow storm or a blizzard killed someone. Humanity as a species would probably survive a nuclear war okay, but many(most?) individuals as well as our planetary civilization would be just as dead. The numbers dying would be slightly different is all.

rfdawn , February 11, 2018 at 6:53 pm

Humanity might survive as a species but not as an idea. Am about halfway through the Ellsberg book and, yes, it does make Dr. Strangelove look like a documentary. Current thinking does not seem much changed.

Jer Bear , February 11, 2018 at 7:07 am

Trump, like everyone before him, will do what Kissinger advises him to do.

The Rev Kev , February 11, 2018 at 8:11 am

Something missing from the sequence of events here is that the main reason that the Kremlin put nuclear missiles in Cuba was the fact that more than 100 Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles were deployed in Italy and Turkey in 1961 by the US, thus cutting down any reaction time by Moscow to minutes in case of a US attack.

The main – unacknowledged – part of the climb down from the Cuba missile crisis was that as Russia pulled its nuclear missiles out of Cuba, the US would do the same in Europe. It cooled things down again until Reagan was elected.

I had forgotten that the 50s had just as many crazies as present times – the Dulles brothers, Curtis LeMay, Edward Teller, J. Edgar Hoover – really scary people and probably founding members of the deep state.

Jerri-Lynn Scofield Post author , February 11, 2018 at 8:26 am

Excellent point about the missiles deployed in Turkey and Italy– and one I might have mentioned if I had remembered it, absent your prod.

Disturbed Voter , February 11, 2018 at 9:02 am

The Jupiter missile agreement was a secret at the time. Kennedy wanted to minimize the appearance of a quid-pro-quo. The subsequent presence of Pershings and Tomahawks in Europe (but not Turkey) was a reaction to the mobile IRBMs deployed by the Soviet Union. Which they still have. France and Britain have their own independent deterrents. Which is just as well, since the Pershings and Tomahawks were traded away as part of START/SALT.

The more recent escalation of NATO into E Europe, the Baltics and the Ukraine are a definite violation of the spirit of the Cuban Missile Crisis agreement, and are pure aggression against a Russia that was seen as too weak to do anything about it until they did do something about it in 2014.

An aggressive NATO is something I view with horror. One does not poke the bear. But Kissinger (the German) and Berzhinski (the Pole) are fanatically anti-Russian. They made up for the passing of Churchill.

The Rev Kev , February 11, 2018 at 5:55 pm

Just recently Russia deployed more nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to the Kaliningrad enclave between Poland and Lithuania. Maybe something to do with all those special forces NATO keeps stationing on the Russian border?

JTMcPhee , February 11, 2018 at 9:14 pm

And all the a -- -oles who Command and Rule, and most of the commentariat and punditry, all treat these affairs as if they are playing some Brobdingnagian Game of Risk ™, where as with Monopoly (which was originally intended to teach a very different lesson) the object of the game is all about TAKING OVER THE WHOLE WORLD, WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA an idiotic froth on top of an ever more dangerous brew of exponentially increasing,and largely ignored, mutual if often asymmetric, deadly vulnerability.

Stupid effing humans and their vast stupid monkey tricks

Carolinian , February 11, 2018 at 9:14 am

LeMay had suggested that we should perhaps wipe out the Soviet Union before they had the chance to catch up to us in nukes. It was an era ruled by fear of nuclear war–a fear that was unleashed by the use of the bomb in Japan. Truman and Byrnes (the latter in a meeting in his hometown–my hometown) rejected calls by some of the Los Alamos scientists to share the nuclear secrets with the Russians and forestall this arms race or so they hoped.

So no the crazy didn't start with Trump and Trump had even advocated we make nice with the Russians until the Dems, their remnants at State and Defense and the press forced him to change course (on threat of impeachment). The elites who have gained more or less permanent power over the direction of this country are a threat to us all.

Anyhow, thanks for the above post. Those who forget history ..

polecat , February 11, 2018 at 11:51 am

Let's not forget the little country that could with it's aggregated threat of 300+ undeclared
They're 'in-the-mix' too !

Disturbed Voter , February 11, 2018 at 12:02 pm

In so far as the US has moved away from the JFK view of nuclear deterrence to the LeMay view of nuclear first strike we are dead.

David , February 11, 2018 at 11:07 am

Different world. The first generation of nuclear weapons had yields (around 20-30Kt) that were comprehensible in terms of conventional bombing, which of course would have required many more aircraft but was also much more efficient per tonne of explosives. For the formative years after 1945, therefore, people thought of nuclear weapons as weapons in the classic sense and, at that time, nobody really knew that much about the effects of radiation and fallout. This all changed with the advent of the hydrogen bomb, but even then it took a long time for the likely catastrophic effects of the use of such weapons in large numbers to sink in. Nuclear technology, and both delivery and guidance systems, evolved far more quickly than rationales for their use could be found. Indeed, you can say that the Cold War was a period when nuclear powers found themselves acquiring weapons with technologies that couldn't actually be used, but couldn't be un-invented either. Enormous intellectual effort went into trying to provide post-hoc rationales for having these weapons, some of it very ingenious, most of it wasted.

Don't forget the role of paranoia either. NSC-68, the report that formalized US strategy during the Cold War, reads today like the ravings of a group of lunatics, seeing, almost literally, Reds under the beds. And if Stalin was dead, the Soviet leadership had just gone through a war which had cost them almost 30 million dead, and any, literally any, sacrifice was worth it to make sure that they prevented another war, or at least won it quickly.

rd , February 11, 2018 at 11:56 am

Dr. Strangelove has moved from the archive boxes of historical artifacts to being a "must see" movie again.

Baby Gerald , February 11, 2018 at 2:12 pm

It never left the 'must see' list. Its just moved higher up the rankings in recent months, what with all this 'collaboration' conspiracy drivel.

From wikipedia :

US military casualties in WW2: 407,300
US civilian casualties in WW2: 12,100

USSR military casualties in WW2: estimated by various sources [see the footnotes] between 8,668,000 to 11,400,000.
USSR civilian casualties in WW2: 10,000,000 [plus another 6-7 million deaths from famine, a line in the table that is completely blank for the US]

Simply put, for every American that died, somewhere between a thousand to two thousand of their Russian counterparts were killed. And somehow people in the US were convinced and worried that Russia wanted to start yet another war when they still hadn't finished burying the dead from the last one.

rd , February 11, 2018 at 3:06 pm

1. Stalin made his pact with the devil that gave Hitler free rein to invade Poland and France. Hitler then invaded Russia from Poland as the jumping off point. Stalin miscalculated big-time.

2. Invaded countries always have many more civilian countries than un-invaded ones.

3. Germany started WW II only 20 years after the end of WW I that also slaughtered 2 million German soldiers. Past losses generally does not appear to impact the decision-making of dictators regarding new wars. So it would have been irrational for the West to think that the USSR had no intent to expand its borders. That was the blunder that France and Britain made in 1938-39. However, the paranoia did get extreme in the Cold War.

Yves Smith , February 11, 2018 at 6:03 pm

This isn't accurate. Stalin tried repeatedly and even towards the end, desperately, to sign a treaty with the Britain and France. They rebuffed him because [he was a] Commie. He signed up with Hitler only after those efforts had clearly failed. It was a self-preservation move. It probably did buy him less time than he thought. But let's not kid ourselves: Hitler's first move otherwise would have been to the East. What were later the Allies would have been delighted to see him take over the USSR. This was why British aristos were so keen on Hitler, that he was seen as an answer to Communism and therefore "our kind of man".

JBird , February 11, 2018 at 8:34 pm

The Poles have been the Germans and Russians chewtoy ever since it was completely partitioned. All the countries immediately around Russia have been horribly abused by Russia. Putin is doing his country no favors by reminding everyone of that. He can cow them into submission, but like the American government is finding, just because they are doesn't mean they cannot cause trouble. Heck, the current Great Game could be said to have started with the Soviet-Afghanistan War.

Going into the war every country was unprepared and unwilling to fight and had difficulty choices. The German military itself was not prepared. It was Hitler's choice to start when and where and by 1938 everyone knew it. Hitler was surprised that France and Great Britain honored their guarantee to Poland.

As evil as Stalin's regime was, and his invasion of Poland was just as bad as Hitler's at first, I don't think most people really understood just how evil the Nazis were and what they were planning on doing for Germany's living space. It was worse than anything that Stalin did and between the Ukrainian famine, the Great Purges, the takeover of the Baltic States, the invasion of Finland, etc he did serious evil.

Harold , February 11, 2018 at 3:17 pm

General LeMay was responsible for the death of a fifth (some say a third) of the North Korean population by saturation bombing with napalm, was he not? A third? Isn't that one in three?

xformbykr , February 11, 2018 at 12:34 pm

Additional books that shed light on both leaving the new deal behind and the Cuban missile crisis are (1) "The Devil's Chessboard" by Talbot and (2) "JFK and The Unspeakable" by Douglass. The first is mostly about Allen Dulles but has interesting chapters on McCarthy, Eisenhower, Nixon, etc. It is reasonably well foot-noted. The second is about the assassination and has loads of detail about the missile crisis and its power players. It is meticulously foot-noted.

JTMcPhee , February 11, 2018 at 1:09 pm

For those with a shred of remaining optimism who want to be rid of it, might I suggest a book titled "With Enough Shovels" by Robert Scheer. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/robert-scheer-4/with-enough-shovels-reagan-bush-and-nuclear-war/

I was going to post the text of the short review, but all I got at the moment is this blankety iPhone and its limits with cut and paste.

Not many read books anyway these days, and what sufficient moiety of them will form the groundswell that tips over the Juggernaut we are all pushing and pulling and riding toward the cliff?

I read this stuff mostly to sense which hand holds the knife and not to go down asking "What happened? What did it all mean?"

John k , February 11, 2018 at 1:13 pm

Trump has been bellicose re NK and Iran, but I see him as resisting the Syrian adventure, while cia plus military hawks pushing forward.
Dems today are real hawks, itching to confront Russia in both Syria and Ukraine the latter another place trump may be resisting hawks, the area has been quiet since the election, I.e. since dems were in charge.
It's an odd thought that in some theaters trump may be the sane one

JTMcPhee , February 11, 2018 at 1:55 pm

Yaas, nothing is happening in Ukraine, all is quiet on the Eastern Front of NATO: http://ukraine.csis.org/ Nuland has gone on to other conquests, and all that. The CIA and War Department have lost interest in that Conflict Zone. Nothing is happening. You are getting sleepy. Sleepy.

Yaas, nothing is happening. https://www.reuters.com/places/ukraine All is well. Safely rest. God is nigh.

marku52 , February 11, 2018 at 3:12 pm

Yeah, the title of this post would lead one to believe that their is something uniquely horrible about Trump's foreign policy. From anything I can detect, her bellicose statement about a no-fly zone in Syria and her abject destruction of Libya, HRC's FP would have been even worse.

If she had been elected, we might already be in a ground war with the Russians in Syria. The only hopeful sign is that while Trump spends his day watching TeeVee, State, DOD, and CIA are all working at cross purposes and getting in each other's way.

Foreign policy? We have a foreign policy? If anybody finds it, will they please explain it to me?

William Beyer , February 11, 2018 at 1:20 pm

I almost never comment, although I rely on NC for most of my news and blood pressure control. You are a treasure.

May I recommend another book – "All Honorable Men" – by James Stewart Martin. Published in 1950 and shortly thereafter all bookstore copies were hoovered-up and burned by the CIA. It might have been referenced in one of the RNN segments, but I haven't slogged through all of them yet.

You can get a hardback at Amazon for a mere $298. An i-book is cheaper.

After reading "The Brothers," and "The Devil's Chessboard," I considered starting a non-profit using GPS technology – Piss-on-their-Graves.org.

J.Fever , February 11, 2018 at 2:43 pm

Forbidden bookshelf series $11.49 Barnes & Noble

JBird , February 11, 2018 at 2:47 pm

The Forbidden Bookshelf series by Open Media is fantastic. Sadly for dinosaurs like me, it is mostly ebooks, but they do the occasional hard copy reprints, and since much in the series would be out of print without Open Media, even the ebooks are great to have.

And it is interesting to see how many bothersome books just go away even without any "censorship" even with the First Amendment being the one right courts have consistently, and strongly, enforced.

JTMcPhee , February 11, 2018 at 9:17 pm

Especially the right of corporate persons to one dollar, one vote speech..,

JBird , February 11, 2018 at 9:43 pm

I will take what I can get, even if as a college student, I don't have much "Free Speech."

:-)

shinola , February 11, 2018 at 4:07 pm

This article reminded me of an interesting/disturbing thing I saw on tv last night – a local news show had a bit on what to do in case of nuclear attack!

Boomers & older probably remember the drill: go to the basement or innermost room of the house, have 72 hours of food & water stashed & don't go outside for at least 3 days, etc. (yeah, that's the ticket).
Thought I was having a flashback to the 60's

Of course the best advice I ever heard on the subject was "Squat down, put your head between your knees & kiss your sweet [rear end] goodbye."

JBird , February 11, 2018 at 5:45 pm

Well, as I recall they were trying to give us the illusion of control so that we would not go all nihilistic or into a drunken fatalistic stupor. I don't know if telling people, like little JBird, that the bombs might start dropping anytime in which case you're just f@@@@d would have done any good.

The Rev Kev , February 11, 2018 at 6:04 pm

Maybe they could digitally colourise and re-issue this old film again, you know, as a public service-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_1jkLxhh20

Of course, it took a long time till we learned that a nuclear attack would be more like this-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VG2aJyIFrA

Oregoncharles , February 11, 2018 at 4:41 pm

One interpretation of the Cold War, that I found revealing, was that the two "opposing" militaries colluded to magnify the threat so as to pump up their respective budgets. So both were essentially conning their own governments – and putting the whole world at risk in the process.

Of course, another big factor, equally obvious at the time, was (and is) that world "leaders," elected or not, can't resist the temptation to play chess with live pieces. They don't seem to care that people wind up dead, or that occasionally they put the whole world in danger.

Waking Up , February 11, 2018 at 5:05 pm

FYI: The first link to the Real News Network ends up at outlook.live.

Jerri-Lynn Scofield Post author , February 11, 2018 at 11:45 pm

Fixed it. Thanks.

rkka , February 11, 2018 at 5:13 pm

It's SIOP, not PSYOP. SIOP stands for Single Integrated Operating Plan, which was what the first nuclear war plan was called. PSYOPS are Psychological Operations.

VietnamVet , February 11, 2018 at 7:17 pm

Having served in the first Cold War, it simply is beyond my comprehension that the Democrats restarted it all over again. Even weirder are the neo-con proponents of a First Strike. If the USA wins, at least one or two major cities (if not all) will be destroyed. New Zealand becomes the sequel to "On the Beach". We are in the same position as Germany in the 1930s except we know that the world war will destroy us. Tell me, how in the hell, did a few thousand U.S. soldiers and contractors ended up in the middle of Eastern Syria surrounded by Russians, the Syrian Arab Army and Shiite militias at risk of attack by Turkey?

JBird , February 11, 2018 at 7:59 pm

Tell me, how in the hell, did a few thousand U.S. soldiers and contractors ended up in the middle of Eastern Syria surrounded by Russians, the Syrian Arab Army and Shiite militias at risk of attack by Turkey?

Why they are needed to fight the evil-doers of course! Anything to protect our Freedom and the American Way. Now, ifyou keep asking these inconvenient questions, then "they" might start asking if you support the terrorists.

It's like when my half blind aged mother, and her possibly weaponized cane, is scrutinized as a possible al-Qaeda terrorist with a super hidden weapon, and I ask why it's 9/11 and the very bad people might hurt us.

Max4241 , February 11, 2018 at 8:10 pm

Nuclear winter. How quaint. Soot and dust. Rapid cooling. Crop failures. Starvation. Billions -perhaps- dead.

But life, certainly, will find a way!

Not in my world. All-out thermonuclear war means 250 nuclear reactors melt down simultaneously and several hundred thousand tons of loosely stored nuclear waste becomes aerosoled.

The resulting radiation blast burns the atmosphere off and the earth becomes a dead planet.

We can never look the thing straight in the eye. Take North Korea. We have been told, repeatedly, endlessly, that they have 20,000 artillery pieces trained on Seoul!

Again, how quaint. How SCARY! What we should be reading about, are the priority targets, the game changers:

http://res.heraldm.com/content/image/2012/03/23/20120323001281_0.jpg

Light those five softies up and you can say good-bye to South Korea forever.

Bobby Gladd , February 11, 2018 at 8:19 pm

"People should study the lunacy of Project Plowshare."
__

Yeah. In 1992 my wife was serving as the QA Mgr for the Nevada Test Site (NTS) nuke remediation project contractor. In 1993 a successful FOIA filing unearthed the Alaskan "Project Chariot." One of the brilliant Project Plowshare ideas was the potential utility of nuke detonations to carve out deep water harbors (they now deny it), so they took a bunch of irradiated soil from NTS and and spread it around on the tundra 130 miles N of the Arctic circle on the coast of the Chukchi Sea to "study potential environmental impacts."

The nuke "dredging" idea went nowhere, so they just plowed the irradiated crap under the surface, where it remained secret until the FOIA revelation decades later. DOE told my wife's company "go clean this shit up" (Eskimo tribes were freaking after finding out), so off goes my wife and her crew to spend the summer and fall living in tents guarded by armed polar bear guards (they had to first plow out a dirt & gravel runway, and flew everyone and all supplies in on STOL aircraft). They dug the test bed area all up (near Cape Thompson), assayed samples in an onsite radlab, put some 30 tons of "contaminated" Arctic soil in large sealed containers, barged it all down to Seattle, loaded it on trucks and drove it all back down to be buried at NTS.

Your tax dollars.

She looked so cute with her clipboard, and her orange vest, steel toed boots and hardhat.

JTMcPhee, February 11, 2018 at 9:26 pm

Did she get stuck dealing with any of the impossibly intractable problems at the Hanford Reservation? Anyone who doubts the massive stupidity of humans, read this: http://www.oregonlive.com/travel/index.ssf/2008/06/a_tour_of_the_hanford_reveals.html

Disaster tourism. "Buffy, can we do Fukushima next?"

The Rev Kev, February 11, 2018 at 9:50 pm

As a teenager I read in a newspaper a proposal to use nuclear blasts to form a canal that would bring the sea to the middle of Australia and form an inland sea from which water could be drawn. We already had nuclear weapon being tested here ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_tests_in_Australia ) so there was no appetite for ideas like this.

[Feb 11, 2018] Fletcher Prouty's suspicions re Kennedy's assassination were later confirmed by Chauncey Holt before he died (there are several versions online). His recorded testimony proves the CIA/MAFIA connection(without knowing who gave the order).

Notable quotes:
"... the MSM deification of Mueller reminds me much of their similar glorification of J Edgar Hoover at that time. ..."
Feb 11, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Bob Van Noy , February 9, 2018 at 1:48 pm

For those unfamiliar with Fletcher Prouty, here is the link that I was reading

https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/GoD.html

BobH , February 9, 2018 at 3:44 pm

Fletcher Prouty's suspicions re Kennedy's assassination were later confirmed by Chauncey Holt before he died (there are several versions online). His recorded testimony proves the CIA/MAFIA connection(without knowing who gave the order). Historically the 9/11 Commission seems to mirror the same CIA infiltration as the Warren Commission did.

More on topic the MSM deification of Mueller reminds me much of their similar glorification of J Edgar Hoover at that time.

[Feb 10, 2018] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video

Notable quotes:
"... CIA killed Kennedy. This pretty much removes all doubt. They are willing to do anything. ..."
"... It IS remarkable the stuff people believe when all logic goes against it. Like Oswald firing magic bullets from an old Italian Carcano...and jet fuel melting steel beams...and a building collapsing through the path of greatest resistance into its own footprint after NOT being hit by an airplane...and Kennedy being shot from behind, but his head snapping backwards from the impact...and Oswald picking the worst possible shooting location, but in front of Kennedy were two intersecting highways going in any direction...and terrorist passports floating gently down from the sky. ..."
"... What was Oswald's reason to kill JFK? And yeah, he picked the very building he worked at to commit the crime. He wasn't THAT stupid!... ..."
"... RFK and Nixon knew immediately the assassination of JFK was a CIA hit job because they had CHAIRED those hit squad operations themselves for Cuban Operations. They saw the CIA- Cuban hit squad fingerprints all over the kill. RFK had personally fired Wm Harvey, Dulles' chief of assassinations. However, RFK was silenced because he and Jack had been tag-teaming Marilyn Monroe. ..."
"... The reason JFK was killed was a) his openly stated determination to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces so they could no longer operate as a dangerous, renegade private army; and b) in the Spring of '63 JFK delivered his famous American U address calling for the end of the Cold War... ..."
"... Oswald was always a patsie... the WC documents how his rifle was inoperable... scope needed parts just to be be sited and take aim... even after parts installed the rifle attributed to Oswald remained highly inaccurate... Military sharpshooters couldn't even hit stationary targets reliably. ..."
Feb 10, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

DownWithYogaPants -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 11:47 AM Permalink

CIA killed Kennedy. This pretty much removes all doubt. They are willing to do anything.

Killtruck -> shimmy Feb 10, 2018 12:51 PM Permalink

"Oswald killed Kennedy. That's it."

It IS remarkable the stuff people believe when all logic goes against it. Like Oswald firing magic bullets from an old Italian Carcano...and jet fuel melting steel beams...and a building collapsing through the path of greatest resistance into its own footprint after NOT being hit by an airplane...and Kennedy being shot from behind, but his head snapping backwards from the impact...and Oswald picking the worst possible shooting location, but in front of Kennedy were two intersecting highways going in any direction...and terrorist passports floating gently down from the sky.

It sure is remarkable. #letsroll

possible band name OswaldandtheMagicBullets

Able Ape -> shimmy Feb 10, 2018 12:57 PM Permalink

What was Oswald's reason to kill JFK? And yeah, he picked the very building he worked at to commit the crime. He wasn't THAT stupid!...

Posa -> shimmy Feb 10, 2018 1:05 PM Permalink

RFK and Nixon knew immediately the assassination of JFK was a CIA hit job because they had CHAIRED those hit squad operations themselves for Cuban Operations. They saw the CIA- Cuban hit squad fingerprints all over the kill. RFK had personally fired Wm Harvey, Dulles' chief of assassinations. However, RFK was silenced because he and Jack had been tag-teaming Marilyn Monroe.

The reason JFK was killed was a) his openly stated determination to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces so they could no longer operate as a dangerous, renegade private army; and b) in the Spring of '63 JFK delivered his famous American U address calling for the end of the Cold War...

Oswald was always a patsie... the WC documents how his rifle was inoperable... scope needed parts just to be be sited and take aim... even after parts installed the rifle attributed to Oswald remained highly inaccurate... Military sharpshooters couldn't even hit stationary targets reliably.

[Feb 09, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis Syria Notes - 5 February 2018

Notable quotes:
"... Amazing how no on in the echelons of U.S. leadership ever questions why Assad always launches his WMD attacks as soon as his forces have Syria's Al Qaeda affiliate on the run. ..."
"... I am hearing that Russia has temporarily banned Turkish aircraft from flying in Syrian airspace, including Afrin. Plus there are reports that the Syrian Armed Forces are stationing AAA and SAM systems in the north. Erdogan may have outlived his usefulness to Putin. ..."
"... My SWAG is that Haley knows she is lying and does not care. Right now the Deep State wants its war on Syria as a prelude to a war on Iran, so Haley is for war as long as that will advance her career. ..."
"... If tomorrow the Deep State were to declare for the Khmer Rouge, she would scream for the death of Lon Nol Imperialists and Enemies of the People(R) with the most touching sincerity. ..."
"... 'Between May and June, 2016, Sheldon Adelson contributed $250,000 to Haley's 527 political organization, A Great Day, funds that she used to target four Republican state senate rivals in primaries. Adelson was the largest contributor to her group, which raised a total of $915,000.' ..."
"... I don't understand why we think Nikki Haley shouldn't be who she is, and should pursue policies other than what she does. IMO, she is no different than Samantha Power. They both are/were equally anti-Russia, anti-Iran, anti-Syria, and pro-Israel pro KSA, and have same position with regard to NK or China, so what is the difference, what has changed. ..."
"... It would have been either the "F* Europe" Tonia Nuland or the rapporteur social worker to Israel Wendy Sherman who is stilllearning all the dirty tricks from Madeleine. ..."
"... I agree with the good Colonel's assessment, except on one point. I don't think Mattis is being biased; to put it in less kinder terms, I think he's being a willing political hack. ..."
Feb 09, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

1. Nikki Haley is either completely gullible or is in thrall to some collection of Borgists at State. Someone remarked of a previous US Secretary of State that "if only he were still alive this would not happen." Unfortunately he was still alive and in office. Much the same could be said of Rex Tillerson. Haley is now tub thumping for US air attacks on Syria. This a reprise of several previous US assertions of Syrian Arab Government (SAG) use of chemical weapons including the East Ghouta and Khan Sheikhoun fiascos. After Khan Sheikhoun the SAG invited US and UN investigations of the air base but somehow this was not accepted. Now James Mattis is asserting that the SAG is manufacturing chemical munitions although the US has no evidence of this as yet. I believe this is called "confirmation bias?"

2. As shown above , the SAA is committed to elimination of the East Idlib pocket. The jihadis are without re-supply and will progressively be running out of the means of resistance. This should not take too long and is actually a good idea before proceeding further into Idlib Province to the west. I believe I expressed an opinion as to the wisdom of such a move.

3. The SAA has begun shelling the Turkish strong point (observation post) at Al-Eis. The Turks have been attempting tricky cleverness by claiming that they are occupying the hill at Al--Eis un accord with a Russian/Iranian/Turkish de-escalation igreement. In fact IMO they are seeking to position themselves so as to impede SAG liberation of Idlib Province. pl


Christian Chuba,

Amazing how no on in the echelons of U.S. leadership ever questions why Assad always launches his WMD attacks as soon as his forces have Syria's Al Qaeda affiliate on the run.
kooshy,
Colonel Lang, did you see this news on AMN, "Syrian Army allows massive YPG convoy to travel to Afrin from their lines' God only knows what is going on in Syria? it's a mess, was that to stop the Turks going to Al Eis.
james said in reply to kooshy... ,
and further to that - this also from AMN -

"BEIRUT, LEBANON (7:53 P.M.) – The Syrian Arab Army or allied paramilitary groups or both have reportedly started shelling the freshly established positions of Turkish forces in the southern countryside of Aleppo province according to both opposition and pro-government sources.

Opposition sources says that Syrian Army and allied Iranian-linked paramilitary groups have unleashed artillery fire onto recently established positions of the Turkish Army in the strategic Al-Eis area of southern Aleppo province."

confusedponderer , 06 February 2018 at 01:43 AM
Re Haley & in thrall of Borgists.

It seems she is attracted by John Bolton, her destructive, cunning and IMO rather malicious hard core neocon predecessor. She twittered this insight in July 2017:

"Great to see @AmbJohnBolton back @USUN. Thanks to his years of public service to our country, he continues to share great advice & wisdom."

His great advice and great wisdom? Ah yes ...

I had the pleasure that an indian senior (20+ years of service) UN guy back then did explain me what he did when US ambassador at the UN, and how and why it was cunning what he did, and how and why it was destructive and what he was after. It turned my stomach to get it explained to clearly.

So, unlike Haley, I always thought Bolton was a ruthless, destructive, nutty, if cunning, nasty man. I never seen his "wisdom". Rather I saw an arsonist who likes to play with fire.

For Haley he, with all his "wisdom", is an inspiration. He was also inspirational for Trump, but not inspirational enough.

Bolton didn't make it to Secretary of State ... because of his moustache. See? How very maverick-ish to make a difficult decision on so simple grounds.

Ah well, perhaps Trump is daily being too savaged by his hair thing on his head. I assume that having to face mirrors likely can be a terror.

Whatever about that moustache, and assuming that the story is correct - I for my part don't see the problem in what is over Bolton's mouth but that what comes out of it.

Donald Trump passed over a potential candidate for Secretary of State because of bushy moustache, according to insiders close to the incoming US President.

Several of Mr Trump's associates said they thought that John Bolton's brush-like moustache was one of the factors that handicapped the bombastic former United Nations ambassador in the sweepstakes for the role.

"Donald was not going to like that moustache," said one, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "I can't think of anyone that's really close to Donald that has a beard that he likes."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-secretary-of-state-reject-john-bolton-moustache-transition-president-elect-cabinet-a7489576.html

JW said in reply to kooshy... , 06 February 2018 at 06:36 AM
Whats going on ? Iran wants influence and bases as far as the sea, to enable it to convince the Israelis to emigrate en masse. The West want to stop them now, everyone except Hezbollah will want to stop them when the last FSA / AQ /etc have almost died off, and Erdogan want to continue mugging people as a form of foreign policy.

Run those actions simultaneously and you have the current outcome.

A. Pols , 06 February 2018 at 08:14 AM
"1. Nikki Haley is either completely gullible or is in thrall to some collection of Borgists at State."

Both

JPB , 06 February 2018 at 10:18 AM
I am hearing that Russia has temporarily banned Turkish aircraft from flying in Syrian airspace, including Afrin. Plus there are reports that the Syrian Armed Forces are stationing AAA and SAM systems in the north. Erdogan may have outlived his usefulness to Putin.
JPB said in reply to Stonevendor ... , 06 February 2018 at 10:43 AM
Stonevendor -

A small number of US and troops from other coalition countries have been in the Manbij area since August 2016 when it was liberated from the headchoppers. More were sent in 2017 when TFSA from the Euphrates Shield enclave started threatening Manbij. No secret there, it has been previously announced publicly.

Barbara Ann -> ToivoS... , 06 February 2018 at 10:46 AM
I have happily discovered an analyst who has consistently been right on many aspects of the way the Syrian conflict has played out, despite its manifold complexities. If you find one that claims to be able to "see" ahead, I'd suggest he/she may better be described as a clairvoyant.

As to things being "fixed" - I guess an expectation that such a state is attainable, or indeed desirable - betrays something of one's ontological preferences. In any case, Syria appears to me to be an object lesson in the futility of such expectations.

Balint Somkuti, PhD , 06 February 2018 at 11:02 AM
Even though I have my own reservations about US benevolence about Syria, what happens if primus enter pares goes running amok?
Sid Finster , 06 February 2018 at 12:00 PM
My SWAG is that Haley knows she is lying and does not care. Right now the Deep State wants its war on Syria as a prelude to a war on Iran, so Haley is for war as long as that will advance her career.

If tomorrow the Deep State were to declare for the Khmer Rouge, she would scream for the death of Lon Nol Imperialists and Enemies of the People(R) with the most touching sincerity.

In fact, most of our elected and unelected career politicians exhibit similar levels of mendacity, on a level that is indistinguishable from sociopathy. Just that in Haley it's more shameless and obvious. Maybe she is not as good an actress as some, I don't know.

John_Frank , 06 February 2018 at 01:37 PM
With respect to the allegations surrounding the usage of chemical weapons, yesterday the UN Security Council had an open meeting to discuss the situation in Syria.

The meeting was held to consider a letter submitted by the Secretary General to the Council on February 1 concerning the latest report from the Director General of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

http://undocs.org/S/2018/84

At the beginning of the meeting Izumi Nakamitsu, High Representative for Disarmament Affairs presented her briefing.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/unoda-web/documents/Remarks+of+the+High+Representative+to+Security+Council+on+Syria+-+5+Feb+2018.pdf

In turn, after the meeting the UN press office published the following news release

Proof of chemical weapons use in Syria should be met with 'meaningful response,' UN disarmament chief http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=58533#.WnnRx65Kupo

During the meeting Ambassador Haley spoke. Her remarks have been posted on the US mission to the UN website:

Ambassador Haley Delivers Remarks at a UN Security Council Meeting on Chemical Weapons Use in Syria https://usun.state.gov/highlights/8286

The UN has posted a video of the entire meeting:

The Situation in the Middle East (Syria) - Security Council, 8174th meeting
http://webtv.un.org/watch/the-situation-in-the-middle-east-syria-security-council-8174th-meeting/5726590308001/

The member states were seeking to have the Security Council President issue a statement condemning the recent reports of the usage of chemical weapons in Syria, but they were unable to achieve the needed consensus.

Russia submitted a resolution that would replace the OPCW-United Nations Joint Investigative Mechanism which had been shut down. However the proposal is not acceptable to the United States in its current form for the reasons stated.

Follows is a summary of the meeting as prepared by the UN secretariat:

Amid New Reports of Chemical Weapons Use in Syria, United Nations Top Disarmament Official Says International Community Obliged to Enact Meaningful Response
http://www.un.org/press/en/2018/sc13196.doc.htm

Although not posted yet, ultimately people will be able to read the entire meeting record at https://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/PV.8174

Ambassador Haley may be pushing for US military action in response to the most recent claims of chemical weapons usage in other forums, but she did not call for such action during the UN Security Council meeting.

As to Defense Secretary Mattis, he spoke to the Press on February 2 at which time he issued a warning and expressed concerns about the usage of Sarin gas.

Media Availability by Secretary Mattis at the Pentagon
https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/1431844/media-availability-by-secretary-mattis-at-the-pentagon/

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the chemical weapons that were -- the State Department was talking about just a little bit yesterday, that mentioned chlorine gas? Is this something you're seeing that's been weaponized or – just give us a sense.

SEC. MATTIS: It has.

Q: It has. Okay.

SEC. MATTIS: It has. We are more -- even more concerned about the possibility of sarin use, the likelihood of sarin use, and we're looking for the evidence. And so that's about all the more I can say about it right now, but we are on the record, and you all have seen how we reacted to that, so they'd be ill-advised to go back to violating the chemical convention.

Then later on during the same press briefing:

"Q: Can I ask a quick follow up, just a clarification on what you'd said earlier about Syria and sarin gas?

SEC. MATTIS: Yeah.

Q: Just make sure I heard you correctly, you're saying you think it's likely they have used it and you're looking for the evidence? Is that what you said?

SEC. MATTIS: That's -- we think that they did not carry out what they said they would do back when -- in the previous administration, when they were caught using it. Obviously they didn't, cause they used it again during our administration.

And that gives us a lot of reason to suspect them. And now we have other reports from the battlefield from people who claim it's been used.

We do not have evidence of it. But we're not refuting them; we're looking for evidence of it. Since clearly we are using -- we are dealing with the Assad regime that has used denial and deceit to hide their outlaw actions, okay?

Q: So the likelihood was not what your -- you're not characterizing it as a likelihood? I thought I used -- you used that word; I guess I misunderstood you.

SEC. MATTIS: Well, there's certainly groups that say they've used it. And so they think there's a likelihood, so we're looking for the evidence.

Q: Is there evidence of chlorine gas weapons used -- evidence of chlorine gas weapons?

SEC. MATTIS: I think that's, yes --

Q: No, I know, I heard you.

SEC. MATTIS: I think it's been used repeatedly. And that's, as you know, a somewhat separate category, which is why I broke out the sarin as another -- yeah.

Q: So there's credible evidence out there that both sarin and chlorine --

SEC. MATTIS: No, I have not got the evidence, not specifically. I don't have the evidence.

What I'm saying is that other -- that groups on the ground, NGOs, fighters on the ground have said that sarin has been used. So we are looking for evidence. I don't have evidence, credible or uncredible."

In that regard three reports from Reuters:

January 30 Exclusive: Tests link Syrian government stockpile to largest sarin attack - sources
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-chemicalweapons-exclusiv/exclusive-tests-link-syrian-government-stockpile-to-largest-sarin-attack-sources-idUSKBN1FJ0MG

"The Syrian government's chemical weapons stockpile has been linked for the first time by laboratory tests to the largest sarin nerve agent attack of the civil war, diplomats and scientists told Reuters, supporting Western claims that government forces under President Bashar al-Assad were behind the atrocity."

February 1 - U.S. says Syria may be developing new types of chemical weapons https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-mideast-crisis-syria-usa/u-s-says-syria-may-be-developing-new-types-of-chemical-weapons-idUSKBN1FL65L

"The Syrian government may be developing new types of chemical weapons, and U.S. President Donald Trump is prepared to consider further military action if necessary to deter chemical attacks, senior U.S. officials said on Thursday."

As to the Friday media briefing by Secretary Mattis on February 2, Reuters reported:

U.S.' Mattis says concerned about Syria's potential use of sarin gas
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-usa/u-s-mattis-says-concerned-about-syrias-potential-use-of-sarin-gas-idUSKBN1FM1VJ

On Monday, February 5, the Bild, a German outlet published a report alleging that Iran was supplying Syria with missiles to deliver chemical weapons and that some of the materials in the weapons came from Germany. The report analyses missiles with gas canisters allegedly used in a chemical weapons attack in Douma, Damascus on January 22, 2018.

Deutsche Bauteile in Assads Giftgas-Raketen
https://www.bild.de/politik/ausland/headlines/gas-deutsche-teile-54697308.bild.html

The Bild article relies on work carried out by an entity known as Syrians for Truth and Justice and the online investigative journalist website Bellingcat operated by Eliot Higgins.

Also read the following reports posted on the Bellingcat website:

January 23 - Despite Trump's Threats, Chemical Attacks Continue in Syria
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2018/01/23/despite-trumps-threats-chemical-attacks-continue-syria/

February 1 - For the Third Time This Year, Chlorine is Used as a Chemical Weapon in Douma, Damascus https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2018/02/01/third-time-year-chlorine-used-chemical-weapon-douma-damascus/

February 5 - Images from the January 22nd 2018 Chlorine Attack in Douma, Damascus
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2018/02/05/images-january-22nd-2018-chlorine-attack-douma-damascus/

February 5 - More Details of the January 22nd 2018 Chlorine Attack in Douma, Damascus https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2018/02/05/details-january-22nd-2018-chlorine-attack-douma-damascus/

Also read the following reports posted by Syrians for Truth and Justice:

August 21, 2017 - Non-Stop Using Chlorine Gas as a Weapon in Syrian Conflict https://stj-sy.com/en/view/185

December 2, 2017 - New Attack by Toxic Gases on a Battlefront in Harasta- Damascus Countryside "Testimonies Confirm Using "Organophosphorus Compounds" https://www.stj-sy.com/en/view/344

January 21, 2018 - Exposure of Six Civilians to Poisonous Substances in Eastern Ghouta- Damascus Countryside https://www.stj-sy.com/en/view/391

February 5, 2018 - Syrian Forces Use Chemical Weapons in Duma for a Second Time in a Month. Joint Report: Bellingcat & Syrians for Truth and Justice https://www.stj-sy.com/en/view/413

(Do not shoot the messenger. As to the Bild report, the summary relies on Google translate, the original article being in German. Since the Bild report relies on work done by Bellingcat and Syrians For Truth and Justice, I have linked to various reports providing details of alleged chemical weapons attacks in Syria since July, 2017 produced by these entities for your reference.)

catherine , 06 February 2018 at 02:43 PM

Re: Nikki Haley

This is all you need to know about Haley and why Trump (or rather Adelson) appointed her to the UN.

'Between May and June, 2016, Sheldon Adelson contributed $250,000 to Haley's 527 political organization, A Great Day, funds that she used to target four Republican state senate rivals in primaries. Adelson was the largest contributor to her group, which raised a total of $915,000.'

(Not coincidentally, however, Sheldon Adelson was the GOP's and Trump's single biggest donor)

"Perhaps Adelson gained an unusual interest in South Carolina's state senate, but it seems more likely the investment was a show of support for Haley's hawkish pro-Israel positions. Adelson, who is also the largest donor to the extreme right-wing Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), has long pushed stridently anti-Iran positions, suggesting in late 2013 that Washington detonate a nuclear weapon in Iran's territory unless Tehran complied with demands that it completely abandon its nuclear program.
And, as Weiss wrote, Haley had come through for Adelson already in 2015, when she signed without any reservation the first law against boycotts of Israel -- about the same time as Adelson convened an anti-BDS summit in Las Vegas.''
https://lobelog.com/nikki-haley-neocon-heartthrob/

DianaLC , 06 February 2018 at 03:00 PM
Thank you. I hear "chemical attack" now and know I need to get away from the Tee Vee and come here instead.
The Beaver , 06 February 2018 at 03:23 PM
Colonel,
Today at House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing :
Former Ambassador Ford:
-If purpose to deter Iran from attacking Israel, perhaps we should have troops in Israel instead of eastern Syria.
-US forces in eastern Syria. Iranians in western Syria. Our forces about 350 miles from Iranians. Not likely Iranians going to leave Syria. Mistake to think Russians will push them out. Hi-level consultations btw us, Israel Jordan to develop menu of options about how to deter.
-when I was US ambassador in Syria in 2007, Iranians were there. Iranians long been there. They don't need a road/land bridge. They fly things into Damascus airport.

Thought he has learnt his lessons, but I must be hoping for too much !

Richardstevenhack , 06 February 2018 at 04:25 PM
Two points:

That the reports of SAA shelling of the Turks comes from "opposition resources" needs no caveat.

That there is also a report claiming that the shelling of the Turks comes from Iranian militia also needs no caveat. Clearly someone wants to blame both the SAA and Iran, which dovetails neatly with the US/Israel desire to "roll back Iran" out of Syria as well as get a full-scale US/NATO/Israel war on Syria started, which has been the goal from Day One of the Syria crisis.

The new rise of "chemical WMD" charges against Syria clearly also feed into the now-confirmed continued desire of the US/Israel for a full-scale air campaign against Syria.

As I believe I've mentioned before, it ain't over until it's over. The US clearly has not given up a desire to go to war with Syria as a precursor to Israel and the US taking out Hizballah (to the degree that is possible) which is also a precursor to starting a war with Iran.

Also, read a report the other day that John Bolton is still considered a candidate for Secretary of State should Tillerson be forced out at some point, which I still think is quite likely. Such an appointment would signal the absolute end of any notion of Trump being interested in rapprochement with Russia and would also guarantee war with Iran.

Because John Bolton is a raving neocon lunatic - which is what the moustache tells you.

kooshy said in reply to catherine... , 06 February 2018 at 05:36 PM
I don't understand why we think Nikki Haley shouldn't be who she is, and should pursue policies other than what she does. IMO, she is no different than Samantha Power. They both are/were equally anti-Russia, anti-Iran, anti-Syria, and pro-Israel pro KSA, and have same position with regard to NK or China, so what is the difference, what has changed.

IMO, they are not selected to pursue US foreign policy, they are only there as Israel'gate keepers, they are just there to make sure nothing against the interests of Israel passes, just like, what just happened in UNSC on Jerusalem. IMO, US for her own policies, doesn't give a damn about UN or UNSC, she does what she wants, and when she wants, and are not shy saying it like it is.

She is there as the Israel' veto power over the rest of the word, in case something not kosher comes up to UNSC. IMO, US' UN ambassadors only job is to protect Israel at UN, they are a retribution from the elected president of US (of either political party0 to Israel lobby for helping them getting elected. If Nikki is a gift for Adelson' money, whoever Hillary would have appointed to UN, would have been a gift to Haim Saban or another billionaire Israeli first SOB. This country' sovereignty has been successfully hijacked in almost 50 years.

Nevertheless, I believe WE the People are the sole responsible party for loss of control, as well as what Nikki does and who she does it for.

John_Frank , 06 February 2018 at 07:00 PM
Earlier today, jihadists backed by Turkey in the Afrin conflict claimed the YPG had used chemical weapons.

https://t.co/vDos2chHTr

In response to these claims, the YPG has issued a statement denying the claim, saying the Turkish military fired artillery shells containing a chemical weapon, which harmed their forces, so they moved to the high ground, while the jihadists remained in the low lying areas, so suffering the consequences.

http://bit.ly/2GQkIgl

Have the Turkish military and the Turkish backed jihadists used chemical weapons in the past in Syria?

Three tweets by @EndiZentarmi

https://twitter.com/EndiZentarmi/status/961005969336688640

Also

https://twitter.com/EndiZentarmi/status/961012542645600256

As well as

https://twitter.com/EndiZentarmi/status/850651337733943297

Along with one tweet by @AzadiRojava:

https://twitter.com/AzadiRojava/status/960962329448976384

In addition, as to the current claim:

https://twitter.com/4rj1n/status/960962657020010497

(The writer is unable to verify the competing claims and is simply posting them for information purposes.)

james said in reply to John_Frank ... , 06 February 2018 at 07:40 PM
john - with respect.. do you understand what a false flag operation is and how often they have been used in the war on syria?
JamesT -> JW... , 06 February 2018 at 11:43 PM
JW

You wrote "everyone except Hezbollah will want to stop [Iran from spreading its influence and bases] ...".

You sir, are wrong. There are a lot of people in the world, and certainly in the Arab world (including Sunnis) who see Iran's influence as a welcome counterweight to the US/UK/Israel. They remember what happened in 1953 and don't buy into what CNN is pushing. I say this based on face to face discussions I have had with Arabs.

John_Frank -> james... , 07 February 2018 at 12:21 PM
Yes and earlier today the OPCW issued the following statement:

OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in Syria Continues Investigations into Allegations of Chemical Weapons Use https://www.opcw.org/news/article/opcw-fact-finding-mission-in-syria-continues-investigations-into-allegations-of-chemical-weapons-use/

The portion relevant for our purposes reads:

"THE HAGUE, Netherlands – 7 February 2018 – Recent allegations about the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Aran Republic continue to be of grave concern to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

The OPCW Fact-Finding Mission (FFM), whose mandate is "to establish facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic", is investigating all credible allegations and provides regular reports for consideration by States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). A rigorous methodology is employed for conducting an investigation of alleged use of chemical weapons. The FFM report will take into account corroboration between interviewee testimonies; open-source research; medical reports and other relevant documentation as well as the characteristics of any samples obtained by the FFM. The FFM works closely with States Parties including the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic.

The FFM's mandate is to determine whether chemical weapons or toxic chemicals as weapons have been used in Syria; it does not include identifying who is responsible for alleged attacks.

OPCW Director General, Ambassador Ahmet Üzümcü reiterated: "Any use of chemical weapons is a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the hard won international norm prohibiting these weapons. Those responsible for their use must be held accountable. These abhorrent weapons have no place in the world today."

In turn, in my view, the UN Security Council needs to reach an understanding on the re-establishment of a OPCW-United Nations Joint Investigative Mechanism so that those responsible for the use of chemical weapons are brought to account.

The Beaver said in reply to kooshy... , 07 February 2018 at 01:35 PM
whoever Hillary would have appointed to UN, would have been a gift to Haim Saban or another billionaire Israeli first SOB.

It would have been either the "F* Europe" Tonia Nuland or the rapporteur social worker to Israel Wendy Sherman who is stilllearning all the dirty tricks from Madeleine.

james said in reply to John_Frank ... , 07 February 2018 at 01:36 PM
sure... but tell me john, how does the opcw offer any credibility to itself, if it is relying on eyewitnesses in the jihadi held area of Khan Shaykhun???
it is fine for the same countries that have been pushing for regime change in syria to say ''they believe''' syria is responsible, but that is not proof and it really sullies there reputation and the opcw's further as i see it.. al nusra were in control of the area at the time... these are the friendly headchopper crew that turkey seems to have in their backpocket at present and who they are using to further there exercise in afrin.. now, maybe al nusra has had a name change again, so forgive me if i don't have the up to date name for them... for all i know, they are now called the 'syrian democratic forces' or turkish free syrian army - 2 other names that sound straight out of a hollywood script.. if i sound cynical - you are reading me correctly.. the western gov'ts - usa, uk, or even israel, saudi arabia, turkey and france need to stop using international organizations for there own political ends and start being honest brokers in finding peace, as opposed to dividing up sovereign countries like syria.. thanks..
james said in reply to John_Frank ... , 07 February 2018 at 02:00 PM
john - for another example of the blame game that the usa has gotten so in the habit of doing with regard to these chemical weapon attacks - i call them false flags, as that is just what they are to me, take a look at the stupidity coming via the daily press briefing from yesterday... all bluster and bullshit with nothing to substantiate any of it.. is this all the usa is capable of nowadays? see down towards the bottom of the link for the relevant comments on this topic..
https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2018/02/278014.htm
Greco said in reply to JW... , 07 February 2018 at 02:00 PM
JW, that sounds about right.

I agree with the good Colonel's assessment, except on one point. I don't think Mattis is being biased; to put it in less kinder terms, I think he's being a willing political hack.

[Feb 02, 2018] Lying, Spying and Hiding by Andrew Napolitano

Notable quotes:
"... The abuse summarized in the Republican memo apparently spans the last year of the Obama administration and the first year of the Trump administration. If it comes through as advertised, it will show the deep state using the government's powers for petty or political or ideological reasons. ..."
"... The use of raw intelligence data by the NSA or the FBI for political purposes or to manipulate those in government is as serious a threat to popular government -- to personal liberty in a free society -- as has ever occurred in America since Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which punished speech critical of the government. ..."
"... No politician gives a hoot about what the people who vote for them think. I am sure, even if any house member or a senator knew of this memo, the bill would still have passed. ..."
"... It appears that the judge doesn't understand how the US government is run these days. ..."
"... Among other Establishment officials, "Robert Mueller, the no-nonsense special counsel investigating whether any Americans aided the Russian government in its now well-known interference in the 2016 American presidential election" (Andrew Napolitano, 12/7/17) helped conduct unlawful, mass surveillance in his FBI gig, and thus violated his "oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution." Right, "Judge"? ..."
"... Senator Wyden knew when Mr. Clapper was lying about governmental spying on every American in a public hearing years ago, Mr. Snowden pulled back the curtain for all to see, and Congress has since flopped. Right, "Judge"? ..."
Feb 01, 2018 | www.unz.com

I have argued for a few weeks now that House Intelligence Committee members have committed misconduct in office by concealing evidence of spying abuses by the National Security Agency and the FBI. They did this by sitting on a four-page memo that summarizes the abuse of raw intelligence data while Congress was debating a massive expansion of FISA.

FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which was written to enable the federal government to spy on foreign agents here and abroad. Using absurd and paranoid logic, the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which only hears the government's lawyers, has morphed "foreign intelligence surveillance" into undifferentiated bulk surveillance of all Americans.

Undifferentiated bulk surveillance is the governmental acquisition of fiber-optic data stored and transmitted by nearly everyone in America. This includes all telephone conversations, text messages and emails, as well as all medical, legal and financial records.

Ignorant of the hot potato on which the House Intelligence Committee had been sitting, Congress recently passed and President Donald Trump signed a vast expansion of spying authorities -- an expansion that authorizes legislatively the domestic spying that judges were authorizing on everyone in the U.S. without individual suspicion of wrongdoing or probable cause of crime; an expansion that passed in the Senate with no votes to spare; an expansion that evades and avoids the Fourth Amendment; an expansion that the president signed into law the day before we all learned of the House Intelligence Committee memo.

The FISA expansion would never have passed the Senate had the House Intelligence Committee memo and the data on which it is based come to light seven days sooner than it did. Why should 22 members of a House committee keep their 500-plus congressional colleagues in the dark about domestic spying abuses while those colleagues were debating the very subject matter of domestic spying and voting to expand the power of those who have abused it?

The answer to this lies in the nature of the intelligence community today and the influence it has on elected officials in the government. By the judicious, personalized and secret revelation of data, both good and bad -- here is what we know about your enemies, and here is what we know about you -- the NSA shows its might to the legislators who supposedly regulate it. In reality, the NSA regulates them.

This is but one facet of the deep state -- the unseen parts of the government that are not authorized by the Constitution and that never change, no matter which party controls the legislative or executive branch. This time, they almost blew it. If just one conscientious senator had changed her or his vote on the FISA expansion -- had that senator known of the NSA and FBI abuses of FISA concealed by the House Intelligence Committee -- the expansion would have failed.

Nevertheless, the evidence on which the committee members sat is essentially a Republican-written summary of raw intelligence data. Earlier this week, the Democrats on the committee authored their version -- based, they say, on the same raw intelligence data as was used in writing the Republican version. But the House Intelligence Committee, made up of 13 Republicans and nine Democrats, voted to release only the Republican-written memo.

Late last week, when it became apparent that the Republican memo would soon be released, the Department of Justice publicly contradicted President Trump by advising the leadership of the House Intelligence Committee in very strong terms that the memo should not be released to the public.

It soon became apparent that, notwithstanding the DOJ admonition, no one in the DOJ had actually seen the memo. So FBI Director Chris Wray made a secret, hurried trip to the House Intelligence Committee's vault last Sunday afternoon to view the memo. When asked by the folks who showed it to him whether it contains secret or top-secret material, he couldn't or wouldn't say. But he apparently saw in the memo the name of the No. 2 person at the FBI, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, as one of the abusers of spying authority. That triggered McCabe's summary departure from the FBI the next day, after a career of 30 years.

The abuse summarized in the Republican memo apparently spans the last year of the Obama administration and the first year of the Trump administration. If it comes through as advertised, it will show the deep state using the government's powers for petty or political or ideological reasons.

The use of raw intelligence data by the NSA or the FBI for political purposes or to manipulate those in government is as serious a threat to popular government -- to personal liberty in a free society -- as has ever occurred in America since Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which punished speech critical of the government.

The government works for us; we should not tolerate its treating us as children. When raw intelligence data is capable of differing interpretations and is relevant to a public dispute -- about, for example, whether the NSA and the FBI are trustworthy, whether FISA should even exist, whether spying on everyone all the time keeps us safe and whether the Constitution even permits this -- the raw data should be released to the American public.

Where is the personal courage on the House Intelligence Committee? Where is the patriotism? Where is the fidelity to the Constitution? The government exists by our consent. It derives its powers from us. We have a right to know what it has done in our names, who broke our trust, who knew about it, who looked the other way and why and by whom all this was intentionally hidden until after Congress voted to expand FISA.

Everyone in government takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. How many take it meaningfully and seriously?

Copyright 2018 Andrew P. Napolitano. Distributed by Creators.com.


MEexpert , February 1, 2018 at 8:02 am GMT

Where is the personal courage on the House Intelligence Committee? Where is the patriotism? Where is the fidelity to the Constitution? The government exists by our consent. It derives its powers from us. We have a right to know what it has done in our names, who broke our trust, who knew about it, who looked the other way and why and by whom all this was intentionally hidden until after Congress voted to expand FISA.

The Judge is wrong. The government exists by Israel's/AIPAC's consent. The fidelity is to the state of Israel. No politician gives a hoot about what the people who vote for them think. I am sure, even if any house member or a senator knew of this memo, the bill would still have passed.

Everyone in government takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution ( State of Israel ). How many take it meaningfully and seriously?

The additions and bolds are mine. It appears that the judge doesn't understand how the US government is run these days. The US government is for Israel, of Israel, and by Israel . Every dishonorable house member and every dishonorable senator knows that. Pure and simple.

Let us see how the Judge's own FOX channel reports on this story.

anonymous Disclaimer , February 1, 2018 at 10:16 am GMT
He'll soon get back to his Russophobia, but Mr. Napolitano's chore today is to create cover for as much Establishment backside as possible by blaming the recent, further statutory enshrinement of our police state on the members of a single committee within the House of Representatives. (He leaves himself room to point his finger at unnamed others who knew about what has now been summarized in a memorandum supposedly soon to be released.) But he fails to address the flaws in this narrative.

1. Among other Establishment officials, "Robert Mueller, the no-nonsense special counsel investigating whether any Americans aided the Russian government in its now well-known interference in the 2016 American presidential election" (Andrew Napolitano, 12/7/17) helped conduct unlawful, mass surveillance in his FBI gig, and thus violated his "oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution." Right, "Judge"?

2. This article, foreshadowed in his published here last week, pounds on the farcical notion that only members of a single House committee have known, and have known only recently, about "[t]he abuse summarized in the Republican memo," that if "just one conscientious senator had changed her or his vote on the FISA expansion -- had that senator known of the NSA and FBI abuses of FISA concealed by the House Intelligence Committee -- the expansion would have failed." But Senator Wyden knew when Mr. Clapper was lying about governmental spying on every American in a public hearing years ago, Mr. Snowden pulled back the curtain for all to see, and Congress has since flopped. Right, "Judge"?

3. Building on his article of last week, Mr. Napolitano wants his readers to think that, daggum it, there's nothing to be done about this now, as though the tablets have been carved and sent back up the mountain for several years. But "one conscientious senator" could take the floor today to introduce a bill to repeal any of these previous or new FISA provisions. Right, "Judge"?

4. None of this law matters because all these people are above it. Right, "Judge"?

Michelle , February 2, 2018 at 7:29 pm GMT
I used to think that the 2 Parties just traded off every few elections and that the President, being only a figure head, was predetermined. Julian Assange, before the election, stated, very firmly, that the powers that be would never let Trump become President. I believed him. I still can't figure out how Trump slipped in under the radar.

[Feb 01, 2018] FISA Frivolity: FBI Warns Memo Could Undermine Faith In Massive, Unaccountable Secret Agencies

Notable quotes:
"... Stressing that such an action would be highly reckless, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that releasing the "Nunes Memo" could potentially undermine faith in the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States. ..."
"... "Making this memo public will almost certainly impede our ability to conduct clandestine activities operating outside any legal or judicial system on an international scale," said Wray, noting that it was essential that mutual trust exist between the American people and the vast, mysterious cabal given free rein to use any tactics necessary to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens or subvert religious and political groups. ..."
"... If we take away the people's faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that's left is an extensive network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally personal, reasons. ..."
Feb 01, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

With the moment of truth - over-hyped dud or Democratic-establishment-crushing dream - looming in less than 24 hours, the headlines, finger-pointing, pettiness, and back-stabbing has reached 11 on the Spinal Tap amplifier of debacle... to the point where some humor in this FISA farce may help everyone get through the weekend.

The following is the latest to cross the wires...

Stressing that such an action would be highly reckless, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that releasing the "Nunes Memo" could potentially undermine faith in the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States.

"Making this memo public will almost certainly impede our ability to conduct clandestine activities operating outside any legal or judicial system on an international scale," said Wray, noting that it was essential that mutual trust exist between the American people and the vast, mysterious cabal given free rein to use any tactics necessary to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens or subvert religious and political groups.

"If we take away the people's faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that's left is an extensive network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally personal, reasons."

At press time, Wray confirmed the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies were unaware of any wrongdoing for violating constitutional rights.

...Yes, The Onion.

[Jan 30, 2018] One of the mysteries of the Snowden affair was why none (almost none) of the 40,000 employees of the disgusting 4th Amendment-trampling NSA blew the whistle on what they likely would have known was massive illegal spying.

Jan 30, 2018 | off-guardian.org

George Cornell says January 24, 2018

One of the mysteries of the Snowden affair was why none (almost none) of the 40,000 employees of the disgusting 4th Amendment-trampling NSA blew the whistle on what they likely would have known was massive illegal spying. It seems logical to assume they used their own technology to screen applicants and I have it third hand that they screened each applicant or nomination, for any left wing activity, any boat-rocking history, any standing up to authority, emerging with a Stepford culture of fartcatching milquetoasts, who meekly and submissively did what they were told and nothing else.

I now ask the same question of the disgraceful Guardian, which is nearly unrecognizably distant from the aims of the family trust establishing it in the wake of Peterloo. Why have none of their columnist railed publicly against the perverse mutilation of a grand old establishment gad fly and formerly a beacon of integrity?

To read the Fraudian now, you have to discount nearly everything they say and decipher the tiresome code for what they really think. Unless you can be sustained by mindless gender-counting and lifestyle advice preceded by the things you 'must' do , delivered by yapping non-experts, bulwarked by doctrinaire moderatrices.

This was a paper to which a whistleblower, not long ago might choose to go. They would be mad to go there now after the Fraudian threw Snowden under the bus in their uninhibited headlong fanatical drum eating for the dreaded Hillary. The pant-suited one wants him home "to face the music". Nice. There were many lessons from Hillary's defeat and they have learned none of them.

We live in an era where lying to Congress can be done with impunity cf. Alexander, Clapper, Brennan et al. There was no consequence for them There could be a consequence for the Fraudian.

[Jan 28, 2018] The not-so-secret life of Mathilde Krim

Notable quotes:
"... As president, Kennedy maintained some distance from the Israeli government. He supported the right of return of Palestinian refugees and vigorously opposed Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons. The CIA had obtained evidence of the Israeli nuclear project in the desert at Dimona– claimed to be a fabric factory, Brod says– and in the year before he was assassinated, Kennedy had pushed Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his successor, Levi Eshkol, to account for the activities. ..."
"... Johnson ultimately suppressed intelligence reports that Israel was becoming a nuclear power. "By 1968, the President had no intention of doing anything to stop the Israeli bomb," Hersh writes. ..."
Jan 28, 2018 | mondoweiss.net

Brod believes that Mathilde Krim was strategic in forming the friendship.

From the day they first met which was at the party for JFK at the Krim residence in the city– from that day forward she speaks proudly of having nurtured a relationship with Johnson because Johnson was not part of the JFK inner circle. I don't think it was an accident that she approached Johnson and developed this ongoing relationship. I have a feeling that from her entry into the United States if not before there was a plan of how she could best serve Israel and she began serving them when she was living in Switzerland in her first marriage and her work with the Stern gang. She had a strong stomach to involve herself with that kind of terror, and she certainly lived up to it here.

The transition from Kennedy to Johnson in 1963 was an important moment in the history of the special relationship.

Kennedy had bridled at the pro-Israel influence. In 1960, his campaign was in trouble when a group of Jewish leaders gave him $500,000 at the Pierre Hotel in New York, and then "interrogated Kennedy stringently on matters affecting Jews and Israel," (as Abba Eban later related ). "As an American citizen [Kennedy] was outraged" by the effort to take "control" of JFK's Middle East policy, his friend the newspaperman Charles Bartlett told Seymour Hersh.

As president, Kennedy maintained some distance from the Israeli government. He supported the right of return of Palestinian refugees and vigorously opposed Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons. The CIA had obtained evidence of the Israeli nuclear project in the desert at Dimona– claimed to be a fabric factory, Brod says– and in the year before he was assassinated, Kennedy had pushed Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his successor, Levi Eshkol, to account for the activities.

His successor had fewer scruples about backing Israel. Johnson's political career was interwoven with Jews, as his wife later reflected, and he saw that nuclear nonproliferation "made for bad politics," as Hersh says in The Samson Option, because it alienated the Jewish community. Johnson ultimately suppressed intelligence reports that Israel was becoming a nuclear power. "By 1968, the President had no intention of doing anything to stop the Israeli bomb," Hersh writes.

Mathilde Krim was undoubtedly a factor in that policymaking. Throughout his presidency, the Krims were among Johnson's very closest friends. They had a room in the White House and built a house on Lake Lyndon B. Johnson in the Texas hill country so as to be near his ranch in Stonewall when he was on vacation there. Johnson stayed at their house in New York.

It has been suggested that Mathilde Krim was LBJ's lover. "It was a barely hidden secret in leading government circles in Israel and the United States at the time that Mrs. Krim was extremely close to Lyndon Johnson," Helena Cobban wrote in her blogpost on Krim last week. While Brod points out that Johnson was a "competitive womanizer," according to his aide Bill Moyers, and certainly the president had social opportunities alone with Mathilde Krim.

... ... ...

They are missing a fascinating story about the ability of a charismatic intelligent zealot to gain the audience of the most powerful man in the world as history was unfolding.

"One of the things that made Israel's miracle come true was Israel's ability to use people like Abe Fortas and Arthur Goldberg," Brod says. "They had a huge Rolodex of influential people, whether mass media or fundraisers, that they could contact and effectively use depending on the situation, and there was no one more needed during the Six Day War than Mathilde Krim."

When Abba Eban told a disapproving Johnson in Texas that Israel could no longer hold off its attack, it was Johnson and Mathilde who flew back to the White House, leaving Lady Bird behind at the ranch. It was Johnson who awakened Krim in her White House bedroom to tell her the news of the war beginning. It was Mathilde Krim who who even as she was forced to get back to work in New York left Johnson a pro-Israel speech to quiet a pending Jewish demonstration.

As for Johnson's willingness to turn a blind eye to the Israeli nuclear program, or its attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, we can only guess at Mathilde Krim's advice to him. As she later advised others, anyone can have an influence over policy– you just have to throw yourself into it.

"Lyndon Johnson was so willing to be Mathilde Krim's hero that he would do almost anything he could get away with," Brod concludes. "And that was quite a lot."

[Jan 24, 2018] The FBI Hand Behind Russia-gate by Ray McGovern

Highly recommended!
This is really a "soft coup", a color revolution against Trump
Notable quotes:
"... It would have been unfortunate enough for Strzok and Page to have their adolescent-sounding texts merely exposed, revealing the reckless abandon of star-crossed lovers hiding (they thought) secrets from cuckolded spouses, office colleagues, and the rest of us. However, for the never-Trump plotters in the FBI, the official release of just a fraction (375) of almost 10,000 messages does incalculably more damage than that. ..."
"... We suddenly have documentary proof that key elements of the U.S. intelligence community were trying to short-circuit the U.S. democratic process. And that puts in a new and dark context the year-long promotion of Russia-gate. It now appears that it was not the Russians trying to rig the outcome of the U.S. election, but leading officials of the U.S. intelligence community, shadowy characters sometimes called the Deep State. ..."
"... More of the Strzok-Page texting dialogue is expected to be released. And the Department of Justice Inspector General reportedly has additional damaging texts from others on the team that Special Counsel Robert Mueller selected to help him investigate Russia-gate. ..."
"... But the main casualty is the FBI's 18-month campaign to sabotage candidate-and-now-President Donald Trump by using the Obama administration's Russia-gate intelligence "assessment," electronic surveillance of dubious legality, and a salacious dossier that could never pass the smell test, while at the same time using equally dubious techniques to immunize Hillary Clinton and her closest advisers from crimes that include lying to the FBI and endangering secrets ..."
"... Ironically, the Strzok-Page texts provide something that the Russia-gate investigation has been sorely lacking: first-hand evidence of both corrupt intent and action. After months of breathless searching for "evidence" of Russian-Trump collusion designed to put Trump in the White House, what now exists is actual evidence that senior officials of the Obama administration colluded to keep Trump out of the White House – proof of what old-time gumshoes used to call "means, motive and opportunity ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Besides this wildly improbable storyline, there were flat denials from WikiLeaks, which distributed the supposedly "hacked" Democratic emails, that the information came from Russia – and there was the curious inability of the National Security Agency to use its immense powers to supply any technical evidence to support the Russia-hack scenario. ..."
"... on Jan. 6, 2017, President Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released an evidence-free report that he said was compiled by "hand-picked" analysts from the CIA, FBI and NSA, offering an "assessment" that Russia and President Putin were behind the release of the Democratic emails in a plot to help Trump win the presidency. ..."
"... Despite the extraordinary gravity of the charge, even New York Times correspondent Scott Shane noted that proof was lacking. He wrote at the time: "What is missing from the [the Jan. 6] public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies' claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to 'trust us.'" ..."
"... Virtually all skepticism about the evidence-free "assessment" was banned. For months, the Times and other newspapers of record repeated the lie that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had concurred in the conclusion about the Russian "hack." Even when that falsehood was belatedly acknowledged , the major news outlets just shifted the phrasing slightly to say that U.S. intelligence agencies had reached the Russian "hack" conclusion. Shane's blunt initial recognition about the lack of proof disappeared from the mainstream media's approved narrative of Russia-gate. ..."
"... Doubts about the Russian "hack" or dissident suggestions that what we were witnessing was a "soft coup" were scoffed at by leading media commentators. Other warnings from veteran U.S. intelligence professionals about the weaknesses of the Russia-gate narrative and the danger of letting politicized intelligence overturn a constitutional election were also brushed aside in pursuit of the goal of removing Trump from the White House. ..."
"... Justified or not, Trump's feeling of vindication could hardly be more dangerous -- particularly at a time when the most urgent need is to drain some testosterone from the self-styled Stable-Genius-in-Chief and his martinet generals. ..."
"... On the home front, Trump, his wealthy friends, and like-thinkers in Congress may now feel they have an even wider carte blanche to visit untold misery on the poor, the widow, the stranger and other vulnerable humans. That was always an underlying danger of the Resistance's strategy to seize on whatever weapons were available – no matter how reckless or unfair – to "get Trump." ..."
"... Beyond that, Russia-gate has become so central to the Washington establishment's storyline that there appears to be no room for second-thoughts or turning back. The momentum is such that some Democrats and the media never-Trumpers can't stop stoking the smoke of Russia-gate and holding out hope against hope that it will somehow justify Trump's impeachment. ..."
"... Yet, the sordid process of using legal/investigative means to settle political scores further compromises the principle of the "rule of law" and integrity of journalism in the eyes of many Americans. After a year of Russia-gate, the "rule of law" and "pursuit of truth" appear to have been reduced to high-falutin' phrases for political score-setttling, a process besmirched by Republicans in earlier pursuits of Democrats and now appearing to be a bipartisan method for punishing political rivals regardless of the lack of evidence. ..."
"... In June and July 2017 Strzok was the top FBI official working on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia, but was taken off that job when the Justice Department IG learned of the Strzok-Page text-message exchange and told Mueller ..."
"... At this point, the $64 question is whether the various congressional oversight committees will remain ensconced in their customarily cozy role as "overlook" committees, or whether they will have the courage to attempt to carry out their Constitutional duty. The latter course would mean confronting a powerful Deep State and its large toolbox of well-practiced retaliatory techniques, including J. Edgar Hoover-style blackmail on steroids, enabled by electronic surveillance of just about everything and everyone. Yes, today's technology permits blanket collection, and "Collect Everything" has become the motto. ..."
"... Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, with almost four decades of membership in the House and Senate, openly warned incoming President Trump in January 2017 against criticizing the U.S. intelligence community because U.S. intelligence officials have "six ways from Sunday to get back at you" if you are "dumb" enough to take them on. ..."
"... If congressional investigators have been paying attention, they already know what former weapons inspector Scott Ritter shared with Veteran intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) colleagues this week; namely, that Fusion GPS's Glenn Simpson, who commissioned the Russia dossier using Democratic Party money, said he reached out to Steele after June 17, just three days before Steele's first report was published , drawing on seven sources. ..."
"... How, you might ask, could Strzok and associates undertake these extra-legal steps with such blithe disregard for the possible consequences should they be caught? The answer is easy; Mrs. Clinton was a shoo-in, remember? This was just extra insurance with no expectation of any "death benefit" ever coming into play -- save for Trump's electoral demise in November 2016. The attitude seemed to be that, if abuse of the FISA law should eventually be discovered -- there would be little interest in a serious investigation by the editors of The New York Times and other anti-Trump publications and whatever troubles remained could be handled by President Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... As you know Mr. McGovern the police state seldom loses. ..."
"... Compared to the criminal and corrupt US political system, the mafia is an honor society oriented on values. More and more evidence appears that the whole Russian Gate was precooked by the Obama and Clinton mafia together with crooks like Clapper, Brennan, Comey. Lynch and many of the top brass in the FBI and the DoJ. The installment of Bob Mueller who is hugely biased and a Comey body hired only Clinton supporters as his lawyers. But such a team shows how corrupt the US justice system has already become. ..."
"... Considering all the experience gleaned from 7+ decades of subverting and overthrowing governments around the world, the Deep State thugs must of thought securing the WH for their Killer Queen was a 'slam dunk.' ..."
"... The FBI answers to the CIA. This essay is absurd. ..."
Jan 24, 2018 | www.unz.com

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the third presidential debate in 2016, during which Clinton called Trump Vladimir Putin's "puppet.

Special Report: In the Watergate era, liberals warned about U.S. intelligence agencies manipulating U.S. politics, but now Trump-hatred has blinded many of them to this danger becoming real, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern notes.

Russia-gate is becoming FBI-gate, thanks to the official release of unguarded text messages between loose-lipped FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and his garrulous girlfriend, FBI lawyer Lisa Page. (Ten illustrative texts from their exchange appear at the end of this article.)

Despite his former job as chief of the FBI's counterintelligence section, Strzok had the naive notion that texting on FBI phones could not be traced. Strzok must have slept through "Surity 101." Or perhaps he was busy texting during that class. Girlfriend Page cannot be happy at being misled by his assurance that using office phones would be a secure way to conduct their affair(s).

It would have been unfortunate enough for Strzok and Page to have their adolescent-sounding texts merely exposed, revealing the reckless abandon of star-crossed lovers hiding (they thought) secrets from cuckolded spouses, office colleagues, and the rest of us. However, for the never-Trump plotters in the FBI, the official release of just a fraction (375) of almost 10,000 messages does incalculably more damage than that.

We suddenly have documentary proof that key elements of the U.S. intelligence community were trying to short-circuit the U.S. democratic process. And that puts in a new and dark context the year-long promotion of Russia-gate. It now appears that it was not the Russians trying to rig the outcome of the U.S. election, but leading officials of the U.S. intelligence community, shadowy characters sometimes called the Deep State.

More of the Strzok-Page texting dialogue is expected to be released. And the Department of Justice Inspector General reportedly has additional damaging texts from others on the team that Special Counsel Robert Mueller selected to help him investigate Russia-gate.

Besides forcing the removal of Strzok and Page, the text exposures also sounded the death knell for the career of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, in whose office some of the plotting took place and who has already announced his plans to retire soon.

But the main casualty is the FBI's 18-month campaign to sabotage candidate-and-now-President Donald Trump by using the Obama administration's Russia-gate intelligence "assessment," electronic surveillance of dubious legality, and a salacious dossier that could never pass the smell test, while at the same time using equally dubious techniques to immunize Hillary Clinton and her closest advisers from crimes that include lying to the FBI and endangering secrets.

Ironically, the Strzok-Page texts provide something that the Russia-gate investigation has been sorely lacking: first-hand evidence of both corrupt intent and action. After months of breathless searching for "evidence" of Russian-Trump collusion designed to put Trump in the White House, what now exists is actual evidence that senior officials of the Obama administration colluded to keep Trump out of the White House – proof of what old-time gumshoes used to call "means, motive and opportunity."

Even more unfortunately for Russia-gate enthusiasts, the FBI lovers' correspondence provides factual evidence exposing much of the made-up "Resistance" narrative – the contrived storyline that The New York Times and much of the rest of the U.S. mainstream media deemed fit to print with little skepticism and few if any caveats, a scenario about brilliantly devious Russians that not only lacks actual evidence – relying on unverified hearsay and rumor – but doesn't make sense on its face.

The Russia-gate narrative always hinged on the preposterous notion that Russian President Vladimir Putin foresaw years ago what no American political analyst considered even possible, the political ascendancy of Donald Trump. According to the narrative, the fortune-telling Putin then risked creating even worse tensions with a nuclear-armed America that would – by all odds – have been led by a vengeful President Hillary Clinton.

Besides this wildly improbable storyline, there were flat denials from WikiLeaks, which distributed the supposedly "hacked" Democratic emails, that the information came from Russia – and there was the curious inability of the National Security Agency to use its immense powers to supply any technical evidence to support the Russia-hack scenario.

The Trump Shock

But the shock of Trump's election and the decision of many never-Trumpers to cast their lot with the Resistance led to a situation in which any prudent skepticism or demand for evidence was swept aside.

So, on Jan. 6, 2017, President Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released an evidence-free report that he said was compiled by "hand-picked" analysts from the CIA, FBI and NSA, offering an "assessment" that Russia and President Putin were behind the release of the Democratic emails in a plot to help Trump win the presidency.

Despite the extraordinary gravity of the charge, even New York Times correspondent Scott Shane noted that proof was lacking. He wrote at the time: "What is missing from the [the Jan. 6] public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies' claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to 'trust us.'"

But the "assessment" served a useful purpose for the never-Trumpers: it applied an official imprimatur on the case for delegitimizing Trump's election and even raised the long-shot hope that the Electoral College might reverse the outcome and possibly install a compromise candidate, such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, in the White House. Though the Powell ploy fizzled, the hope of somehow removing Trump from office continued to bubble, fueled by the growing hysteria around Russia-gate.

Virtually all skepticism about the evidence-free "assessment" was banned. For months, the Times and other newspapers of record repeated the lie that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had concurred in the conclusion about the Russian "hack." Even when that falsehood was belatedly acknowledged , the major news outlets just shifted the phrasing slightly to say that U.S. intelligence agencies had reached the Russian "hack" conclusion. Shane's blunt initial recognition about the lack of proof disappeared from the mainstream media's approved narrative of Russia-gate.

Doubts about the Russian "hack" or dissident suggestions that what we were witnessing was a "soft coup" were scoffed at by leading media commentators. Other warnings from veteran U.S. intelligence professionals about the weaknesses of the Russia-gate narrative and the danger of letting politicized intelligence overturn a constitutional election were also brushed aside in pursuit of the goal of removing Trump from the White House.

It didn't even seem to matter when new Russia-gate disclosures conflicted with the original narrative that Putin had somehow set Trump up as a Manchurian candidate. All normal journalistic skepticism was jettisoned. It was as if the Russia-gate advocates started with the conclusion that Trump must go and then made the facts fit into that mold, but anyone who noted the violations of normal investigative procedures was dismissed as a "Trump enabler" or a "Moscow stooge."

The Text Evidence

But then came the FBI text messages, providing documentary evidence that key FBI officials involved in the Russia-gate investigation were indeed deeply biased and out to get Trump, adding hard proof to Trump's longstanding lament that he was the subject of a "witch hunt ."

Peter Strzok, who served as a Deputy Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, second in command of counterintelligence.

Justified or not, Trump's feeling of vindication could hardly be more dangerous -- particularly at a time when the most urgent need is to drain some testosterone from the self-styled Stable-Genius-in-Chief and his martinet generals.

On the home front, Trump, his wealthy friends, and like-thinkers in Congress may now feel they have an even wider carte blanche to visit untold misery on the poor, the widow, the stranger and other vulnerable humans. That was always an underlying danger of the Resistance's strategy to seize on whatever weapons were available – no matter how reckless or unfair – to "get Trump."

Beyond that, Russia-gate has become so central to the Washington establishment's storyline that there appears to be no room for second-thoughts or turning back. The momentum is such that some Democrats and the media never-Trumpers can't stop stoking the smoke of Russia-gate and holding out hope against hope that it will somehow justify Trump's impeachment.

Yet, the sordid process of using legal/investigative means to settle political scores further compromises the principle of the "rule of law" and integrity of journalism in the eyes of many Americans. After a year of Russia-gate, the "rule of law" and "pursuit of truth" appear to have been reduced to high-falutin' phrases for political score-setttling, a process besmirched by Republicans in earlier pursuits of Democrats and now appearing to be a bipartisan method for punishing political rivals regardless of the lack of evidence.

Strzok and Page

Peter Strzok (pronounced "struck") has an interesting pedigree with multiple tasks regarding both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump. As the FBI's chief of counterespionage during the investigation into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's unauthorized use of a personal email server for classified information, Strzok reportedly changed the words "grossly negligent" (which could have triggered legal prosecution) to the far less serious "extremely careless" in FBI Director James Comey's depiction of Clinton's actions. This semantic shift cleared the way for Comey to conclude just 20 days before the Democratic National Convention began in July 2016, that "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring charges against Mrs. Clinton.

Then, as Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division, Strzok led the FBI's investigation into alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election of 2016. It is a safe bet that he took a strong hand in hand-picking the FBI contingent of analysts that joined "hand-picked" counterparts from CIA and NSA in preparing the evidence-free, Jan. 6, 2017 assessment accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of interfering in the election of 2016. (Although accepted in Establishment groupthink as revealed truth, that poor excuse for analysis reflected the apogee of intelligence politicization -- rivaled only by the fraudulent intelligence on "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq 15 years ago.)

In June and July 2017 Strzok was the top FBI official working on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia, but was taken off that job when the Justice Department IG learned of the Strzok-Page text-message exchange and told Mueller.

There is no little irony in the fact that what did in the FBI sweathearts was their visceral disdain for Mr. Trump, their cheerleading-cum-kid-gloves treatment of Mrs. Clinton and her associates, their 1950-ish, James Clapperesque attitude toward Russians as "almost genetically driven" to evil, and their (Strzok/Page) elitist conviction that they know far better what is good for the country than regular American citizens, including those "deplorables" whom Clinton said made up half of Trump's supporters.

But Strzok/Page had no idea that their hubris, elitism and scheming would be revealed in so tangible a way. Worst of all for them, the very thing that Strzok, in particular, worked so hard to achieve -- the sabotaging of Trump and immunization of Mrs. Clinton and her closest advisers is now coming apart at the seams.

Congress: Oversee? or Overlook?

At this point, the $64 question is whether the various congressional oversight committees will remain ensconced in their customarily cozy role as "overlook" committees, or whether they will have the courage to attempt to carry out their Constitutional duty. The latter course would mean confronting a powerful Deep State and its large toolbox of well-practiced retaliatory techniques, including J. Edgar Hoover-style blackmail on steroids, enabled by electronic surveillance of just about everything and everyone. Yes, today's technology permits blanket collection, and "Collect Everything" has become the motto.

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, with almost four decades of membership in the House and Senate, openly warned incoming President Trump in January 2017 against criticizing the U.S. intelligence community because U.S. intelligence officials have "six ways from Sunday to get back at you" if you are "dumb" enough to take them on.

Thanks to the almost 10,000 text messages between Strzok and Page, only a small fraction of which were given to Congress four weeks ago, there is now real evidentiary meat on the bones of the suspicions that there indeed was a "deep-state coup" to "correct" the outcome of the 2016 election. We now know that the supposedly apolitical FBI officials had huge political axes to grind. The Strzok-Page exchanges drip with disdain for Trump and those deemed his smelly deplorable supporters. In one text message, Strzok expressed visceral contempt for those working-class Trump voters, writing on Aug. 26, 2016, "Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support. it's scary real down here."

The texts even show Strzok warning of the need for an "insurance policy" to thwart Trump on the off-chance that his poll numbers closed in on those of Mrs. Clinton.

An Aug. 6, 2016 text message, for example, shows Page giving her knight in shining armor strong affirmation: "Maybe you're meant to stay where you are because you're meant to protect the country from that menace [Trump]." That text to Strzok includes a link to a David Brooks column in The New York Times, in which Brooks concludes with the clarion call: "There comes a time when neutrality and laying low become dishonorable. If you're not in revolt, you're in cahoots. When this period and your name are mentioned, decades hence, your grandkids will look away in shame."

Another text message shows that other senior government officials – alarmed at the possibility of a Trump presidency – joined the discussion. In an apparent reference to an August 2016 meeting with FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Strzok wrote to Page on Aug. 15, 2016, "I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office -- that there's no way he [Trump] gets elected -- but I'm afraid we can't take that risk." Strzok added, "It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event that you die before you're 40."

Insurance Policy?

Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, says he will ask Strzok to explain the "insurance policy" when he calls him to testify. What seems already clear is that the celebrated "Steele Dossier" was part of the "insurance," as was the evidence-less legend that Russia hacked the DNC's and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's emails and gave them to WikiLeaks .

If congressional investigators have been paying attention, they already know what former weapons inspector Scott Ritter shared with Veteran intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) colleagues this week; namely, that Fusion GPS's Glenn Simpson, who commissioned the Russia dossier using Democratic Party money, said he reached out to Steele after June 17, just three days before Steele's first report was published , drawing on seven sources.

"There is a snowball's chance in hell that this is raw intelligence gathered by Steele; rather he seems to have drawn on a single 'trusted intermediary' to gather unsubstantiated rumor already in existence."

Another VIPS colleague, Phil Giraldi, writing out of his own experience in private sector consulting, added: "The fact that you do not control your sources frequently means that they will feed you what they think you want to hear. Since they are only doing it for money, the more lurid the details the better, as it increases the apparent value of the information. The private security firm in turn, which is also doing it for the money, will pass on the stories and even embroider them to keep the client happy and to encourage him to come back for more. When I read the Steele dossier it looked awfully familiar to me, like the scores of similar reports I had seen which combined bullshit with enough credible information to make the whole product look respectable."

It is now widely known that the Democrats ponied up the "insurance premiums," so to speak, for former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele's "dossier" of lurid -- but largely unproven -- "intelligence" on Trump and the Russians. If, as many have concluded, the dossier was used to help justify a FISA warrant to snoop on the Trump campaign, those involved will be in deep kimchi, if congressional overseers do their job.

How, you might ask, could Strzok and associates undertake these extra-legal steps with such blithe disregard for the possible consequences should they be caught? The answer is easy; Mrs. Clinton was a shoo-in, remember? This was just extra insurance with no expectation of any "death benefit" ever coming into play -- save for Trump's electoral demise in November 2016. The attitude seemed to be that, if abuse of the FISA law should eventually be discovered -- there would be little interest in a serious investigation by the editors of The New York Times and other anti-Trump publications and whatever troubles remained could be handled by President Hillary Clinton.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee of Judiciary on Crime and Terrorism, joined Sen. Grassley in signing the letter referring Christopher Steele to the Justice Department to investigate what appear to be false statements about the dossier. In signing, Graham noted the "many stop signs the Department of Justice ignored in its use of the dossier." The signature of committee ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, however, was missing -- an early sign that a highly partisan battle royale is in the offing. On Tuesday, Feinstein unilaterally released a voluminous transcript of Glenn Simpson's earlier testimony and, as though on cue, Establishment pundits portrayed Steele as a good source and Fusion GPS's Glenn Simpson as a victim.

The Donnybrook is now underway; the outcome uncertain.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army and CIA intelligence analyst for 30 years; prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief for Nixon, Ford, and Reagan; and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

... ... ...

SunBakedSuburb , January 15, 2018 at 9:30 pm GMT

Thanks for the article, Mr. McGovern. I sure wish this could be published where some liberal eyeballs could get a look at it. I would also be interested in your opinion on the strange stuff found in some of the John Podesta emails. Although I can understand why you may not want to swim in those murky waters.
niteranger , January 24, 2018 at 5:28 am GMT
The world is controlled by Corporate Fascist Military Industrial Intelligence Police States. They will pick the leaders of the world and no one will tell the differently. This FBI scandal goes through all the intelligence agencies and begins with Obama who basically runs the government in his "third term." This entire election was rigged by Dems starting with the exclusion of Sanders. Unfortunately, for the Dems their plan failed because Hillary was such a terrible candidate. If this is not brought out in the open we will never have a chance of getting a legitimate candidate again.

As you know Mr. McGovern the police state seldom loses.

anonymous Disclaimer , January 24, 2018 at 6:05 am GMT
An excellent, factual summary. (And, in light of the last two weeks, prescient.) This is true journalism, long gone from the rotten husks of what used to be known as the Press.

But the passages about Mr. Strzok helping to alter Mr. Comey's letter picked a scab: Why is there such widespread acceptance of the notion that Mrs. Clinton can not now be charged? I don't believe that Mr. McGovern shares that notion, other than seeing how immunizing people, etc., makes her prosecution more difficult. But many Americans on each "side" seem to see Mr. Comey's exercise of what was Mrs. Lynch's discretion to begin with as the equivalent of a Presidential pardon. In the meantime, applicable statutes of limitation run

The more sunlight, the better. But before getting your hopes up about any of this hullabaloo, or expecting any change in how the USG functions, go back and look for those pictures of Mr. Trump golfing with Mr. Clinton, the Clintons at his wedding(s), etc.

Ludwig Watzal , Website January 24, 2018 at 7:19 am GMT

Compared to the criminal and corrupt US political system, the mafia is an honor society oriented on values. More and more evidence appears that the whole Russian Gate was precooked by the Obama and Clinton mafia together with crooks like Clapper, Brennan, Comey. Lynch and many of the top brass in the FBI and the DoJ. The installment of Bob Mueller who is hugely biased and a Comey body hired only Clinton supporters as his lawyers. But such a team shows how corrupt the US justice system has already become.

The mainstream media are involved in this witch hunt against Trump from the very beginning. Perhaps some of its bog shots were even paid for fabricated political reporting. The NYT, the Post, CNN, MSNBC and all the other so-called opinion leaders spread fake news and kept the legend of "Russian collusion" going over a year, despite presenting not a single piece of evidence. Their task was to manipulate and brainwash the American public.

Just listen to this interview. One understands what was and still is going on in this crooked US political system.

The Alarmist , January 24, 2018 at 11:11 am GMT

" thanks to the official release of unguarded text messages between loose-lipped FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and his garrulous girlfriend, FBI lawyer Lisa Page."

Despite the efforts to destroy a significant part of the data trail. You know, in the good old days, evidence of the affair would be enough for their clearances to be revoked, and use of Government telecomms for such purposes would be grounds for firing. Don't know what Sessions is waiting for, but this bubba would like some red meat already. For that matter, he should have told Mueller where to put his subpeona. Sessions really is an empty suit.

bluedog , January 24, 2018 at 12:29 pm GMT
@niteranger

Well in reality it began with Bush the Stupid and his remark that the Constitution was only a GD piece of paper and promptly tore it up,and as long as we continue to have the best government "money can buy" nothing will change,anymore than it will change under Trump, as he switches from the war on terror to the war on competitors (Russia and China)and world domination and its resources..

Greg Bacon , Website January 24, 2018 at 12:32 pm GMT

We suddenly have documentary proof that key elements of the U.S. intelligence community were trying to short-circuit the U.S. democratic process.

Considering all the experience gleaned from 7+ decades of subverting and overthrowing governments around the world, the Deep State thugs must of thought securing the WH for their Killer Queen was a 'slam dunk.' My believe is that Trump actually got around 70% of the vote, a number that overwhelmed their computerized vote fixing.

All the grief, misery and destruction we've visited upon nations around the world is now coming back to haunt Americans. Only part missing is the violent overthrow or assassination of a leader and don't put the Deep State thugs beyond that.

fnn , January 24, 2018 at 12:43 pm GMT

On the home front, Trump, his wealthy friends, and like-thinkers in Congress may now feel they have an even wider carte blanche to visit untold misery on the poor, the widow, the stranger and other vulnerable humans.

This looks like a disingenuous conflation of Trump (and his handful of presumably more or less dependable allies/minions) with the Ryan-Koch- US Chamber of Commerce GOP establishment. Despite what Jeff Flake says, he's not a dictator, so he has to make concessions to the donor class-controlled wing of the party. This stuff is so obvious I'm embarrassed as I type it out.

bluedog , January 24, 2018 at 12:43 pm GMT
@Wally

Keep right on sucking up that kool-aid,the economy has an up-tick because of government spending, which of course will add another $1.7 trillion (per David Stockman Reagan's budget directer) to the debt that you just wished onto your children,g children and their children (ain't you proud/) and lol if you believe those government figures on the unemployment stats than you must believe in the tooth fairy,and of course along with those bonuses comes the lay-offs, a thousand here a thousand there (on the Lay-off list) as the work is out sourced to other countries,meanwhile a few more billion goes to the military/industrial group.Ah yes utopia at last,well while it last that is .

n230099 , January 24, 2018 at 1:11 pm GMT

"It would have been unfortunate enough for Strzok and Page to have their adolescent-sounding texts merely exposed, revealing the reckless abandon of star-crossed lovers hiding (they thought) secrets from cuckolded spouses, office colleagues, and the rest of us."

True One of the first thoughts I had was that these were, at most, highschool level communications. To think this is 'high level' government in action is, at once, amusing and disturbing.

Jim Christian , January 24, 2018 at 1:49 pm GMT
@RobinG

Now, many companies are cutting corners by using "contract workers" on a temporary basis.

Concur all, but this especially. In the DC area starting with the internet boom and dot.com busts of the late 90s, Indians started coming in and all of a sudden, everyone in IT and computer technologies was being replaced with a contract. After spending years getting certs and continuously upgrading skills and certs, people were ruined with imported contractors. It started at FannyMae and Freddie Mac, the entire board and hierarchy there read like the New Delhi phone book for twenty years now. Between the Chins and Indians, there's been an enormous overclass installed and it's not going anywhere. Someone here recently wrote an article about it but it isn't recent. With the handwriting on the wall so long ago, I gave up chasing Microsoft certs and contracts and went back to analog phone systems and infrastructure and electrical, but I saw a lot of people that tried to follow the professional IT path ruined. Throw in the racial and sexual politics in the offices and the environment is pretty miserable anyway..

Pretty bad as is, but with AI coming about, whole classes of Democrat folks unconcerned with immigration will be replaced by Bots of all sorts, making the immigration hardships look like Disney World.

The Alarmist , January 24, 2018 at 2:29 pm GMT

"Strzok reportedly changed the words "grossly negligent" (which could have triggered legal prosecution) to the far less serious "extremely careless" in FBI Director James Comey's depiction of Clinton's actions. This semantic shift cleared the way for Comey to conclude just 20 days before the Democratic National Convention began in July 2016, that "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring charges against Mrs. Clinton."

It's a thin line between "gross negligence" and "extreme carelessness." While "gross negligence" usually involves unintentional acts, they can border on intentional conduct by the very recklessness of the activity. A senior government moving vast amounts of classified data on unsecured networks can't begin to assert she didn't know the risks she was taking. Semantics here are irrelevant: The substance of the law is that HRC was grossly negligent.

As a seasoned lawyer, Comey would know that a prosecutor could very reasonably equate the two and charge on a violation of 18 USC 793 (Gathering, transmitting, or losing defense information) There are a couple paragraphs that could be applied, but (f) looks most likely. The mere act of storing classified data on a personal server could also be a violation of 18 USC 798 (Disclosure of classified information). Destroying the same data might also be charged as violations of the 2009 Federal Records Act, and there is plenty of reason to pursue the limb of Obstruction of Justice in light of the other serious charges that could reasonably be made.

In order to be credible, justice must be seen to be done. The longer Sessions and Trump let this charade go uninvestigated for fear that investigating it looks overtly political, the more political it actually becomes, and the less credible the rule of law in America becomes ("Laws and regulations are for the little people!)

Anonymous Disclaimer , January 24, 2018 at 2:47 pm GMT
The deep state coup was the appointment of Trump or it could have been Clinton. You have no choice when you vote. The work of retired spooks like McGovern is to convince you that you live in a Democracy where voting matters. There's no evidence that voting serves anyone other than appearances for the ruling elite.

The FBI is an inherently political organization. I would expect the FBI to tweet things like " that motherfucker is goin' down" or "fuck her" or "Orange son of a bitch, let's make some noise" or more racist "those nigger motherfuckers in the city" or "think you're anonymous on the internet lil'boy?" Those would be the tweets of the FBI that we all know and love.

anonymous Disclaimer , January 24, 2018 at 3:34 pm GMT
This interference into a presidential election by an agency such as the FBI raises the question of whether there's been manipulation of other previous elections. Were some of our previous presidents installed through machinations of an intelligence agency?
bluedog , January 24, 2018 at 4:26 pm GMT
@Wally

Sure they are these companies and corporations are saving millions upon millions due to Trump and the republicans, while throwing a few crumbs to the workers who are suppose to lick their hands, many who only make $10-$11 dollars per hour, and seeing they are bonuses the government will take more than their share, and down the road these same workers will be paying it back in spades ,after all someone has to fund the military/industrial racket

Anonymous Disclaimer , Website January 24, 2018 at 5:16 pm GMT
Trump needs to be impeached. The entire Government is a bad bit of fiction, why not use the symbolic figure head of empire to generate excitement in the mass of American sheep? To that end, throw up any accusation that will stick, make it sound like a Constitutional crisis but simple enough for the average begrudged redneck to understand. The FBI has an agenda, what part of the Government doesn't? The whole point of elections is to have different groups employ every tactic under the sun to manipulate said sheep. Let's get the impeachment show started.
Altai , January 24, 2018 at 6:02 pm GMT
This whole affair also totally destroys the G-Man mythos. From the outside Strzok looks the part. Yet both he and Page write texts like they're particularly dim 20 year old girls.

Strzok – God Hillary should win. 100,000,000-0.

Page– I don't know. But we'll get it back. We're America. We rock.

Page – He's not ever going to become president, right? Right?!

Strzok – OMG did you hear what Trump just said?

Page – Yep. Out to lunch with (redacted) We both hate everyone and everything.

Page – Just riffing on the hot mess that is our country.

Strzok– Donald just said "bad hombres"

This is the level of discourse (Of course this could just be a biased sample to humiliate Strzok but leave the really bad conspiring out of frame) he has with his mistress on an FBI phone as he plans dirty tricks on his own country?

chris , January 24, 2018 at 8:42 pm GMT
The sad part will be to see how they will all, one after the other, get away with everything they've done.

If any of them will even go to trial for anything other than some procedural point, they'll all make a deal with DC-Democratic prosecutors, Hollywood will make a film casting them as heroes and they'll all get a slap on the wrist, a la Petraeus.

The politicians will claim that they have to hide the truth so that the public will not loose their 'trust' in these institutions, they'll name some RINO as the 'compromise' candidate to lead these institutions and it'll be back to business as usual in the heart of the empire, as in all previous times, see James Bovard's article:

http://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/370122-another-software-upgrade-suppressing-evidence-is-fbi-standard-procedure

chris , January 24, 2018 at 9:01 pm GMT
my favoriete quote:

Page– I don't know. But we'll get it back. We're America. We rock.

Such vacuous shallowness, imagining themselves to be the heroes of some cheap Hollywood movie, not even suspecting how 2 dimensional, delusional, and sophomoric it all sounds (of course, it only sound moronic because we found out about it before the plan reach its planned conclusion).

After 14 years of non-stop wars and mass murder, we find out the empire is run by the cheerleading squad, motivating each other with high fives while trying to take 'democracy' down. Still, I suspect there were adults at table also who mad sure to say one step out of the spotlight.

Maple Curtain , January 24, 2018 at 9:12 pm GMT
"Page– I don't know. But we'll get it back. We're America. We rock."

"We're America. We Rock."

And there we have it folks, the type of REAL SERIOUS mature human beings with oodles of gravitas who infest the highest echelons of our bureaucracies.

They rock.

We're deplorable.

That little girl, Page, is stuck emotionally, in junior high. Trump is just not one of the cool kids and he needs to be ostracized.

... ... ...

Twodees Partain , January 24, 2018 at 9:37 pm GMT
@The Alarmist

"It's a thin line between "gross negligence" and "extreme carelessness." "

Not in the context of legal language. In fact, it's a great divide. "Extremely careless" is not a federal criminal charge, while "gross negligence" actually is. Never mind about the difference in degree when speaking of the two terms, one is a crime, and the other is merely grounds for an investigation.

Frankie P , January 24, 2018 at 10:16 pm GMT
@Ludwig Watzal

Excellent video, fantastic, in-depth analysis. Thank you.

Frankie P

'Quit digging'.

Anonymous Disclaimer , January 25, 2018 at 1:50 am GMT
The FBI answers to the CIA. This essay is absurd.

[Jan 24, 2018] I remember the day like it was yesterday

Jan 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Betrayed -> holdbuysell Jan 24, 2018 4:13 PM Permalink

Watch this and you will understand why ((((They)))) blew off his head in the streets of Dallas. Kennedy would not give David Ben - Gurion any nuclear technology and was threatening the pigs regarding Dimona. Jack Rubenstein AKA Jack Ruby was ordered by Giancanna who was ordered by Lansky to be a foot soldger in the operation. CIA and Mob did their part But the bottom line is Kennedy stepped on the Jew Fed's Usury game with EO 11110 Which put legal Constitutional money backed by silver into circulation. This would put the Fed out of business over time.

John Kennedy understood very well who the true enemy of his country was and I believe was determined to destroy them. He foolishly did not protect himself even though he was well aware he was in ((((Their)))) crossfire.

And here we sit today with the Nation ripped apart. Americans at each other throats and blaming each other never perceiving the iron fist of the Zionists ruling above them.

Divide and conquer is their main tool to destroy us.

dcohn -> Betrayed Jan 24, 2018 4:33 PM Permalink

I remember the day like it was yesterday.

I was home sick from school. In those days a TV gets rolled into your room if you are sick. Otherwise only Mom and Dad had a TV in the bedroom. We had two TVs in 1963.

I was watching the only thing on TV the president in DALLAS and WHAM The President has been SHOT comes over .

I run Mommy Mommy President Kennedy has been shot.

SHE WHACKED me across the face. How can you say such a thing. I don't recall the exact words but the whack hurt. That was common in 1963 when you did something "wrong" or whatever.

Obviously 5 minutes later she was crying and flipping out.

It sure seems like he was a good man but what the fuck was he smoking to get in an open fucking car?

Seems he liked it. Great Article about that day.

https://news.utexas.edu/2013/11/18/why-jfk-died-in-dallas

[Jan 24, 2018] Congress is treating Americans like children over FISA memo Judge Napolitano - YouTube

Jan 22, 2018 | www.youtube.com

FOX News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano on how damaging the four-page FISA memo could really be to the U.S. government.


SusanBailey AmazingEstate , 1 day ago

They're not treating us like children. They're treating us like chumps. I don't think I'm the only American citizen who's tired of it. Impanel a grand jury and get to the bottom of the massive corruption going on in our country.

WhoToBelieve , 1 day ago

They're not protecting us, they're protecting themselves. They all have dirt that is threatened to be revealed.

TheWisendorf , 1 day ago

Next week we will be mad when we get the memo and find it blacked out every other sentence... That's why they need 19 days to go over 4 lousy pages, To make sure the people don't see anything that might make any sense.

Tonic Taz , 1 day ago

#ReleaseTheMemo #FisaMemo

TheWisendorf , 1 day ago

The memo is just a summary. The actual set of doc are up in the thousands, so no, Nunes or any of the Dems there can fake the memo.

mike dar , 1 day ago

treating Americans like children - more like treating Americans like subjects, vote cows without them having any authority. Americans don't have to give up their authority as employers of Congressmen, the Americans chose to be treated 'like children'.

DucksDeLucks , 1 day ago

The correct argument is not that universal spying on the public doesn't work, but that it's inconsistent with our way of life. Freedom isn't free and one of the costs is not having some of the options a dictator has to deal with adversaries.

[Jan 22, 2018] If Trump is an authoritarian, why don t Democrats treat him like one? by Corey Robin

Highly recommended!
The is a single party of neoliberal oligarchy with two wings. Both are afraid of citizens and would like to sly on them.
Notable quotes:
"... Despite being in the minority, Democrats last week had enough Republican votes on their side to curb the president's ability, enhanced since 9/11, to spy on citizens and non-citizens alike. ..."
"... In the House, a majority of Democrats were willing to join a small minority of Republicans to do just that. But 55 Democrats – including the minority leader, Nancy Pelosi; the minority whip, Steny Hoyer; and other Democratic leaders of the opposition to Trump – refused. ..."
"... After the House voted for an extension of the president's power to spy, a group of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans attempted to filibuster the bill. The critical 60th vote to shut down the filibuster was a Democrat. ..."
"... This is despite the fact that the surveillance bill gives precisely the sorts of powers viewers of an Academy Award-winning film about the Stasi from not long so ago ..."
"... Pelosi: 'We Must Fight Even Harder Against Trump's Authoritarian Impulses Now That We've Voted to Enable Them' ..."
"... But in the same way that discourse of authoritarianism misses the democratic forest for the anti-democratic tweets, so does it focus more on the rhetoric of an abusive man than the infrastructure of an oppressive state, more on the erosion of norms than the material instruments of repression. ..."
Jan 20, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

You'd think that Democrats in Congress would jump at the opportunity to impose a constraint on Donald Trump's presidency – one that liberals and Democrats alike have characterized as authoritarian. Apparently, that's not the case.

Despite being in the minority, Democrats last week had enough Republican votes on their side to curb the president's ability, enhanced since 9/11, to spy on citizens and non-citizens alike.

In the House, a majority of Democrats were willing to join a small minority of Republicans to do just that. But 55 Democrats – including the minority leader, Nancy Pelosi; the minority whip, Steny Hoyer; and other Democratic leaders of the opposition to Trump – refused.

After the House voted for an extension of the president's power to spy, a group of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans attempted to filibuster the bill. The critical 60th vote to shut down the filibuster was a Democrat.

With the exception of Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept, a press that normally expresses great alarm over Trump's amassing and abuse of power has had relatively little to say about this vote (or this vote or this vote).

This is despite the fact that the surveillance bill gives precisely the sorts of powers viewers of an Academy Award-winning film about the Stasi from not long so ago would instantly recognize to a president whose view of the media a leading Republican recently compared to Stalin.

It was left to the Onion to offer the best (and near only) comment:

Pelosi: 'We Must Fight Even Harder Against Trump's Authoritarian Impulses Now That We've Voted to Enable Them'

Last week, I wrote in these pages how the discourse of Trump's authoritarianism ignores or minimizes the ways in which democratic citizens and institutions – the media, the courts, the opposition party, social movements – are opposing Trump, with seemingly little fear of intimidation.

But in the same way that discourse of authoritarianism misses the democratic forest for the anti-democratic tweets, so does it focus more on the rhetoric of an abusive man than the infrastructure of an oppressive state, more on the erosion of norms than the material instruments of repression.

[Jan 22, 2018] US Intelligence Could Well Have Wiretapped Trump by Ron Paul

Notable quotes:
"... Unable to come to terms with losing the 2016 election, Democrats are still pushing the 'Russiagate' probe and blocking the release of a memo describing surveillance abuses by the FBI, former Congressman Ron Paul told RT. ..."
"... I don't think anybody is seeking justice or seeking truth as much as they're seeking to get political advantage ..."
"... "I would be surprised if they haven't spied on him. They spy on everybody else. And they have spied on other members of the executive branch and other presidents." ..."
"... "The other day when they voted to get FISA even more power to spy on American people, the president couldn't be influenced by the fact that they used it against him. And I believe they did, and he believes that." ..."
"... "I've always maintained that government ought to be open and the people ought to have their privacy. But right now the people have no privacy and all our government does is work on secrecy and then it becomes competitive between the two parties, who get stuck with the worst deal by arguing, who's guilty of some crime," the politician explained. ..."
"... Paul also blasted the infamous 'Russian Dossier' compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, and which the Democrats used in their attack on Trump, saying it ..."
"... "has no legitimacy being revealing [in terms of] of Trump being associated with Russia. From the people I know The story has been all made up, essentially." ..."
"... "I'm no fan of Trump. I'm not a supporter of his, but I think that has been carried way overboard. I think the Democrats can't stand the fact that they've lost the election, and they can't stand the fact that Trump is a little bit more independent minded than they like," he said. ..."
Jan 20, 2018 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

Unable to come to terms with losing the 2016 election, Democrats are still pushing the 'Russiagate' probe and blocking the release of a memo describing surveillance abuses by the FBI, former Congressman Ron Paul told RT.

A top-secret intelligence memo, believed to reveal political bias at the highest levels of the FBI and the DOJ towards President Trump, may well be as significant as the Republicans say, Ron Paul told RT. But, he added, "there's still to many unknowns, especially, from my view point."

"Trump connection to the Russians, I think, has been way overblown, and I'd like to just get to the bottom of this the new information that's coming out, maybe this will reveal things and help us out," he said.

"Right now it's just a political fight," the former US Congressman said. "I think they're dealing with things a lot less important than the issue they ought to be talking about Right now, I don't think anybody is seeking justice or seeking truth as much as they're seeking to get political advantage."

Trump's claims that he was wiretapped by US intelligence agencies on the orders of the Obama administration may well turn out to be true, Paul said.

"I would be surprised if they haven't spied on him. They spy on everybody else. And they have spied on other members of the executive branch and other presidents."

However, he criticized Trump for doing nothing to prevent the Senate from voting in the expansion of warrantless surveillance of US citizens under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) earlier this week.

"The other day when they voted to get FISA even more power to spy on American people, the president couldn't be influenced by the fact that they used it against him. And I believe they did, and he believes that."

"I've always maintained that government ought to be open and the people ought to have their privacy. But right now the people have no privacy and all our government does is work on secrecy and then it becomes competitive between the two parties, who get stuck with the worst deal by arguing, who's guilty of some crime," the politician explained.

The fact that Democrats on the relevant committees have all voted against releasing the memo "might mean that Trump is probably right; there's probably a lot of stuff there that would exonerate him from any accusation they've been making," he said.

Paul also blasted the infamous 'Russian Dossier' compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, and which the Democrats used in their attack on Trump, saying it

"has no legitimacy being revealing [in terms of] of Trump being associated with Russia. From the people I know The story has been all made up, essentially."

"I'm no fan of Trump. I'm not a supporter of his, but I think that has been carried way overboard. I think the Democrats can't stand the fact that they've lost the election, and they can't stand the fact that Trump is a little bit more independent minded than they like," he said.

This article was originally published by RT -

[Jan 22, 2018] Trump Jr. on FISA memo Media, Democrats working together to deceive Americans

Jan 22, 2018 | www.washingtonexaminer.com

Donald Trump Jr. called for the release of a memo that allegedly contains information about Obama administration surveillance abuses and suggested that Democrats are complicit with the media in misleading the public.

"It's the double standard that the people are fed by the Democrats in complicity with the media, that's why neither have any trust from the American people anymore," Trump said on Fox News Friday.

[Jan 18, 2018] Mathilde Krim = backdoor connection LBJ and Ben-Gurion by by Steven Gaal ,

Jun 09, 2010 | educationforum.ipbhost.com

in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted June 9, 2010 http://kennysideshow.blogspot.com/2010/06/uss-liberty-flubbed-up-false-flag.html

1967: Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East

By Tom Śegev see pages 116 to 122

http://books.google.com/books?id=wDhYMiAnidAC&pg=PA118&lpg=PA118&dq=jfk+assassination+%22krim%22&source=bl&ots=A_7Lrvc8f7&sig=LE2pjs29TdMS01KBcnquX7cZt28&hl=en&ei=Wr0PTK-jKIvqnQeRp-nCDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

[Jan 16, 2018] The Russia Explainer

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Historians will come to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Russia's attack on sovereign Georgian territory marked the official return of history, indeed to an almost 19th-century style of great-power competition , complete with virulent nationalisms, battles for resources, struggles over spheres of influence and territory, and even -- though it shocks our 21st-century sensibilities -- the use of military power to obtain geopolitical objectives. ..."
"... Administration officials said Mr. Putin had miscalculated and would pay a cost regardless of what the United States did, pointing to the impact on Russia's currency and markets. "What we see here are distinctly 19th- and 20th-century decisions made by President Putin to address problems," one of the officials said. "What he needs to understand is that in terms of his economy, he lives in the 21st-century world, an interdependent world." ..."
"... The dossier's claim that Putin talked about the "ideals-based international order" also rings false. Putin only ever refers to Western ideals when saying that Western countries' leaders are hypocrites for not adhering to them. ..."
"... The more straightforward explanation is that, knowing that this is opposition research, Steele and his sources provided information that rang true with what the client already believed and would want to hear. This is the first report in the series–in effect, a teaser trailer–and no consultant working on a monthly retainer is going to tell you in the first memo that his services aren't needed. If Steele had indicated that there was no dirt to investigate, the $15,000/mo. (as estimated by Vanity Fair ) contract wouldn't have lasted longer than a month or two. ..."
"... The dossier's use of the phraseology "Trump and his team" and "Trump team" and the like is confusing in reference to the pre-2016 campaign period. Other than his lawyer Michael Cohen, there's nothing I've seen to indicate that the other Trump campaign people mentioned by name in the dossier (Paul Manafort and Carter Page) knew Trump before 2016. By all appearances, the key members of Trump's team before 2016 were his children, and maybe his talent agent. ..."
"... It also seems out of character for Trump to have the foresight and planning that it would take to seek out intelligence on Hillary Clinton several years back. Several years ago, Trump and the Clintons were friends , and the Clintons attended Trump's wedding and Bill and Donald played golf together. ..."
"... Russians are very cautious about what they talk about, even amongst each other. Therefore, with the story about [sexual acts] in the Moscow Ritz Carlton, the idea you have managed to triple source it via an employee at the hotel, a serving FSB [Russian security service] officer, and the security officer at the hotel, who inevitably will be at least a former FSB or GRU [Russian intelligence agency] officer It just doesn't make sense. If such a thing had taken place, it would be a Russian state secret. ..."
"... Seems more likely that it's just a piece of "scuttlebutt" that Steele's sources, pressed to find anything juicy on Trump, saw in the newspaper or in a news search on Google or on Russian search engine Yandex . ..."
"... Whatever the truth of the matter, Page is clearly someone who was very keen to network with powerful Russians in 2016 and was not shy about leveraging his affiliation with the Trump campaign to do it. ..."
"... But at the same time, this would also mean Page was a loose cannon and a huge potential liability to the Trump campaign. Igor Sechin is, and was in July 2016, on the Specially Designated Nationals list of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. This means that it's a crime for any US citizen to do any business with Sechin personally (though not with Rosneft as a corporate entity). ..."
"... Page, by all appearances, is reckless and kind of an idiot . He had to have known that his activities (even if they were limited to just non-treasonous networking with Russians) carried a huge risk of blowback for Trump. He didn't care. Carter Page's willingness to toe the Russian line on foreign policy, publicly and on the record, goes beyond even what the most Russophile Western expats in Moscow say in private conversations. I think it's a perfectly valid question to ask why and how Carter Page came to be affiliated with the Trump campaign, why he visited Russia alone at least twice in 2016, and what contacts he's had with Russian officials (he definitely met with some of them, at least at the New Economic School graduation reception on Jul. 8, at which there were several senior Russian officials present and Carter Page was commencement speaker and an honored foreign guest). ..."
"... And why send him to give a public university commencement speech in which he rails against US foreign policy, ensuring wide media coverage? ..."
"... A meeting with a Trump adviser on the sidelines of such a noisy, high-profile trip–with both the Russian and foreign press speculating in real-time what the hell Page was doing in Moscow–seems like an extremely incautious setting for a meeting to discuss the most scandalous quid pro quo since the secret protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. ..."
"... To sum up, I have serious doubts that a meeting took place as described. But I also think that Carter Page was–at the very least–trying to leverage his connection to Trump in Russia for personal gain at the very earliest opportunity he got. ..."
"... *This report doesn't have a date. However, the July 19 report is numbered "2016/94" and the July 26 report is numbered "2016/097" so it seems like this is where the report should go. ..."
"... This is the central allegation against the Trump campaign – that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to take actions aimed at defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. The one thing that I'd add (or, rather, remind) is that by late July, the story of allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election was in full swing . Manafort's history in the former Soviet Union was being widely reported . Carter Page, as mentioned above, had traveled to Moscow for unknown purposes a few weeks before, a trip that was covered in the Russian and US media. ..."
"... What I'd like to point out here -- in terms of the timing of the information in this report -- is that the DNC hacked e-mail dumps on WikiLeaks that led to Debbie Wassermann Schultz resigning as head of the DNC happened on July 22, 2016 , and even before the WikiLeaks dumps the DNC had been attributing the hack to Russia. ..."
"... Since this report refers to the WikiLeaks dump of DNC e-mails that happened on July 22, even though it's undated we know that the report must have been made after that, as well as after the Republican National Convention that happened on July 18, as well as after reports had emerged that the Trump team had been behind a change in the Republican Party platform to remove a reference to providing lethal arms to Ukraine. The allegation made here closely tracks what was being reported in the media at the time. ..."
"... FBI director James Comey made a point of saying that US intelligence services were struck by how unusually noisy the Russians had been in their election interference, as if they wanted to be discovered. ..."
"... *The actual date on the report is "26 July 201 5 " (in the British style), but since it refers to events that happened as recently as June 2016, and based on the news reports that said that Steele was hired in June 2016, I assume this is just a typo. ..."
"... This strains credulity. So there's a single Russian emigre who not only knows the internal mood of the Trump team, but also knows what the Russian leadership is thinking (about a matter that, remember, according to the dossier is top-top secret)? And I know what you're thinking – well, if they were in collusion, of course there's such a person. But who is it? You'd think that there couldn't be too many people who fit this description – being a Russian emigre, close to the Trump campaign, and also with top-level Kremlin access. ..."
"... This is described as someone's opinion so it's hard to argue against or fact-check. I will note that the e-mails from John Podesta's Gmail account started being published by WikiLeaks in October 2016, and since the e-mails run only through March 2016, and given that WikiLeaks usually takes time to prepare for a dump, whoever broke into Podesta's Gmail account was likely very active at the time when this report was dated. If you believe that it was the Russians who broke into Podesta's Gmail account, then this intelligence report is precisely wrong. Eleven days after this report, on August 10, Guccifer 2.0 published the personal contact info of 200 prominent Democrats, so if you believe that Guccifer 2.0 was the alter ego of the Russian government, this intelligence report was precisely wrong. ..."
"... This report is dated precisely one week before Sergei Ivanov was dismissed from his post and moved to a less political role as Putin's special envoy for the environment. If you want to be charitable to the dossier, you could say that this report foreshadows Ivanov's dismissal (later reports say that the dismissal was unexpected). But on the other hand, clearly Ivanov's move to his new position was already in the works on Aug. 5 – it was reported that rumors of the move had been circulating since spring. Why hadn't Steele's "well-placed and established" sources heard those rumors? ..."
"... Peskov is widely considered not to be an independent political player in the Kremlin. He is seen as being a sort of assistant to Putin in addition to his role as spokesman, but someone who likes the spotlight, celebrity and glamour a bit too much. ..."
"... About Turkey: Peskov started his career in the Russian diplomatic corps as a Turkey specialist and worked as the third secretary of the Russian embassy in Ankara in the early '90s. He speaks Turkish. So hearing him mentioned in connection with Turkey makes some sense. ..."
"... Russia was reported to have given advance warning to Erdogan, based on intelligence intercepts, that a coup was being planned. Peskov denied these reports. Just a few weeks earlier, Turkish president Erdogan had apologized to Putin for shooting down a Russian fighter jet on the Turkey-Syria border and Medvedev had announced that Russia would begin lifting the sanctions it had imposed on Turkey in connection with the incident. ..."
"... So in early August 2016 it seemed like Russia-Turkey relations had turned a corner and were being handled quite well – as a matter of fact, over the course of 2016, Turkey went from being the US's partner on Syria to being in a de facto alliance with Russia . The turnaround is stunning – in January 2016 , the US and Turkey were conducting joint operations in Syria, and in January 2017 , Turkey and Russia were conducting joint operations in Syria. Whoever was handling Russia's relationship with Turkey, they did a good job by any objective measure – hard to see how this can be considered "botched." ..."
"... Around this time , there was a lot of speculation in the media about whether Trump would drop out of the race. It's remarkable how the "intelligence" in the dossier follows what was being reported in the news at the time. ..."
"... Ivanov was leading the operation to "hack the US election" literally days before he was fired? That doesn't make sense. ..."
"... This ethnic Russian associate of Trump – who is it? Is it Sergei Millian ? He's supposed to be Source D , a "close associate" of Trump, but he might also be the ethnic Russian (even though Millian is technically from Belarus) associate referred to here and elsewhere. ..."
"... Here we have Carter Page telling the maybe-Millian about his collusion with Russian intelligence on the DNC leaks. Do people really go around confessing crimes willy-nilly? According to this dossier, they do. ..."
"... The big Trump campaign news of August 2016, of course, was that on Aug. 17, Steve Bannon replaced Paul Manafort as head of Trump's campaign. This news was absolutely huge. If Steele's source would have said on Aug. 9 that Bannon would be replacing Manafort, or even that a change of campaign management was being discussed, then in retrospect, you would have to admit that this source was well-informed. But if on Aug. 9, this source was talking about "a rethink and a likely change of tactics," s/he either was not very close to the campaign or was holding back on Steele. ..."
"... So this associate was so close to the campaign that he was privy to all of the team's discussions about collusion with the Russians, but he didn't know that Steve Bannon was about to be named as the new campaign head? ..."
"... But my main beef with this paragraph involves the phrase "kick-back payments to MANAFORT as alleged." Manafort wasn't accused of receiving kickbacks (as I'll explain in a moment, that doesn't make any sense) – he was accused of being paid cash by Yanukovich's political party in an off-the-books scheme, and this was widely covered in the press after the story broke in The New York Times on Aug. 14. ..."
"... That's not a kickback. A kickback is when a government or other organization is offering a contract to an outside contractor, typically in a competitive bid situation, and then when the winner is selected the winner kicks back some of the contract proceeds to the person who manipulated the contract selection process. ..."
"... So if there were kickbacks involved in Manafort's work for Yanukovich, it would've been Manafort kicking back money to Yanukovich, not the other way around. ..."
"... However, what Manafort was actually accused of in the press -- receiving money not properly accounted for under Ukrainian law -- is a crime under American law only if he received income that he didn't report to the IRS, or engaged in money laundering, even if an indisputable "documentary trail" emerges. ..."
"... It is difficult to imagine Putin and his inner circle being fearful of political vulnerability and embarrassment in connection with Manafort. As even Julia Ioffe–a journalist opposed to both Trump and Putin–conceded i n a recent article i n The Atlantic , the political consulting work that Manafort did for Yanukovich and others in the former Soviet Union was hardly unusual. ..."
"... Just to point out – there's a certain implication in the dossier's description of Manafort's work for Yanukovich that this work was "exposed" during the 2016 US election campaign. That's not the case. Manafort just wasn't a household name before 2016, so no one cared. He was just another American political consultant who was more than happy to offer his services to unsavory foreign politicians, like Sandra Bullock's character in "Our Brand is Crisis." ..."
"... Manafort's work for Yanukovich was public knowledge in Ukraine as early as 2005, and was reported actively in the Ukrainian press. By 2016 it was part of Manafort's resume. ..."
"... The report on the Alfa Group (yes, Steele spelled it wrong) is actually the only place in the whole dossier where the dossier was ahead of the mainstream news cycle. The report doesn't give any context for why a special report on the relationship between Putin and Alfa was requested. But on Halloween 2016, the story broke that in Spring and Summer 2016, white-hat hackers had been tracking electronic communications between Trump's e-mail server and an Alfa-Bank (part of Alfa Group) computer in Russia, posting their findings on Reddit – so it was in the public domain but you really had to be paying attention (as apparently a few New York Times journalists and probably the FBI were). I doubt that Steele or his sources were following hacker forums on Reddit. ..."
"... So here's what I think happened: by September, Steele's ultimate client was the Democrats. Someone tipped off the Hillary Clinton campaign (and/or the Clinton-aligned group that was paying Fusion GPS / Orbis) about the electronic link to Alfa, and then Orbis (Steele) got a call asking for an intelligence report on Alfa Group's connections to Putin, without saying why. However, since it was on the phone, the Orbis person heard it as "Alpha Group," and their Russian sources didn't correct the error. ..."
"... Vladimir Putin was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg from 1992 to 1996 . In August 1996 Putin moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow to be Deputy Chief of the Presidential Property Management Directorate (Yeltsin was president at the time, of course). He needed a new job because his boss, St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak , lost his re-election bid. ..."
"... Alfa-Bank was a direct competitor to Khodorkovsky's Bank Menatep (a subsidiary of Rosprom) at the time. So there's no way Fridman and Aven used Govorun to deliver cash to Putin when Putin was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. The dates don't line up. There was an 8-month gap after Putin left St. Petersburg and before Govorun started working at Alfa. ..."
"... How could Steele's sources have made this mistake? Because Govorun's Wikipedia page omits his time at Rosprom, and makes it look like Govorun worked at Alfa-Bank from 1993 to 2000. This is why you don't prepare your report based on Wikipedia, kids! ..."
"... Or if Steele was feeling particularly lazy, he could've gone to Trump's Twitter feed, where Trump proudly told his millions of followers that he'd just spent the weekend with Aras Agalarov and that he wanted to do more business with him. Maybe in Steele's world, being "well-placed" to hear intel about Trump's connections with Russian businesspeople means reading Donald Trump's tweets? ..."
"... There's no other word but "fraud" to describe an "intelligence report" that tries to make it look like the connection between Trump and the Agalarov family is some kind of inside information that you'd need "well-placed sources" to obtain. It took some serious balls for Steele to present it that way, since all anyone would have to do is Google the names mentioned in the report and it would be instantly clear that the intelligence was worthless. ..."
"... Hmm. This is the intelligence that Hillary's people were getting less than one month from Election Day. Intelligence that they paid for. Makes you feel sorry for her; I strongly suspect she was being conned with these reports. ..."
"... In December 2016, Rosneft did indeed sell 19.5% of its shares to two investors using a complicated financing structure. Some have pointed to this as an example where the dossier correctly predicted something would happen. However, the sale of 19.5% of Rosneft to an investor was part of Russia's privatization plan for 2016, which the Russian government announced in December 2015 , and the timeline for the privatization (referring to the 19.5% figure) was updated throughout the year . Anyone who was following Russian business news in 2016 knew that Rosneft was planning to sell 19.5% to an investor that year. ..."
"... Sucks to be Michael Cohen! Unless the dossier is true, he should sue for libel. ..."
"... Sechin is a very big deal in Russia, and a total badass that you don't want to mess with. He is an intimidating guy who is as serious as a heart attack. Carter Page is a dumbass. But the account of this conversation makes it sound like Page was running the meeting like a seasoned pro, leaving Sechin hanging, keeping things vague and noncommittal. I, on the other hand, think that Sechin would never bother meeting with a nobody like Carter Page to discuss something as consequential as billion-dollar oil deals and international relations unless Page had made his bona fides abundantly clear. ..."
"... "Unexpectedly." This looks suspiciously like ass-covering as to why Steele's earlier reports dated mere days before Ivanov's dismissal, containing statements attributed directly to Ivanov, made no mention that these were his last days on the job. ..."
"... Most political observers believed at the time that it was Bernie Sanders, not Russia, who pushed Hillary Clinton away from supporting TPP. This is because Bernie Sanders said openly that he was pressuring Hillary to drop support for TPP. Strangely, the only place where the "veterans' pensions ruse" was ever reported was in the Steele dossier, and the media haven't been tipped off to it to this day. Dodged a bullet! Remember, this is after Putin had supposedly directly ordered all Kremlin insiders, all of whom are tried-and-true Putin loyalists, not to talk about these matters even in private. ..."
"... Steele's team has made the bold decision to misspell Paul Manafort's name as MANNAFORT (Mannafort from heaven?) throughout this report. ..."
"... Gubarev sued BuzzFeed and its editor-in-chief for libel and slander and, lacking any basis other than the dossier itself for these allegations, BuzzFeed blacked out the identifying information. ..."
"... This is quite a cinematic portrayal of hacking. The implication seems to be that there were teams of hackers in a room somewhere and they were ordered to "stand down." Is that how hacking works? Especially in this case, where the hacking that resulted in the 2016 DNC and Podesta leaks had taken place several months before this alleged meeting? This also seems to contradict the declassified US intelligence community findings that said that the hacks were done by Russian government hacker teams called "Cozy Bear" and "Fancy Bear" that were working for the GRU, a Russian intelligence agency that isn't mentioned once in the dossier. The Romanian angle apparently refers t o Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be Romanian but was also believed to be a Russian intelligence agency alter ego only pretending to be Romanian. If these were Russian government hackers, why would they be ordered to cross international borders and "lay low" in Bulgaria, a member of NATO? ..."
"... Also, given that Russia allegedly had huge wins in their 2016 election meddling, why would they be so stingy as to demand that Trump pay his share for the hacking? Especially if they were so concerned about covering their tracks? This only would implicate the Trump campaign and create a paper trail leading directly to Trump transition team members in the United States, plus they would be involving themselves in a criminal conspiracy to violate US money laundering laws, RICO and the like. ..."
Apr 04, 2017 | russiaexplainer.com

THE DOSSIER

... ... ...

[Jan 14, 2018] The US could have had a visionary reformer in JFK but unfortunately he was prematurely decommissioned by the deep state but Trump is light years behind JFK in intellect and articulation.

Notable quotes:
"... I view Trump as a failing would be reformer. I have already stated on this site that Trump's bid to enter the reformers club is pretty much hampered by his reaching power without having a strong third party behind him. He is bound by the diktats of the deep state and the most he can manage is to sabotage the system through guile. His mission is truly impossible. ..."
"... Gorbachov was another failed reformer who nevertheless managed to destroy the old system but his victory was worse than a phyrric one as he moved the situation from a bad system to total chaos of the uncreative destruction type as the Soviet Union morphed into oligarchic Russia. ..."
"... The US could have had a visionary reformer in JFK but unfortunately he was prematurely decommissioned by the deep state but Trump is light years behind JFK in intellect and articulation. Overall I would stick to Gerald Celente's definition of the political establishment as cowards, fools, freaks and liars, a fact that is hard to swallow but true nonetheless. ..."
Jan 14, 2018 | www.unz.com

Joe Levantine , January 12, 2018 at 8:07 pm GMT

@peterAUS

I view Trump as a failing would be reformer. I have already stated on this site that Trump's bid to enter the reformers club is pretty much hampered by his reaching power without having a strong third party behind him. He is bound by the diktats of the deep state and the most he can manage is to sabotage the system through guile. His mission is truly impossible.

Gorbachov was another failed reformer who nevertheless managed to destroy the old system but his victory was worse than a phyrric one as he moved the situation from a bad system to total chaos of the uncreative destruction type as the Soviet Union morphed into oligarchic Russia.

Truly, the only 20th century impressive reformer, notwithstanding the controversy surrounding his name, was Adolf Hitler. He was guided by a vision and after he cumulated many successes started to act on intuition bypassing the guidance of his party and state apparatus, both the civil and the military one, which led him to commit some grave strategic errors that proved finally to be his undoing. Here I repeat what I have already stated on this site that Hitler came to power within weeks from FDR's ascendency, but Hitler managed to do in two years what FDR failed to do in six years of the New Deal with German unemployment falling from 25% under the Weimar Republic to 3%. Yet despite his successes, he did fight the recalcitrance of the bureaucracy by relying on the SA and the SS. Trump has nothing of this luxury and will invariably have to kowtow to the power structure to stay in power.

That leaves the one truly successful Western reformer who managed to materialise his vision, the one and only Otto Von Bismarch, who knew how to play the different layers of the German societies against each other and managed to rule unhindered by the establishment guided by a visionary plan that was supported by extremely competent military and civilian officials.

The US could have had a visionary reformer in JFK but unfortunately he was prematurely decommissioned by the deep state but Trump is light years behind JFK in intellect and articulation. Overall I would stick to Gerald Celente's definition of the political establishment as cowards, fools, freaks and liars, a fact that is hard to swallow but true nonetheless.

[Jan 02, 2018] The Still-Missing Evidence of Russia-gate by Dennis J. Bernstein

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The central groupthink around Russia-gate is the still unproven claim that Russia hacked Democratic emails in 2016 and publicized them via WikiLeaks, a crucial issue that NSA experts say should be easy to prove if true, reports Dennis J. Bernstein. ..."
"... Binney: We at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) published an article on this in July. First of all, if any of the data went anywhere across the fiber optic world, the NSA would know. Just inside the United States, the NSA has over a hundred tap points on the fiber lines, taking in everything. ..."
"... The other data that came out from Guccifer 2.0, a download from the DNC, has been a charade. It was a download and not a transfer across the Web. The Web won't manage such a high speed. It could not have gotten across the Atlantic at that high speed. You would have to have high capacity lines dedicated to that in order to do it. They have been playing games with us. There is no factual evidence to back up any charge of hacking here. ..."
"... Bernstein: Let me come at this from the other side. Has the United States ever tried to hack into and undermine Russian operations in this way? ..."
"... Binney: Oh, sure. We do it as much as anybody else. In the Ukraine, for example, we sponsored regime change. When someone who was pro-Soviet was elected president, we orchestrated a coup to put our man in power. ..."
"... Did the US meddle in the Russian elections that brought Yeltsin to power? ..."
"... I believe they did. We try to leverage our power and influence elections around the world. ..."
"... Binney: Yes, to defend privacy but also to defend the Constitution. Right now, our government is violating the first, fourth and fifth amendments in various ways. Mueller did it, Comey did it, they were all involved in violating the Constitution. ..."
"... Bernstein: There seems to be a new McCarthyite operation around the Russia-gate investigation. It appears that it is an attempt to justify the idea that Clinton lost because the Russians undermined the election. ..."
"... Bernstein: It was initially put out that seventeen intelligence agencies found compelling evidence that the Russians hacked into our election. You're saying it was actually selected individuals from just three agencies. Is there anything to the revelations that FBI agents talked about taking action to prevent Trump from becoming president? ..."
"... Binney: It certainly does seem that it is leaning that way, that is was all a frame-up. It is a sad time in our history, to see the government working against itself internally ..."
"... Bernstein: What concerns do you have regarding the Russia-gate investigation and the McCarthyite tactics that are being employed? ..."
"... Binney: Ultimately, my main concern is that it could lead to actual war with Russia. We should definitely not be going down that path. We need to get out of all these wars. I am also concerned about what we are doing to our own democracy. We are trampling the fundamental principles contained in the Constitution. The only way to reverse all this is to start indicting people who are participating in and managing these activities that are clearly unconstitutional. ..."
Jan 02, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

The central groupthink around Russia-gate is the still unproven claim that Russia hacked Democratic emails in 2016 and publicized them via WikiLeaks, a crucial issue that NSA experts say should be easy to prove if true, reports Dennis J. Bernstein.

A changing-places moment brought about by Russia-gate is that liberals who are usually more skeptical of U.S. intelligence agencies, especially their evidence-free claims, now question the patriotism of Americans who insist that the intelligence community supply proof to support the dangerous claims about Russian 'hacking" of Democratic emails especially when some veteran U.S. government experts say the data would be easily available if the Russians indeed were guilty.

One of those experts is William Binney, a former high-level National Security Agency intelligence official who, after his 2001 retirement, blew the whistle on the extraordinary breadth of NSA surveillance programs. His outspoken criticism of the NSA during the George W. Bush administration made him the subject of FBI investigations that included a raid on his home in 2007.

Even before Edward Snowden's NSA whistleblowing, Binney publicly revealed that NSA had access to telecommunications companies' domestic and international billing records, and that since 9/11 the agency has intercepted some 15 trillion to 20 trillion communications. Snowden has said: "I have tremendous respect for Binney, who did everything he could according to the rules."

I spoke to Binney on Dec. 28 about Russia-gate and a host of topics having to do with spying and America's expanding national security state.

Dennis Bernstein: I would like you to begin by telling us a little about your background at the NSA and how you got there.

William Binney: I was in the United States Army from 1965 to 1969. They put me in the Army Security Agency, an affiliate of the NSA. They liked the work I was doing and they put me on a priority hire in 1970. I was in the NSA for 32 years, mostly working against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. I was solving what were called "wizard puzzles," and the NSA was sometimes referred to as the "Puzzle Palace." I had to solve code systems and work on cyber systems and data systems to be able to predict in advance the "intentions and capabilities of adversaries or potential adversaries."

Bernstein: At a certain point you ran amiss of your supervisors. What did you come to understand and try to tell people that got you in dutch with your higher-ups?

Binney: By 1998-1999, the "digital issue" was basically solved. This created a problem for the upper ranks because at the time they were lobbying Congress for $3.8 billion to continue working on what we had already accomplished. That lobby was started in 1989 for a separate program called Trailblazer, which failed miserably in 2005-2006. We had to brief Congress on how we were progressing and my information ran contrary to the efforts downtown to secure more funding. And so this caused a problem internally.

We learned from some of our staff members in Congress that several of the corporations that were getting contracts from the NSA were downtown lobbying against our program in Congress. This is the military industrial complex in action. That lobby was supported by the NSA management because they just wanted more money to build a bigger empire.

But Dick Cheney, who was behind all of this, wanted it because he grew up under Nixon, who always wanted to know what his political enemies were thinking and doing. This kind of approach of bulk acquisition of everything was possible after you removed certain segments of our software and they used it against the entire digital world. Cheney wanted to know who his political enemies were and get updates about them at any time.

Bernstein: Your expertise was in the Soviet Union and so you must know a lot about bugging. Do you believe that Russia hacked and undermined our last election? Can Trump thank Russia for the result?

Binney: We at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) published an article on this in July. First of all, if any of the data went anywhere across the fiber optic world, the NSA would know. Just inside the United States, the NSA has over a hundred tap points on the fiber lines, taking in everything. Mark Klein exposed some of this at the AT&T facility in San Francisco.

This is not for foreigners, by the way, this is for targeting US citizens. If they wanted only foreigners, all they would have to do was look at the transatlantic cables where they surface on the coast of the United States. But they are not there, they are distributed among the US population.

Bernstein: So if, in fact, the Russians were tapping into DNC headquarters, the NSA would absolutely know about it.

Binney: Yes, and they would also have trace routes on where they went specifically, in Russia or anywhere else. If you remember, about three or four years ago, the Chinese hacked into somewhere in the United States and our government came out and confirmed that it was the Chinese who did it, and it came from a specific military facility in Shanghai. The NSA had these trace route programs embedded by the hundreds across the US and all around the world.

The other data that came out from Guccifer 2.0, a download from the DNC, has been a charade. It was a download and not a transfer across the Web. The Web won't manage such a high speed. It could not have gotten across the Atlantic at that high speed. You would have to have high capacity lines dedicated to that in order to do it. They have been playing games with us. There is no factual evidence to back up any charge of hacking here.

Bernstein: So was this a leak by somebody at Democratic headquarters?

Binney: We don't know that for sure, either. All we know was that it was a local download. We can likely attribute it to a USB device that was physically passed along.

Bernstein: Let me come at this from the other side. Has the United States ever tried to hack into and undermine Russian operations in this way?

Binney: Oh, sure. We do it as much as anybody else. In the Ukraine, for example, we sponsored regime change. When someone who was pro-Soviet was elected president, we orchestrated a coup to put our man in power.

Then we invited the Ukraine into NATO. One of the agreements we made with the Russians when the Soviet Union fell apart was that the Ukraine would give them their nuclear weapons to manage and that we would not move NATO further east toward Russia. I think they made a big mistake when they asked Ukraine to join NATO. They should have asked Russia to join as well, making it all-inclusive. If you treat people as adversaries, they are going to act that way.

Bernstein: Did the US meddle in the Russian elections that brought Yeltsin to power?

Binney: I believe they did. We try to leverage our power and influence elections around the world.

Bernstein: What has your group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, been up to, and what has been the US government's response?

Binney: We have been discussing privacy and security with the European Union and with a number of European parliaments. Recently the Austrian supreme court ruled that the entire bulk acquisition system was unconstitutional. Everyone but the conservatives in the Austrian parliament voted that bill down, making Austria the first country there to do the right thing.

A slide from material leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden to the Washington Post, showing what happens when an NSA analyst "tasks" the PRISM system for information about a new surveillance target.

Bernstein: Is it your goal to defend people's privacy and their right to communicate privately?

Binney: Yes, to defend privacy but also to defend the Constitution. Right now, our government is violating the first, fourth and fifth amendments in various ways. Mueller did it, Comey did it, they were all involved in violating the Constitution.

Back in the 1990's, the idea was to make our analysts effective so that they could see threats coming before they happened and alert people to take action so that lives would be saved. What happens now is that people go out and kill someone and then the NSA and the FBI go on a forensics mission. Intelligence is supposed to tell you in advance when a crime is coming so that you can do something to avert it. They have lost that perspective.

Bernstein: They now have access to every single one of our electronic conversations, is that right? The human mind has a hard time imagining how you could contain, move and study all that information.

Binney: Basically, it is achievable because most of the processing is done by machine so it doesn't cost human energy.

Bernstein: There seems to be a new McCarthyite operation around the Russia-gate investigation. It appears that it is an attempt to justify the idea that Clinton lost because the Russians undermined the election.

Binney: I have seen no evidence at all from anybody, including the intelligence community. If you look at the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) report, they state on the first page that "We have high confidence that the Russians did this." But when you get toward the end of the report, they basically confess that "our judgment does not imply that we have evidence to back it up."

Bernstein: It was initially put out that seventeen intelligence agencies found compelling evidence that the Russians hacked into our election. You're saying it was actually selected individuals from just three agencies. Is there anything to the revelations that FBI agents talked about taking action to prevent Trump from becoming president?

Binney: It certainly does seem that it is leaning that way, that is was all a frame-up. It is a sad time in our history, to see the government working against itself internally.

Bernstein: I take it you are not a big supporter of Trump.

Binney: Well, I voted for him. I couldn't vote for a warmonger like Clinton. She wanted to see our planes shooting down Russian planes in Syria. She advocated for destabilizing Libya, for getting rid of Assad in Syria, she was a strong backer of the war in Iraq.

Bernstein: What concerns do you have regarding the Russia-gate investigation and the McCarthyite tactics that are being employed?

Binney: Ultimately, my main concern is that it could lead to actual war with Russia. We should definitely not be going down that path. We need to get out of all these wars. I am also concerned about what we are doing to our own democracy. We are trampling the fundamental principles contained in the Constitution. The only way to reverse all this is to start indicting people who are participating in and managing these activities that are clearly unconstitutional.

Dennis J Bernstein is a host of "Flashpoints" on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom . You can access the audio archives at www.flashpoints.net .

[Jan 02, 2018] False flag attacks using sharpshooters as a standard instrument of color revolutions

Notable quotes:
"... Andrew Bacevich needs to study more deeply about Syrian history and politics, since his description of Syrian president Bashar Assad as a brutal dictator fits as a description of Bashar's father Hafez Assad but is inaccurate in relation to Bashar Assad, who seems to have a rather gentle personality and is actually one of the more benign leaders in the Middle East. ..."
"... Under that new constitution, in 2014 he ran in a free election observed by international observers against two other politicians and was reelected president. He has promised that if he loses the next election he will step down. ..."
"... Nevertheless Assad has been systematically demonized by the governments and MSM of the US, UK, and France, as well as by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Demonization is a technique that is often used to prepare the way for regime change, and it is not based on objective analysis. ..."
"... Similar tactics were used in Ukraine in February 2014 by ultranationalist Right Sector sharpshooters, who were seen shooting Maidan demonstrators. The deaths of the demonstrators were then blamed on the police. ..."
"... "'From the start the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.' ..."
"... opposition is armed and frequently employs brutality and violence, only in order then to blame the government. ..."
"... For an objective overview of the context of the events of 2011 in Syria that led to the international war against the elected Syrian government, see Stephen Gowans, "The Revolutionary Distemper in Syria That Wasn't." ..."
"... Also see Gowans' well-researched 2016 book 'Washington's Long War on Syria.' The US has been demonizing and trying to overthrow the Syrian government for several decades now, above all because it is the only remaining semi-socialist nation in the Middle East and has single-payer national health insurance, support for the elderly, and free college education for all. Assad is no saint, but he is one of the more democratic and forward-looking leaders in the Middle East today. ..."
Jan 02, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Gen Dau , , May 8, 2017 at 7:55 pm

Andrew Bacevich needs to study more deeply about Syrian history and politics, since his description of Syrian president Bashar Assad as a brutal dictator fits as a description of Bashar's father Hafez Assad but is inaccurate in relation to Bashar Assad, who seems to have a rather gentle personality and is actually one of the more benign leaders in the Middle East.

Bashar Assad had planned to be a doctor, and he studied medicine for two years in the UK before being ordered to return to Syria by his father after his elder brother died in an accident. Although there were some excesses by the police in 2011, Bashar Assad quickly relaxed some old security laws and pushed for a new democratic constitution, which was promulgated in 2012. Under that new constitution, in 2014 he ran in a free election observed by international observers against two other politicians and was reelected president. He has promised that if he loses the next election he will step down.

Nevertheless Assad has been systematically demonized by the governments and MSM of the US, UK, and France, as well as by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Demonization is a technique that is often used to prepare the way for regime change, and it is not based on objective analysis. Although Assad is often called a butcher who gasses his own people, experts such as Theodore Postol of MIT and others have shown that not a single allegation of gassing by the Syrian government under Assad has ever been proven. In addition, many of the excesses by the Syrian police against demonstrators in 2011 seem to have been initiated by armed members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda in Syria, who quickly infiltrated the demonstrations.

There have even been allegations that jihadi sharpshooters on rooftops shot demonstrators in false-flag attacks.

Similar tactics were used in Ukraine in February 2014 by ultranationalist Right Sector sharpshooters, who were seen shooting Maidan demonstrators. The deaths of the demonstrators were then blamed on the police. In the case of Syria:

"Syrian-based Father Frans van der Lugt was the Dutch priest murdered by a gunman in Homs . His involvement in reconciliation and peace activities never stopped him from lobbing criticisms at both sides in this conflict. But in the first year of the crisis, he penned some remarkable observations about the violence – this one in January 2012:

"'From the start the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.'

"In September 2011 he wrote: 'From the start there has been the problem of the armed groups, which are also part of the opposition The opposition of the street is much stronger than any other opposition. And this opposition is armed and frequently employs brutality and violence, only in order then to blame the government. '"

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/157412-syria-hidden-massacre-2011/

For an objective overview of the context of the events of 2011 in Syria that led to the international war against the elected Syrian government, see Stephen Gowans, "The Revolutionary Distemper in Syria That Wasn't."

https://gowans.wordpress.com/2016/10/22/the-revolutionary-distemper-in-syria-that-wasnt/

Also see Gowans' well-researched 2016 book 'Washington's Long War on Syria.' The US has been demonizing and trying to overthrow the Syrian government for several decades now, above all because it is the only remaining semi-socialist nation in the Middle East and has single-payer national health insurance, support for the elderly, and free college education for all. Assad is no saint, but he is one of the more democratic and forward-looking leaders in the Middle East today.

[Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

Highly recommended!
Essentially CIA dictates the US foreign policy. The tail is wagging the dog. The current Russophobia hysteria mean additional billions for CIA and FBI. As simple as that.
The article contain some important observation about self-sustaining nature of the US militarism. It is able to create new threats and new insurgencies almost at will via CIA activities.
The key problem is that wars are highly profitable for important part of the ruling elite, especially representing finance and military industrial complex. Also now part of the US ruling elite now consists of "colonial administrators" which are directly interested in maintaining and expanding the US empire. This is trap from which nation might not be able to escape.
Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. government may pretend to respect a "rules-based" global order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is "might makes right" -- and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and enforcer, writes Nicolas J.S. Davies. ..."
"... Once the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the 1954 Geneva Accords and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and fair election in 1956, the die was cast. ..."
"... No U.S. president could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the limits of what U.S. military force could achieve, betraying widely held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and profited from them. ..."
"... The critical "lesson of Vietnam" was summed up by Richard Barnet in his 1972 book Roots of War . "At the very moment that the number one nation has perfected the science of killing," Barnet wrote, "It has become an impractical means of political domination." ..."
"... Even the senior officer corps of the U.S. military saw it that way, since many of them had survived the horrors of Vietnam as junior officers. The CIA could still wreak havoc in Latin America and elsewhere, but the full destructive force of the U.S. military was not unleashed again until the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the First Gulf War in 1991. ..."
"... Half a century after Vietnam, we have tragically come full circle. With the CIA's politicized intelligence running wild in Washington and its covert operations spreading violence and chaos across every continent, President Trump faces the same pressures to maintain his own and his country's credibility as Johnson and Nixon did. ..."
"... Trump is facing these questions, not just in one country, Vietnam, but in dozens of countries across the world, and the interests perpetuating and fueling this cycle of crisis and war have only become more entrenched over time, as President Eisenhower warned that they would, despite the end of the Cold War and, until now, the lack of any actual military threat to the United States. ..."
"... U.S. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1955 to 1964, managing the global military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and around the world. Fletcher Prouty's book, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World , was suppressed when it was first published in 1973. Thousands of copies disappeared from bookstores and libraries, and a mysterious Army Colonel bought the entire shipment of 3,500 copies the publisher sent to Australia. But Prouty's book was republished in 2011, and it is a timely account of the role of the CIA in U.S. policy. ..."
"... The main purpose of the CIA, as Prouty saw it, is to create such pretexts for war. ..."
"... The CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes foreign intelligence and a clandestine service that conducts covert operations. Both functions are essential to creating pretexts for war, and that is what they have done for 70 years. ..."
"... Prouty described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S. military, the State Department, the National Security Council and other government institutions, covertly placing its officers in critical positions to ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever forces, weapons, equipment, ammunition and other resources it needs to carry them out. ..."
"... Many retired intelligence officers, such as Ray McGovern and the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), saw the merging of clandestine operations with intelligence analysis in one agency as corrupting the objective analysis they tried to provide to policymakers. They formed VIPS in 2003 in response to the fabrication of politicized intelligence that provided false pretexts for the U.S. to invade and destroy Iraq. ..."
"... But Fletcher Prouty was even more disturbed by the way that the CIA uses clandestine operations to trigger coups, wars and chaos. The civil and proxy war in Syria is a perfect example of what Prouty meant ..."
"... The role of U.S. "counterterrorism" operations in fueling armed resistance and terrorism, and the absence of any plan to reduce the asymmetric violence unleashed by the "global war on terror," would be no surprise to Fletcher Prouty. As he explained, such clandestine operations always take on a life of their own that is unrelated, and often counter-productive, to any rational U.S. policy objective. ..."
"... This is a textbook CIA operation on the same model as Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 60s. The CIA uses U.S. special forces and training missions to launch covert and proxy military operations that drive local populations into armed resistance groups, and then uses the presence of those armed resistance groups to justify ever-escalating U.S. military involvement. This is Vietnam redux on a continental scale. ..."
"... China is already too big and powerful for the U.S. to apply what is known as the Ledeen doctrine named for neoconservative theorist and intelligence operative Michael Ledeen who suggested that every 10 years or so, the United States "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business." ..."
"... As long as the CIA and the U.S. military keep plunging the scapegoats for our failed policies into economic crisis, violence and chaos, the United States and the United Kingdom can remain the safe havens of the world's wealth, islands of privilege and excess amidst the storms they unleash on others. ..."
"... But if that is the only "significant national objective" driving these policies, it is surely about time for the 99 percent of Americans who reap no benefit from these murderous schemes to stop the CIA and its allies before they completely wreck the already damaged and fragile world in which we all must live, Americans and foreigners alike. ..."
"... Douglas Valentine has probably studied the CIA in more depth than any other American journalist, beginning with his book on The Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He has written a new book titled The CIA as Organized Crime : How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, in which he brings Fletcher Prouty's analysis right up to the present day, describing the CIA's role in our current wars and the many ways it infiltrates, manipulates and controls U.S. policy. ..."
"... In Venezuela, the CIA and the right-wing opposition are following the same strategy that President Nixon ordered the CIA to inflict on Chile, to "make the economy scream" in preparation for the 1973 coup. ..."
"... The U.S. willingness to scrap the Agreed Framework in 2003, the breakdown of the Six Party Talks in 2009 and the U.S. refusal to acknowledge that its own military actions and threats create legitimate defense concerns for North Korea have driven the North Koreans into a corner from which they see a credible nuclear deterrent as their only chance to avoid mass destruction. ..."
"... Obama's charm offensive invigorated old and new military alliances with the U.K., France and the Arab monarchies, and he quietly ran up the most expensive military budge t of any president since World War Two. ..."
"... Throughout history, serial aggression has nearly always provoked increasingly united opposition, as peace-loving countries and people have reluctantly summoned the courage to stand up to an aggressor. France under Napoleon and Hitler's Germany also regarded themselves as exceptional, and in their own ways they were. But in the end, their belief in their exceptionalism led them on to defeat and destruction. ..."
Oct 30, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

The U.S. government may pretend to respect a "rules-based" global order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is "might makes right" -- and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and enforcer, writes Nicolas J.S. Davies.

As the recent PBS documentary on the American War in Vietnam acknowledged, few American officials ever believed that the United States could win the war, neither those advising Johnson as he committed hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, nor those advising Nixon as he escalated a brutal aerial bombardment that had already killed millions of people.

As conversations tape-recorded in the White House reveal, and as other writers have documented, the reasons for wading into the Big Muddy, as Pete Seeger satirized it , and then pushing on regardless, all came down to "credibility": the domestic political credibility of the politicians involved and America's international credibility as a military power.

Once the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the 1954 Geneva Accords and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and fair election in 1956, the die was cast. The CIA's support for the repressive Diem regime and its successors ensured an ever-escalating war, as the South rose in rebellion, supported by the North. No U.S. president could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the limits of what U.S. military force could achieve, betraying widely held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and profited from them.

The critical "lesson of Vietnam" was summed up by Richard Barnet in his 1972 book Roots of War . "At the very moment that the number one nation has perfected the science of killing," Barnet wrote, "It has become an impractical means of political domination."

Even the senior officer corps of the U.S. military saw it that way, since many of them had survived the horrors of Vietnam as junior officers. The CIA could still wreak havoc in Latin America and elsewhere, but the full destructive force of the U.S. military was not unleashed again until the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the First Gulf War in 1991.

Half a century after Vietnam, we have tragically come full circle. With the CIA's politicized intelligence running wild in Washington and its covert operations spreading violence and chaos across every continent, President Trump faces the same pressures to maintain his own and his country's credibility as Johnson and Nixon did. His predictable response has been to escalate ongoing wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and West Africa, and to threaten new ones against North Korea, Iran and Venezuela.

Trump is facing these questions, not just in one country, Vietnam, but in dozens of countries across the world, and the interests perpetuating and fueling this cycle of crisis and war have only become more entrenched over time, as President Eisenhower warned that they would, despite the end of the Cold War and, until now, the lack of any actual military threat to the United States.

Ironically but predictably, the U.S.'s aggressive and illegal war policy has finally provoked a real military threat to the U.S., albeit one that has emerged only in response to U.S. war plans. As I explained in a recent article , North Korea's discovery in 2016 of a U.S. plan to assassinate its president, Kim Jong Un, and launch a Second Korean War has triggered a crash program to develop long-range ballistic missiles that could give North Korea a viable nuclear deterrent and prevent a U.S. attack. But the North Koreans will not feel safe from attack until their leaders and ours are sure that their missiles can deliver a nuclear strike against the U.S. mainland.

The CIA's Pretexts for War

U.S. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1955 to 1964, managing the global military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and around the world. Fletcher Prouty's book, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World , was suppressed when it was first published in 1973. Thousands of copies disappeared from bookstores and libraries, and a mysterious Army Colonel bought the entire shipment of 3,500 copies the publisher sent to Australia. But Prouty's book was republished in 2011, and it is a timely account of the role of the CIA in U.S. policy.

Prouty surprisingly described the role of the CIA as a response by powerful people and interests to the abolition of the U.S. Department of War and the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947. Once the role of the U.S. military was redefined as one of defense, in line with the United Nations Charter's prohibition against the threat or use of military force in 1945 and similar moves by other military powers, it would require some kind of crisis or threat to justify using military force in the future, both legally and politically. The main purpose of the CIA, as Prouty saw it, is to create such pretexts for war.

The CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes foreign intelligence and a clandestine service that conducts covert operations. Both functions are essential to creating pretexts for war, and that is what they have done for 70 years.

Prouty described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S. military, the State Department, the National Security Council and other government institutions, covertly placing its officers in critical positions to ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever forces, weapons, equipment, ammunition and other resources it needs to carry them out.

Many retired intelligence officers, such as Ray McGovern and the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), saw the merging of clandestine operations with intelligence analysis in one agency as corrupting the objective analysis they tried to provide to policymakers. They formed VIPS in 2003 in response to the fabrication of politicized intelligence that provided false pretexts for the U.S. to invade and destroy Iraq.

CIA in Syria and Africa

But Fletcher Prouty was even more disturbed by the way that the CIA uses clandestine operations to trigger coups, wars and chaos. The civil and proxy war in Syria is a perfect example of what Prouty meant. In late 2011, after destroying Libya and aiding in the torture-murder of Muammar Gaddafi, the CIA and its allies began flying fighters and weapons from Libya to Turkey and infiltrating them into Syria. Then, working with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Croatia and other allies, this operation poured thousands of tons of weapons across Syria's borders to ignite and fuel a full-scale civil war.

Once these covert operations were under way, they ran wild until they had unleashed a savage Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria (Jabhat al-Nusra, now rebranded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), spawned the even more savage "Islamic State," triggered the heaviest and probably the deadliest U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam and drawn Russia, Iran, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Hezbollah, Kurdish militias and almost every state or armed group in the Middle East into the chaos of Syria's civil war.

Meanwhile, as Al Qaeda and Islamic State have expanded their operations across Africa, the U.N. has published a report titled Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment , based on 500 interviews with African militants. This study has found that the kind of special operations and training missions the CIA and AFRICOM are conducting and supporting in Africa are in fact the critical "tipping point" that drives Africans to join militant groups like Al Qaeda, Al-Shabab and Boko Haram.

The report found that government action, such as the killing or detention of friends or family, was the "tipping point" that drove 71 percent of African militants interviewed to join armed groups, and that this was a more important factor than religious ideology.

The conclusions of Journey to Extremism in Africa confirm the findings of other similar studies. The Center for Civilians in Conflict interviewed 250 civilians who joined armed groups in Bosnia, Somalia, Gaza and Libya for its 2015 study, The People's Perspectives : Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict . The study found that the most common motivation for civilians to join armed groups was simply to protect themselves or their families.

The role of U.S. "counterterrorism" operations in fueling armed resistance and terrorism, and the absence of any plan to reduce the asymmetric violence unleashed by the "global war on terror," would be no surprise to Fletcher Prouty. As he explained, such clandestine operations always take on a life of their own that is unrelated, and often counter-productive, to any rational U.S. policy objective.

"The more intimate one becomes with this activity," Prouty wrote, "The more one begins to realize that such operations are rarely, if ever, initiated from an intent to become involved in pursuit of some national objective in the first place."

The U.S. justifies the deployment of 6,000 U.S. special forces and military trainers to 53 of the 54 countries in Africa as a response to terrorism. But the U.N.'s Journey to Extremism in Africa study makes it clear that the U.S. militarization of Africa is in fact the "tipping point" that is driving Africans across the continent to join armed resistance groups in the first place.

This is a textbook CIA operation on the same model as Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 60s. The CIA uses U.S. special forces and training missions to launch covert and proxy military operations that drive local populations into armed resistance groups, and then uses the presence of those armed resistance groups to justify ever-escalating U.S. military involvement. This is Vietnam redux on a continental scale.

Taking on China

What seems to really be driving the CIA's militarization of U.S. policy in Africa is China's growing influence on the continent. As Steve Bannon put it in an interview with the Economist in August, "Let's go screw up One Belt One Road."

China is already too big and powerful for the U.S. to apply what is known as the Ledeen doctrine named for neoconservative theorist and intelligence operative Michael Ledeen who suggested that every 10 years or so, the United States "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business."

China is too powerful and armed with nuclear weapons. So, in this case, the CIA's job would be to spread violence and chaos to disrupt Chinese trade and investment, and to make African governments increasingly dependent on U.S. military aid to fight the militant groups spawned and endlessly regenerated by U.S.-led "counterterrorism" operations.

Neither Ledeen nor Bannon pretend that such policies are designed to build more prosperous or viable societies in the Middle East or Africa, let alone to benefit their people. They both know very well what Richard Barnet already understood 45 years ago, that America's unprecedented investment in weapons, war and CIA covert operations are only good for one thing: to kill people and destroy infrastructure, reducing cities to rubble, societies to chaos and the desperate survivors to poverty and displacement.

As long as the CIA and the U.S. military keep plunging the scapegoats for our failed policies into economic crisis, violence and chaos, the United States and the United Kingdom can remain the safe havens of the world's wealth, islands of privilege and excess amidst the storms they unleash on others.

But if that is the only "significant national objective" driving these policies, it is surely about time for the 99 percent of Americans who reap no benefit from these murderous schemes to stop the CIA and its allies before they completely wreck the already damaged and fragile world in which we all must live, Americans and foreigners alike.

Douglas Valentine has probably studied the CIA in more depth than any other American journalist, beginning with his book on The Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He has written a new book titled The CIA as Organized Crime : How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, in which he brings Fletcher Prouty's analysis right up to the present day, describing the CIA's role in our current wars and the many ways it infiltrates, manipulates and controls U.S. policy.

The Three Scapegoats

In Trump's speech to the U.N. General Assembly, he named North Korea, Iran and Venezuela as his prime targets for destabilization, economic warfare and, ultimately, the overthrow of their governments, whether by coup d'etat or the mass destruction of their civilian population and infrastructure. But Trump's choice of scapegoats for America's failures was obviously not based on a rational reassessment of foreign policy priorities by the new administration. It was only a tired rehashing of the CIA's unfinished business with two-thirds of Bush's "axis of evil" and Bush White House official Elliott Abrams' failed 2002 coup in Caracas, now laced with explicit and illegal threats of aggression.

How Trump and the CIA plan to sacrifice their three scapegoats for America's failures remains to be seen. This is not 2001, when the world stood silent at the U.S. bombardment and invasion of Afghanistan after September 11th. It is more like 2003, when the U.S. destruction of Iraq split the Atlantic alliance and alienated most of the world. It is certainly not 2011, after Obama's global charm offensive had rebuilt U.S. alliances and provided cover for French President Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Cameron, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Arab royals to destroy Libya, once ranked by the U.N. as the most developed country in Africa , now mired in intractable chaos.

In 2017, a U.S. attack on any one of Trump's scapegoats would isolate the United States from many of its allies and undermine its standing in the world in far-reaching ways that might be more permanent and harder to repair than the invasion and destruction of Iraq.

In Venezuela, the CIA and the right-wing opposition are following the same strategy that President Nixon ordered the CIA to inflict on Chile, to "make the economy scream" in preparation for the 1973 coup. But the solid victory of Venezuela's ruling Socialist Party in recent nationwide gubernatorial elections, despite a long and deep economic crisis, reveals little public support for the CIA's puppets in Venezuela.

The CIA has successfully discredited the Venezuelan government through economic warfare, increasingly violent right-wing street protests and a global propaganda campaign. But the CIA has stupidly hitched its wagon to an extreme right-wing, upper-class opposition that has no credibility with most of the Venezuelan public, who still turn out for the Socialists at the polls. A CIA coup or U.S. military intervention would meet fierce public resistance and damage U.S. relations all over Latin America.

Boxing In North Korea

A U.S. aerial bombardment or "preemptive strike" on North Korea could quickly escalate into a war between the U.S. and China, which has reiterated its commitment to North Korea's defense if North Korea is attacked. We do not know exactly what was in the U.S. war plan discovered by North Korea, so neither can we know how North Korea and China could respond if the U.S. pressed ahead with it.

Most analysts have long concluded that any U.S. attack on North Korea would be met with a North Korean artillery and missile barrage that would inflict unacceptable civilian casualties on Seoul, a metropolitan area of 26 million people, three times the population of New York City. Seoul is only 35 miles from the frontier with North Korea, placing it within range of a huge array of North Korean weapons. What was already a no-win calculus is now compounded by the possibility that North Korea could respond with nuclear weapons, turning any prospect of a U.S. attack into an even worse nightmare.

U.S. mismanagement of its relations with North Korea should be an object lesson for its relations with Iran, graphically demonstrating the advantages of diplomacy, talks and agreements over threats of war. Under the Agreed Framework signed in 1994, North Korea stopped work on two much larger nuclear reactors than the small experimental one operating at Yongbyong since 1986, which only produces 6 kg of plutonium per year, enough for one nuclear bomb.

The lesson of Bush's Iraq invasion in 2003 after Saddam Hussein had complied with demands that he destroy Iraq's stockpiles of chemical weapons and shut down a nascent nuclear program was not lost on North Korea. Not only did the invasion lay waste to large sections of Iraq with hundreds of thousands of dead but Hussein himself was hunted down and condemned to death by hanging.

Still, after North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006, even its small experimental reactor was shut down as a result of the "Six Party Talks" in 2007, all the fuel rods were removed and placed under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the cooling tower of the reactor was demolished in 2008.

But then, as relations deteriorated, North Korea conducted a second nuclear weapon test and again began reprocessing spent fuel rods to recover plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.

North Korea has now conducted six nuclear weapons tests. The explosions in the first five tests increased gradually up to 15-25 kilotons, about the yield of the bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but estimates for the yield of the 2017 test range from 110 to 250 kilotons , comparable to a small hydrogen bomb.

The even greater danger in a new war in Korea is that the U.S. could unleash part of its arsenal of 4,000 more powerful weapons (100 to 1,200 kilotons), which could kill millions of people and devastate and poison the region, or even the world, for years to come.

The U.S. willingness to scrap the Agreed Framework in 2003, the breakdown of the Six Party Talks in 2009 and the U.S. refusal to acknowledge that its own military actions and threats create legitimate defense concerns for North Korea have driven the North Koreans into a corner from which they see a credible nuclear deterrent as their only chance to avoid mass destruction.

China has proposed a reasonable framework for diplomacy to address the concerns of both sides, but the U.S. insists on maintaining its propaganda narratives that all the fault lies with North Korea and that it has some kind of "military solution" to the crisis.

This may be the most dangerous idea we have heard from U.S. policymakers since the end of the Cold War, but it is the logical culmination of a systematic normalization of deviant and illegal U.S. war-making that has already cost millions of lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan. As historian Gabriel Kolko wrote in Century of War in 1994, "options and decisions that are intrinsically dangerous and irrational become not merely plausible but the only form of reasoning about war and diplomacy that is possible in official circles."

Demonizing Iran

The idea that Iran has ever had a nuclear weapons program is seriously contested by the IAEA, which has examined every allegation presented by the CIA and other Western "intelligence" agencies as well as Israel. Former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei revealed many details of this wild goose chase in his 2011 memoir, Age of Deception : Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times .

When the CIA and its partners reluctantly acknowledged the IAEA's conclusions in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), ElBaradei issued a press release confirming that, "the agency has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program or undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran."

Since 2007, the IAEA has resolved all its outstanding concerns with Iran. It has verified that dual-use technologies that Iran imported before 2003 were in fact used for other purposes, and it has exposed the mysterious "laptop documents" that appeared to show Iranian plans for a nuclear weapon as forgeries. Gareth Porter thoroughly explored all these questions and allegations and the history of mistrust that fueled them in his 2014 book, Manufactured Crisis : the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare , which I highly recommend.

But, in the parallel Bizarro world of U.S. politics, hopelessly poisoned by the CIA's endless disinformation campaigns, Hillary Clinton could repeatedly take false credit for disarming Iran during her presidential campaign, and neither Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump nor any corporate media interviewer dared to challenge her claims.

"When President Obama took office, Iran was racing toward a nuclear bomb," Clinton fantasized in a prominent foreign policy speech on June 2, 2016, claiming that her brutal sanctions policy "brought Iran to the table."

In fact, as Trita Parsi documented in his 2012 book, A Single Roll of the Dice : Obama's Diplomacy With Iran , the Iranians were ready, not just to "come to the table," but to sign a comprehensive agreement based on a U.S. proposal brokered by Turkey and Brazil in 2010. But, in a classic case of "tail wags dog," the U.S. then rejected its own proposal because it would have undercut support for tighter sanctions in the U.N. Security Council. In other words, Clinton's sanctions policy did not "bring Iran to the table", but prevented the U.S. from coming to the table itself.

As a senior State Department official told Trita Parsi, the real problem with U.S. diplomacy with Iran when Clinton was at the State Department was that the U.S. would not take "Yes" for an answer. Trump's ham-fisted decertification of Iran's compliance with the JCPOA is right out of Clinton's playbook, and it demonstrates that the CIA is still determined to use Iran as a scapegoat for America's failures in the Middle East.

The spurious claim that Iran is the world's greatest sponsor of terrorism is another CIA canard reinforced by endless repetition. It is true that Iran supports and supplies weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas, which are both listed as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. But they are mainly defensive resistance groups that defend Lebanon and Gaza respectively against invasions and attacks by Israel.

Shifting attention away from Al Qaeda, Islamic State, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and other groups that actually commit terrorist crimes around the world might just seem like a case of the CIA "taking its eyes off the ball," if it wasn't so transparently timed to frame Iran with new accusations now that the manufactured crisis of the nuclear scare has run its course.

What the Future Holds

Barack Obama's most consequential international achievement may have been the triumph of symbolism over substance behind which he expanded and escalated the so-called "war on terror," with a vast expansion of covert operations and proxy wars that eventually triggered the heaviest U.S. aerial bombardments since Vietnam in Iraq and Syria.

Obama's charm offensive invigorated old and new military alliances with the U.K., France and the Arab monarchies, and he quietly ran up the most expensive military budget of any president since World War Two.

But Obama's expansion of the "war on terror" under cover of his deceptive global public relations campaign created many more problems than it solved, and Trump and his advisers are woefully ill-equipped to solve any of them. Trump's expressed desire to place America first and to resist foreign entanglements is hopelessly at odds with his aggressive, bullying approach to every foreign policy problem.

If the U.S. could threaten and fight its way to a resolution of any of its international problems, it would have done so already. That is exactly what it has been trying to do since the 1990s, behind both the swagger and bluster of Bush and Trump and the deceptive charm of Clinton and Obama: a "good cop – bad cop" routine that should no longer fool anyone anywhere.

But as Lyndon Johnson found as he waded deeper and deeper into the Big Muddy in Vietnam, lying to the public about unwinnable wars does not make them any more winnable. It just gets more people killed and makes it harder and harder to ever tell the public the truth.

In unwinnable wars based on lies, the "credibility" problem only gets more complicated, as new lies require new scapegoats and convoluted narratives to explain away graveyards filled by old lies. Obama's cynical global charm offensive bought the "war on terror" another eight years, but that only allowed the CIA to drag the U.S. into more trouble and spread its chaos to more places around the world.

Meanwhile, Russian President Putin is winning hearts and minds in capitals around the world by calling for a recommitment to the rule of international law , which prohibits the threat or use of military force except in self-defense. Every new U.S. threat or act of aggression will only make Putin's case more persuasive, not least to important U.S. allies like South Korea, Germany and other members of the European Union, whose complicity in U.S. aggression has until now helped to give it a false veneer of political legitimacy.

Throughout history, serial aggression has nearly always provoked increasingly united opposition, as peace-loving countries and people have reluctantly summoned the courage to stand up to an aggressor. France under Napoleon and Hitler's Germany also regarded themselves as exceptional, and in their own ways they were. But in the end, their belief in their exceptionalism led them on to defeat and destruction.

Americans had better hope that we are not so exceptional, and that the world will find a diplomatic rather than a military "solution" to its American problem. Our chances of survival would improve a great deal if American officials and politicians would finally start to act like something other than putty in the hands of the CIA

Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq . He also wrote the chapters on "Obama at War" in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader .

[Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

Highly recommended!
Essentially CIA dictates the US foreign policy. The tail is wagging the dog. The current Russophobia hysteria mean additional billions for CIA and FBI. As simple as that.
The article contain some important observation about self-sustaining nature of the US militarism. It is able to create new threats and new insurgencies almost at will via CIA activities.
The key problem is that wars are highly profitable for important part of the ruling elite, especially representing finance and military industrial complex. Also now part of the US ruling elite now consists of "colonial administrators" which are directly interested in maintaining and expanding the US empire. This is trap from which nation might not be able to escape.
Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. government may pretend to respect a "rules-based" global order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is "might makes right" -- and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and enforcer, writes Nicolas J.S. Davies. ..."
"... Once the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the 1954 Geneva Accords and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and fair election in 1956, the die was cast. ..."
"... No U.S. president could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the limits of what U.S. military force could achieve, betraying widely held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and profited from them. ..."
"... The critical "lesson of Vietnam" was summed up by Richard Barnet in his 1972 book Roots of War . "At the very moment that the number one nation has perfected the science of killing," Barnet wrote, "It has become an impractical means of political domination." ..."
"... Even the senior officer corps of the U.S. military saw it that way, since many of them had survived the horrors of Vietnam as junior officers. The CIA could still wreak havoc in Latin America and elsewhere, but the full destructive force of the U.S. military was not unleashed again until the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the First Gulf War in 1991. ..."
"... Half a century after Vietnam, we have tragically come full circle. With the CIA's politicized intelligence running wild in Washington and its covert operations spreading violence and chaos across every continent, President Trump faces the same pressures to maintain his own and his country's credibility as Johnson and Nixon did. ..."
"... Trump is facing these questions, not just in one country, Vietnam, but in dozens of countries across the world, and the interests perpetuating and fueling this cycle of crisis and war have only become more entrenched over time, as President Eisenhower warned that they would, despite the end of the Cold War and, until now, the lack of any actual military threat to the United States. ..."
"... U.S. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1955 to 1964, managing the global military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and around the world. Fletcher Prouty's book, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World , was suppressed when it was first published in 1973. Thousands of copies disappeared from bookstores and libraries, and a mysterious Army Colonel bought the entire shipment of 3,500 copies the publisher sent to Australia. But Prouty's book was republished in 2011, and it is a timely account of the role of the CIA in U.S. policy. ..."
"... The main purpose of the CIA, as Prouty saw it, is to create such pretexts for war. ..."
"... The CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes foreign intelligence and a clandestine service that conducts covert operations. Both functions are essential to creating pretexts for war, and that is what they have done for 70 years. ..."
"... Prouty described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S. military, the State Department, the National Security Council and other government institutions, covertly placing its officers in critical positions to ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever forces, weapons, equipment, ammunition and other resources it needs to carry them out. ..."
"... Many retired intelligence officers, such as Ray McGovern and the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), saw the merging of clandestine operations with intelligence analysis in one agency as corrupting the objective analysis they tried to provide to policymakers. They formed VIPS in 2003 in response to the fabrication of politicized intelligence that provided false pretexts for the U.S. to invade and destroy Iraq. ..."
"... But Fletcher Prouty was even more disturbed by the way that the CIA uses clandestine operations to trigger coups, wars and chaos. The civil and proxy war in Syria is a perfect example of what Prouty meant ..."
"... The role of U.S. "counterterrorism" operations in fueling armed resistance and terrorism, and the absence of any plan to reduce the asymmetric violence unleashed by the "global war on terror," would be no surprise to Fletcher Prouty. As he explained, such clandestine operations always take on a life of their own that is unrelated, and often counter-productive, to any rational U.S. policy objective. ..."
"... This is a textbook CIA operation on the same model as Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 60s. The CIA uses U.S. special forces and training missions to launch covert and proxy military operations that drive local populations into armed resistance groups, and then uses the presence of those armed resistance groups to justify ever-escalating U.S. military involvement. This is Vietnam redux on a continental scale. ..."
"... China is already too big and powerful for the U.S. to apply what is known as the Ledeen doctrine named for neoconservative theorist and intelligence operative Michael Ledeen who suggested that every 10 years or so, the United States "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business." ..."
"... As long as the CIA and the U.S. military keep plunging the scapegoats for our failed policies into economic crisis, violence and chaos, the United States and the United Kingdom can remain the safe havens of the world's wealth, islands of privilege and excess amidst the storms they unleash on others. ..."
"... But if that is the only "significant national objective" driving these policies, it is surely about time for the 99 percent of Americans who reap no benefit from these murderous schemes to stop the CIA and its allies before they completely wreck the already damaged and fragile world in which we all must live, Americans and foreigners alike. ..."
"... Douglas Valentine has probably studied the CIA in more depth than any other American journalist, beginning with his book on The Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He has written a new book titled The CIA as Organized Crime : How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, in which he brings Fletcher Prouty's analysis right up to the present day, describing the CIA's role in our current wars and the many ways it infiltrates, manipulates and controls U.S. policy. ..."
"... In Venezuela, the CIA and the right-wing opposition are following the same strategy that President Nixon ordered the CIA to inflict on Chile, to "make the economy scream" in preparation for the 1973 coup. ..."
"... The U.S. willingness to scrap the Agreed Framework in 2003, the breakdown of the Six Party Talks in 2009 and the U.S. refusal to acknowledge that its own military actions and threats create legitimate defense concerns for North Korea have driven the North Koreans into a corner from which they see a credible nuclear deterrent as their only chance to avoid mass destruction. ..."
"... Obama's charm offensive invigorated old and new military alliances with the U.K., France and the Arab monarchies, and he quietly ran up the most expensive military budge t of any president since World War Two. ..."
"... Throughout history, serial aggression has nearly always provoked increasingly united opposition, as peace-loving countries and people have reluctantly summoned the courage to stand up to an aggressor. France under Napoleon and Hitler's Germany also regarded themselves as exceptional, and in their own ways they were. But in the end, their belief in their exceptionalism led them on to defeat and destruction. ..."
Oct 30, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

The U.S. government may pretend to respect a "rules-based" global order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is "might makes right" -- and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and enforcer, writes Nicolas J.S. Davies.

As the recent PBS documentary on the American War in Vietnam acknowledged, few American officials ever believed that the United States could win the war, neither those advising Johnson as he committed hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, nor those advising Nixon as he escalated a brutal aerial bombardment that had already killed millions of people.

As conversations tape-recorded in the White House reveal, and as other writers have documented, the reasons for wading into the Big Muddy, as Pete Seeger satirized it , and then pushing on regardless, all came down to "credibility": the domestic political credibility of the politicians involved and America's international credibility as a military power.

Once the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the 1954 Geneva Accords and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and fair election in 1956, the die was cast. The CIA's support for the repressive Diem regime and its successors ensured an ever-escalating war, as the South rose in rebellion, supported by the North. No U.S. president could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the limits of what U.S. military force could achieve, betraying widely held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and profited from them.

The critical "lesson of Vietnam" was summed up by Richard Barnet in his 1972 book Roots of War . "At the very moment that the number one nation has perfected the science of killing," Barnet wrote, "It has become an impractical means of political domination."

Even the senior officer corps of the U.S. military saw it that way, since many of them had survived the horrors of Vietnam as junior officers. The CIA could still wreak havoc in Latin America and elsewhere, but the full destructive force of the U.S. military was not unleashed again until the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the First Gulf War in 1991.

Half a century after Vietnam, we have tragically come full circle. With the CIA's politicized intelligence running wild in Washington and its covert operations spreading violence and chaos across every continent, President Trump faces the same pressures to maintain his own and his country's credibility as Johnson and Nixon did. His predictable response has been to escalate ongoing wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and West Africa, and to threaten new ones against North Korea, Iran and Venezuela.

Trump is facing these questions, not just in one country, Vietnam, but in dozens of countries across the world, and the interests perpetuating and fueling this cycle of crisis and war have only become more entrenched over time, as President Eisenhower warned that they would, despite the end of the Cold War and, until now, the lack of any actual military threat to the United States.

Ironically but predictably, the U.S.'s aggressive and illegal war policy has finally provoked a real military threat to the U.S., albeit one that has emerged only in response to U.S. war plans. As I explained in a recent article , North Korea's discovery in 2016 of a U.S. plan to assassinate its president, Kim Jong Un, and launch a Second Korean War has triggered a crash program to develop long-range ballistic missiles that could give North Korea a viable nuclear deterrent and prevent a U.S. attack. But the North Koreans will not feel safe from attack until their leaders and ours are sure that their missiles can deliver a nuclear strike against the U.S. mainland.

The CIA's Pretexts for War

U.S. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1955 to 1964, managing the global military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and around the world. Fletcher Prouty's book, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World , was suppressed when it was first published in 1973. Thousands of copies disappeared from bookstores and libraries, and a mysterious Army Colonel bought the entire shipment of 3,500 copies the publisher sent to Australia. But Prouty's book was republished in 2011, and it is a timely account of the role of the CIA in U.S. policy.

Prouty surprisingly described the role of the CIA as a response by powerful people and interests to the abolition of the U.S. Department of War and the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947. Once the role of the U.S. military was redefined as one of defense, in line with the United Nations Charter's prohibition against the threat or use of military force in 1945 and similar moves by other military powers, it would require some kind of crisis or threat to justify using military force in the future, both legally and politically. The main purpose of the CIA, as Prouty saw it, is to create such pretexts for war.

The CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes foreign intelligence and a clandestine service that conducts covert operations. Both functions are essential to creating pretexts for war, and that is what they have done for 70 years.

Prouty described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S. military, the State Department, the National Security Council and other government institutions, covertly placing its officers in critical positions to ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever forces, weapons, equipment, ammunition and other resources it needs to carry them out.

Many retired intelligence officers, such as Ray McGovern and the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), saw the merging of clandestine operations with intelligence analysis in one agency as corrupting the objective analysis they tried to provide to policymakers. They formed VIPS in 2003 in response to the fabrication of politicized intelligence that provided false pretexts for the U.S. to invade and destroy Iraq.

CIA in Syria and Africa

But Fletcher Prouty was even more disturbed by the way that the CIA uses clandestine operations to trigger coups, wars and chaos. The civil and proxy war in Syria is a perfect example of what Prouty meant. In late 2011, after destroying Libya and aiding in the torture-murder of Muammar Gaddafi, the CIA and its allies began flying fighters and weapons from Libya to Turkey and infiltrating them into Syria. Then, working with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Croatia and other allies, this operation poured thousands of tons of weapons across Syria's borders to ignite and fuel a full-scale civil war.

Once these covert operations were under way, they ran wild until they had unleashed a savage Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria (Jabhat al-Nusra, now rebranded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), spawned the even more savage "Islamic State," triggered the heaviest and probably the deadliest U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam and drawn Russia, Iran, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Hezbollah, Kurdish militias and almost every state or armed group in the Middle East into the chaos of Syria's civil war.

Meanwhile, as Al Qaeda and Islamic State have expanded their operations across Africa, the U.N. has published a report titled Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment , based on 500 interviews with African militants. This study has found that the kind of special operations and training missions the CIA and AFRICOM are conducting and supporting in Africa are in fact the critical "tipping point" that drives Africans to join militant groups like Al Qaeda, Al-Shabab and Boko Haram.

The report found that government action, such as the killing or detention of friends or family, was the "tipping point" that drove 71 percent of African militants interviewed to join armed groups, and that this was a more important factor than religious ideology.

The conclusions of Journey to Extremism in Africa confirm the findings of other similar studies. The Center for Civilians in Conflict interviewed 250 civilians who joined armed groups in Bosnia, Somalia, Gaza and Libya for its 2015 study, The People's Perspectives : Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict . The study found that the most common motivation for civilians to join armed groups was simply to protect themselves or their families.

The role of U.S. "counterterrorism" operations in fueling armed resistance and terrorism, and the absence of any plan to reduce the asymmetric violence unleashed by the "global war on terror," would be no surprise to Fletcher Prouty. As he explained, such clandestine operations always take on a life of their own that is unrelated, and often counter-productive, to any rational U.S. policy objective.

"The more intimate one becomes with this activity," Prouty wrote, "The more one begins to realize that such operations are rarely, if ever, initiated from an intent to become involved in pursuit of some national objective in the first place."

The U.S. justifies the deployment of 6,000 U.S. special forces and military trainers to 53 of the 54 countries in Africa as a response to terrorism. But the U.N.'s Journey to Extremism in Africa study makes it clear that the U.S. militarization of Africa is in fact the "tipping point" that is driving Africans across the continent to join armed resistance groups in the first place.

This is a textbook CIA operation on the same model as Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 60s. The CIA uses U.S. special forces and training missions to launch covert and proxy military operations that drive local populations into armed resistance groups, and then uses the presence of those armed resistance groups to justify ever-escalating U.S. military involvement. This is Vietnam redux on a continental scale.

Taking on China

What seems to really be driving the CIA's militarization of U.S. policy in Africa is China's growing influence on the continent. As Steve Bannon put it in an interview with the Economist in August, "Let's go screw up One Belt One Road."

China is already too big and powerful for the U.S. to apply what is known as the Ledeen doctrine named for neoconservative theorist and intelligence operative Michael Ledeen who suggested that every 10 years or so, the United States "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business."

China is too powerful and armed with nuclear weapons. So, in this case, the CIA's job would be to spread violence and chaos to disrupt Chinese trade and investment, and to make African governments increasingly dependent on U.S. military aid to fight the militant groups spawned and endlessly regenerated by U.S.-led "counterterrorism" operations.

Neither Ledeen nor Bannon pretend that such policies are designed to build more prosperous or viable societies in the Middle East or Africa, let alone to benefit their people. They both know very well what Richard Barnet already understood 45 years ago, that America's unprecedented investment in weapons, war and CIA covert operations are only good for one thing: to kill people and destroy infrastructure, reducing cities to rubble, societies to chaos and the desperate survivors to poverty and displacement.

As long as the CIA and the U.S. military keep plunging the scapegoats for our failed policies into economic crisis, violence and chaos, the United States and the United Kingdom can remain the safe havens of the world's wealth, islands of privilege and excess amidst the storms they unleash on others.

But if that is the only "significant national objective" driving these policies, it is surely about time for the 99 percent of Americans who reap no benefit from these murderous schemes to stop the CIA and its allies before they completely wreck the already damaged and fragile world in which we all must live, Americans and foreigners alike.

Douglas Valentine has probably studied the CIA in more depth than any other American journalist, beginning with his book on The Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He has written a new book titled The CIA as Organized Crime : How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, in which he brings Fletcher Prouty's analysis right up to the present day, describing the CIA's role in our current wars and the many ways it infiltrates, manipulates and controls U.S. policy.

The Three Scapegoats

In Trump's speech to the U.N. General Assembly, he named North Korea, Iran and Venezuela as his prime targets for destabilization, economic warfare and, ultimately, the overthrow of their governments, whether by coup d'etat or the mass destruction of their civilian population and infrastructure. But Trump's choice of scapegoats for America's failures was obviously not based on a rational reassessment of foreign policy priorities by the new administration. It was only a tired rehashing of the CIA's unfinished business with two-thirds of Bush's "axis of evil" and Bush White House official Elliott Abrams' failed 2002 coup in Caracas, now laced with explicit and illegal threats of aggression.

How Trump and the CIA plan to sacrifice their three scapegoats for America's failures remains to be seen. This is not 2001, when the world stood silent at the U.S. bombardment and invasion of Afghanistan after September 11th. It is more like 2003, when the U.S. destruction of Iraq split the Atlantic alliance and alienated most of the world. It is certainly not 2011, after Obama's global charm offensive had rebuilt U.S. alliances and provided cover for French President Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Cameron, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Arab royals to destroy Libya, once ranked by the U.N. as the most developed country in Africa , now mired in intractable chaos.

In 2017, a U.S. attack on any one of Trump's scapegoats would isolate the United States from many of its allies and undermine its standing in the world in far-reaching ways that might be more permanent and harder to repair than the invasion and destruction of Iraq.

In Venezuela, the CIA and the right-wing opposition are following the same strategy that President Nixon ordered the CIA to inflict on Chile, to "make the economy scream" in preparation for the 1973 coup. But the solid victory of Venezuela's ruling Socialist Party in recent nationwide gubernatorial elections, despite a long and deep economic crisis, reveals little public support for the CIA's puppets in Venezuela.

The CIA has successfully discredited the Venezuelan government through economic warfare, increasingly violent right-wing street protests and a global propaganda campaign. But the CIA has stupidly hitched its wagon to an extreme right-wing, upper-class opposition that has no credibility with most of the Venezuelan public, who still turn out for the Socialists at the polls. A CIA coup or U.S. military intervention would meet fierce public resistance and damage U.S. relations all over Latin America.

Boxing In North Korea

A U.S. aerial bombardment or "preemptive strike" on North Korea could quickly escalate into a war between the U.S. and China, which has reiterated its commitment to North Korea's defense if North Korea is attacked. We do not know exactly what was in the U.S. war plan discovered by North Korea, so neither can we know how North Korea and China could respond if the U.S. pressed ahead with it.

Most analysts have long concluded that any U.S. attack on North Korea would be met with a North Korean artillery and missile barrage that would inflict unacceptable civilian casualties on Seoul, a metropolitan area of 26 million people, three times the population of New York City. Seoul is only 35 miles from the frontier with North Korea, placing it within range of a huge array of North Korean weapons. What was already a no-win calculus is now compounded by the possibility that North Korea could respond with nuclear weapons, turning any prospect of a U.S. attack into an even worse nightmare.

U.S. mismanagement of its relations with North Korea should be an object lesson for its relations with Iran, graphically demonstrating the advantages of diplomacy, talks and agreements over threats of war. Under the Agreed Framework signed in 1994, North Korea stopped work on two much larger nuclear reactors than the small experimental one operating at Yongbyong since 1986, which only produces 6 kg of plutonium per year, enough for one nuclear bomb.

The lesson of Bush's Iraq invasion in 2003 after Saddam Hussein had complied with demands that he destroy Iraq's stockpiles of chemical weapons and shut down a nascent nuclear program was not lost on North Korea. Not only did the invasion lay waste to large sections of Iraq with hundreds of thousands of dead but Hussein himself was hunted down and condemned to death by hanging.

Still, after North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006, even its small experimental reactor was shut down as a result of the "Six Party Talks" in 2007, all the fuel rods were removed and placed under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the cooling tower of the reactor was demolished in 2008.

But then, as relations deteriorated, North Korea conducted a second nuclear weapon test and again began reprocessing spent fuel rods to recover plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.

North Korea has now conducted six nuclear weapons tests. The explosions in the first five tests increased gradually up to 15-25 kilotons, about the yield of the bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but estimates for the yield of the 2017 test range from 110 to 250 kilotons , comparable to a small hydrogen bomb.

The even greater danger in a new war in Korea is that the U.S. could unleash part of its arsenal of 4,000 more powerful weapons (100 to 1,200 kilotons), which could kill millions of people and devastate and poison the region, or even the world, for years to come.

The U.S. willingness to scrap the Agreed Framework in 2003, the breakdown of the Six Party Talks in 2009 and the U.S. refusal to acknowledge that its own military actions and threats create legitimate defense concerns for North Korea have driven the North Koreans into a corner from which they see a credible nuclear deterrent as their only chance to avoid mass destruction.

China has proposed a reasonable framework for diplomacy to address the concerns of both sides, but the U.S. insists on maintaining its propaganda narratives that all the fault lies with North Korea and that it has some kind of "military solution" to the crisis.

This may be the most dangerous idea we have heard from U.S. policymakers since the end of the Cold War, but it is the logical culmination of a systematic normalization of deviant and illegal U.S. war-making that has already cost millions of lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan. As historian Gabriel Kolko wrote in Century of War in 1994, "options and decisions that are intrinsically dangerous and irrational become not merely plausible but the only form of reasoning about war and diplomacy that is possible in official circles."

Demonizing Iran

The idea that Iran has ever had a nuclear weapons program is seriously contested by the IAEA, which has examined every allegation presented by the CIA and other Western "intelligence" agencies as well as Israel. Former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei revealed many details of this wild goose chase in his 2011 memoir, Age of Deception : Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times .

When the CIA and its partners reluctantly acknowledged the IAEA's conclusions in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), ElBaradei issued a press release confirming that, "the agency has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program or undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran."

Since 2007, the IAEA has resolved all its outstanding concerns with Iran. It has verified that dual-use technologies that Iran imported before 2003 were in fact used for other purposes, and it has exposed the mysterious "laptop documents" that appeared to show Iranian plans for a nuclear weapon as forgeries. Gareth Porter thoroughly explored all these questions and allegations and the history of mistrust that fueled them in his 2014 book, Manufactured Crisis : the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare , which I highly recommend.

But, in the parallel Bizarro world of U.S. politics, hopelessly poisoned by the CIA's endless disinformation campaigns, Hillary Clinton could repeatedly take false credit for disarming Iran during her presidential campaign, and neither Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump nor any corporate media interviewer dared to challenge her claims.

"When President Obama took office, Iran was racing toward a nuclear bomb," Clinton fantasized in a prominent foreign policy speech on June 2, 2016, claiming that her brutal sanctions policy "brought Iran to the table."

In fact, as Trita Parsi documented in his 2012 book, A Single Roll of the Dice : Obama's Diplomacy With Iran , the Iranians were ready, not just to "come to the table," but to sign a comprehensive agreement based on a U.S. proposal brokered by Turkey and Brazil in 2010. But, in a classic case of "tail wags dog," the U.S. then rejected its own proposal because it would have undercut support for tighter sanctions in the U.N. Security Council. In other words, Clinton's sanctions policy did not "bring Iran to the table", but prevented the U.S. from coming to the table itself.

As a senior State Department official told Trita Parsi, the real problem with U.S. diplomacy with Iran when Clinton was at the State Department was that the U.S. would not take "Yes" for an answer. Trump's ham-fisted decertification of Iran's compliance with the JCPOA is right out of Clinton's playbook, and it demonstrates that the CIA is still determined to use Iran as a scapegoat for America's failures in the Middle East.

The spurious claim that Iran is the world's greatest sponsor of terrorism is another CIA canard reinforced by endless repetition. It is true that Iran supports and supplies weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas, which are both listed as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. But they are mainly defensive resistance groups that defend Lebanon and Gaza respectively against invasions and attacks by Israel.

Shifting attention away from Al Qaeda, Islamic State, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and other groups that actually commit terrorist crimes around the world might just seem like a case of the CIA "taking its eyes off the ball," if it wasn't so transparently timed to frame Iran with new accusations now that the manufactured crisis of the nuclear scare has run its course.

What the Future Holds

Barack Obama's most consequential international achievement may have been the triumph of symbolism over substance behind which he expanded and escalated the so-called "war on terror," with a vast expansion of covert operations and proxy wars that eventually triggered the heaviest U.S. aerial bombardments since Vietnam in Iraq and Syria.

Obama's charm offensive invigorated old and new military alliances with the U.K., France and the Arab monarchies, and he quietly ran up the most expensive military budget of any president since World War Two.

But Obama's expansion of the "war on terror" under cover of his deceptive global public relations campaign created many more problems than it solved, and Trump and his advisers are woefully ill-equipped to solve any of them. Trump's expressed desire to place America first and to resist foreign entanglements is hopelessly at odds with his aggressive, bullying approach to every foreign policy problem.

If the U.S. could threaten and fight its way to a resolution of any of its international problems, it would have done so already. That is exactly what it has been trying to do since the 1990s, behind both the swagger and bluster of Bush and Trump and the deceptive charm of Clinton and Obama: a "good cop – bad cop" routine that should no longer fool anyone anywhere.

But as Lyndon Johnson found as he waded deeper and deeper into the Big Muddy in Vietnam, lying to the public about unwinnable wars does not make them any more winnable. It just gets more people killed and makes it harder and harder to ever tell the public the truth.

In unwinnable wars based on lies, the "credibility" problem only gets more complicated, as new lies require new scapegoats and convoluted narratives to explain away graveyards filled by old lies. Obama's cynical global charm offensive bought the "war on terror" another eight years, but that only allowed the CIA to drag the U.S. into more trouble and spread its chaos to more places around the world.

Meanwhile, Russian President Putin is winning hearts and minds in capitals around the world by calling for a recommitment to the rule of international law , which prohibits the threat or use of military force except in self-defense. Every new U.S. threat or act of aggression will only make Putin's case more persuasive, not least to important U.S. allies like South Korea, Germany and other members of the European Union, whose complicity in U.S. aggression has until now helped to give it a false veneer of political legitimacy.

Throughout history, serial aggression has nearly always provoked increasingly united opposition, as peace-loving countries and people have reluctantly summoned the courage to stand up to an aggressor. France under Napoleon and Hitler's Germany also regarded themselves as exceptional, and in their own ways they were. But in the end, their belief in their exceptionalism led them on to defeat and destruction.

Americans had better hope that we are not so exceptional, and that the world will find a diplomatic rather than a military "solution" to its American problem. Our chances of survival would improve a great deal if American officials and politicians would finally start to act like something other than putty in the hands of the CIA

Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq . He also wrote the chapters on "Obama at War" in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader .

[Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

Highly recommended!
If this is true, then this is definitely a sophisticated false flag operation. Was malware Alperovich people injected specifically designed to implicate Russians? In other words Crowdstrike=Fancy Bear
Images removed. For full content please thee the original source
One interesting corollary of this analysis is that installing Crowdstrike software is like inviting a wolf to guard your chicken. If they are so dishonest you take enormous risks. That might be true for some other heavily advertized "intrusion prevention" toolkits. So those criminals who use mistyped popular addresses or buy Google searches to drive lemmings to their site and then flash the screen that they detected a virus on your computer a, please call provided number and for a small amount of money your virus will be removed get a new more sinister life.
I suspected many of such firms (for example ISS which was bought by IBM in 2006) to be scams long ago.
Notable quotes:
"... Disobedient Media outlines the DNC server cover-up evidenced in CrowdStrike malware infusion ..."
"... In the article, they claim to have just been working on eliminating the last of the hackers from the DNC's network during the past weekend (conveniently coinciding with Assange's statement and being an indirect admission that their Falcon software had failed to achieve it's stated capabilities at that time , assuming their statements were accurate) . ..."
"... To date, CrowdStrike has not been able to show how the malware had relayed any emails or accessed any mailboxes. They have also not responded to inquiries specifically asking for details about this. In fact, things have now been discovered that bring some of their malware discoveries into question. ..."
"... there is a reason to think Fancy Bear didn't start some of its activity until CrowdStrike had arrived at the DNC. CrowdStrike, in the indiciators of compromise they reported, identified three pieces of malware relating to Fancy Bear: ..."
"... They found that generally, in a lot of cases, malware developers didn't care to hide the compile times and that while implausible timestamps are used, it's rare that these use dates in the future. It's possible, but unlikely that one sample would have a postdated timestamp to coincide with their visit by mere chance but seems extremely unlikely to happen with two or more samples. Considering the dates of CrowdStrike's activities at the DNC coincide with the compile dates of two out of the three pieces of malware discovered and attributed to APT-28 (the other compiled approximately 2 weeks prior to their visit), the big question is: Did CrowdStrike plant some (or all) of the APT-28 malware? ..."
"... The IP address, according to those articles, was disabled in June 2015, eleven months before the DNC emails were acquired – meaning those IP addresses, in reality, had no involvement in the alleged hacking of the DNC. ..."
"... The fact that two out of three of the Fancy Bear malware samples identified were compiled on dates within the apparent five day period CrowdStrike were apparently at the DNC seems incredibly unlikely to have occurred by mere chance. ..."
"... That all three malware samples were compiled within ten days either side of their visit – makes it clear just how questionable the Fancy Bear malware discoveries were. ..."
Dec 28, 2017 | theduran.com

Of course the DNC did not want to the FBI to investigate its "hacked servers". The plan was well underway to excuse Hillary's pathetic election defeat to Trump, and CrowdStrike would help out by planting evidence to pin on those evil "Russian hackers." Some would call this entire DNC server hack an "insurance policy."

... ... ...

[Dec 28, 2017] From Snowden To Russia-gate - The CIA And The Media

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The promotion of the alleged Russian election hacking in certain media may have grown from the successful attempts of U.S. intelligence services to limit the publication of the NSA files obtained by Edward Snowden. ..."
"... In May 2013 Edward Snowden fled to Hongkong and handed internal documents from the National Security Agency (NSA) to four journalists, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian and separately to Barton Gellman who worked for the Washington Post . ..."
"... In July 2013 the Guardian was forced by the British government to destroy its copy of the Snowden archive. ..."
"... In August 2013 Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for some $250 million. In 2012 Bezos, the founder, largest share holder and CEO of Amazon, had already a cooperation with the CIA. Together they invested in a Canadian quantum computing company. In March 2013 Amazon signed a $600 million deal to provide computing services for the CIA. ..."
"... The motivation for the Bezos and Omidyar to do this is not clear. Bezos is estimated to own a shameful $90 billion. The Washington Post buy is chump-change for him. Omidyar has a net worth of some $9.3 billion. But the use of billionaires to mask what are in fact intelligence operations is not new. The Ford Foundation has for decades been a CIA front , George Soros' Open Society foundation is one of the premier "regime change" operations, well versed in instigating "color revolutions" ..."
"... It would have been reasonable if the cooperation between those billionaires and the intelligence agencies had stopped after the NSA leaks were secured. But it seems that strong cooperation of the Bezos and Omidyar outlets with the CIA and others continue. ..."
"... The Washington Post , which has a much bigger reach, is the prime outlet for "Russia-gate", the false claims by parts of the U.S. intelligence community and the Clinton campaign, that Russia attempted to influence U.S. elections or even "colluded" with Trump. ..."
"... The revelation that the sole Russiagate "evidence" was the so-called Steele Dossier - i.e. opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign - which was used by the intelligence community to not only begin the public assertions of Trump's perfidy but to then initiate FISA approved surveillance on the Trump campaign, that is truly astonishing. Instructive then that the NY Times, Washington Post, etc have yet to acknowledge these facts to their readers, and instead have effectively doubled down on the story, insisting that the Russiagate allegations are established fact and constitute "objective reality." That suggests this fake news story will continue indefinitely. ..."
"... What we see here is these bastions of establishment thinking in the USA promoting "objective reality" as partisan - i.e. there is a Clinton reality versus a Trump reality, or a Russian reality versus a "Western" reality, facts and documentation be damned. This divorce from objectivity is a symptom of the overall decline of American institutions, an indicate a future hard, rather than soft, landing near the end of the road. ..."
Dec 28, 2017 | www.moonofalabama.org

The promotion of the alleged Russian election hacking in certain media may have grown from the successful attempts of U.S. intelligence services to limit the publication of the NSA files obtained by Edward Snowden.

In May 2013 Edward Snowden fled to Hongkong and handed internal documents from the National Security Agency (NSA) to four journalists, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian and separately to Barton Gellman who worked for the Washington Post . Some of those documents were published by Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian , others by Barton Gellman in the Washington Post . Several other international news site published additional material though the mass of NSA papers that Snowden allegedly acquired never saw public daylight.

In July 2013 the Guardian was forced by the British government to destroy its copy of the Snowden archive.

In August 2013 Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for some $250 million. In 2012 Bezos, the founder, largest share holder and CEO of Amazon, had already a cooperation with the CIA. Together they invested in a Canadian quantum computing company. In March 2013 Amazon signed a $600 million deal to provide computing services for the CIA.

In October 2013 Pierre Omidyar, the owner of Ebay, founded First Look Media and hired Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. The total planned investment was said to be $250 million. It took up to February 2014 until the new organization launched its first site, the Intercept . Only a few NSA stories appeared on it. The Intercept is a rather mediocre site. Its management is said to be chaotic . It publishes few stories of interests and one might ask if it ever was meant to be a serious outlet. Omidyar has worked, together with the U.S. government, to force regime change onto Ukraine. He had strong ties with the Obama administration.

Snowden had copies of some 20,000 to 58,000 NSA files . Only 1,182 have been published . Bezos and Omidyar obviously helped the NSA to keep more than 95% of the Snowden archive away from the public. The Snowden papers were practically privatized into trusted hands of Silicon Valley billionaires with ties to the various secret services and the Obama administration.

The motivation for the Bezos and Omidyar to do this is not clear. Bezos is estimated to own a shameful $90 billion. The Washington Post buy is chump-change for him. Omidyar has a net worth of some $9.3 billion. But the use of billionaires to mask what are in fact intelligence operations is not new. The Ford Foundation has for decades been a CIA front , George Soros' Open Society foundation is one of the premier "regime change" operations, well versed in instigating "color revolutions".

It would have been reasonable if the cooperation between those billionaires and the intelligence agencies had stopped after the NSA leaks were secured. But it seems that strong cooperation of the Bezos and Omidyar outlets with the CIA and others continue.

The Intercept burned a intelligence leaker, Realty Winner, who had trusted its journalists to keep her protected. It smeared the President of Syria as neo-nazi based on an (intentional?) mistranslation of one of his speeches. It additionally hired a Syrian supporter of the CIA's "regime change by Jihadis" in Syria. Despite its pretense of "fearless, adversarial journalism" it hardly deviates from U.S. policies.

The Washington Post , which has a much bigger reach, is the prime outlet for "Russia-gate", the false claims by parts of the U.S. intelligence community and the Clinton campaign, that Russia attempted to influence U.S. elections or even "colluded" with Trump.

Just today it provides two stories and one op-ed that lack any factual evidence for the anti-Russian claims made in them.

In Kremlin trolls burned across the Internet as Washington debated options the writers insinuate that some anonymous writer who published a few pieces on Counterpunch and elsewhere was part of a Russian operation. They provide zero evidence to back that claim up. Whatever that writer wrote (see list at end) was run of the mill stuff that had little to do with the U.S. election. The piece then dives into various cyber-operations against Russia that the Obama and Trump administration have discussed.

A second story in the paper today is based on "a classified GRU report obtained by The Washington Post." It claims that the Russian military intelligence service GRU started a social media operation one day after the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was illegally removed from his office in a U.S. regime change operation . What the story lists as alleged GRU puppet postings reads like normal internet talk of people opposed to the fascist regime change in Kiev. The Washington Post leaves completely unexplained who handed it an alleged GRU report from 2014, who classified it and how, if at all, it verified its veracity. To me the piece and the assertions therein have a strong odor of bovine excrement.

An op-ed in the very same Washington Post has a similar smell. It is written by the intelligence flunkies Michael Morell and Mike Rogers. Morell had hoped to become CIA boss under a President Hillary Clinton. The op-ed (which includes a serious misunderstanding of "deterrence") asserts that Russia never stopped its cyberattacks on the United States :

Russia's information operations tactics since the election are more numerous than can be listed here . But to get a sense of the breadth of Russian activity, consider the messaging spread by Kremlin-oriented accounts on Twitter, which cybersecurity and disinformation experts have tracked as part of the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy.

The author link to this page which claims to list Twitter hashtags that are currently used by Russian influence agents. Apparently the top issue Russia's influence agents currently promote is "#merrychristmas".


bigger

When the authors claim Russian operations are "more numerous than can be listed here" they practically admit that they have not even one plausible operation they could cite. Its simply obfuscation to justify their call for more political and military measures against Russia. This again to distract from the real reasons Clinton lost the election and to introduce a new Cold War for the benefit of weapon producers and U.S. influence in Europe.

Cont. reading: From Snowden To Russia-gate - The CIA And The Media

11:53 AM | Comments (137)

G , Dec 26, 2017 12:10:03 PM | 1

If what you allege is true about Greenwald and the Intercept, then why hasn't Snowden spoken out about it yet? Surely he would have said something about the Intercept and Greenwald keeping important stories buried by now. Yet, as far as I can tell, he has a good relationship with Greenwald. I find it hard to believe hat a man who literally gave up everything he had in life to leak important docs would remain silent for so long about a publishing cover up. I don't really like the Intercept and I think your analysis of its content is accurate, but I do find it hard to believe that the NSA docs were "bought" back by the CIA.
Ort , Dec 26, 2017 1:41:21 PM | 16
@G | 1

If what you allege is true about Greenwald and the Intercept, then why hasn't Snowden spoken out about it yet?
_____________________________________________________

My understanding is that early on, Snowden placed his trove of documents in the exclusive care of Glenn Greenwald and his associates. Although Snowden has since become a public figure in his own right, and his opinions on state-security events and issues are solicited, as far as I know Snowden has no direct responsibility for managing the material he downloaded.

I haven't followed Snowden closely enough to know how familiar he may be with the contents of the reported "20,000 to 58,000 NSA files" turned over to GG/Omidyar. Snowden presumably took pains to acquire items of interest in his cache as he accumulated classified material, but even if he has extraordinary powers of recall he may not remember precisely what remains unreleased.

FWIW, I was troubled from the first by one of the mainstays of GG's defense, or rationale, when it became clear that he was the principal, and perhaps sole, executive "curator" of the Snowden material. In order to reassure and placate nervous "patriots"-- and GG calls himself a "patriot"-- he repeatedly emphasized that great care was being taken to vet the leaked information before releasing it.

GG's role as whistleblower Snowden's enabler and facilitator was generally hailed uncritically by progressive-liberals and civil-liberties advocates, to a point where public statements that should've raised skeptical doubts and questions were generally passively accepted by complacent admirers.

Specifically, my crap detectors signaled "red alert" early on, when Greenwald (still affiliated with "The Guardian", IIRC) took great pains to announce that his team was working closely with the US/UK governments to vet and screen Snowden's material before releasing any of it; GG repeatedly asserted that he was reviewing the material with the relevant state-security agencies to ensure that none of the released material would compromise or jeopardize government operatives and/or national security.

WTF? Bad enough that Greenwald was requiring the world to exclusively trust his judgment in deciding what should be released and what shouldn't. He was also making it clear that he wasn't exactly committed to disclosing "the worst" of the material "though the heavens fall".

In effect, as GG was telling the world that he could be trusted to manage the leaked information responsibly, he was also telling the world that it simply had to trust his judgment in this crucial role.

To me, there was clearly a subliminal message for both Western authorities and the public: don't worry, we're conscientious, patriotic leak-masters. We're not going to irresponsibly disclose anything too radical, or politically/socially destabilizing.

GG and the Omidyar Group have set themselves up as an independent "brand" in the new field of whistleblower/hacker impresario and leak-broker.

Like only buying NFL-approved merchandise, or fox-approved eggs, the public is being encouraged to only buy (into) Intercept-approved Snowden Leaks™. It's a going concern, which lends itself much more to the "modified limited hangout" approach than freely tossing all the biggest eggs out of the basket.

GG found an opportunity to augment his rising career as a self-made investigative journalist and civil-liberties advocate. Now he's sitting pretty, the celebrity point man for a lucrative modified limited hangout enterprise. What is wrong with this picture?

Bart Hansen , Dec 26, 2017 1:51:59 PM | 17
#1: I suspect that Snowden needs Glenn and Laura as liaisons to the outside world.
G , Dec 26, 2017 2:05:23 PM | 18
@16 I just see no evidence of that aside from fitting the narrative of people who are convinced of a cover up in leaked docs. Moreover, there is no way Russia would continue to offer Snowden asylum if he was gov agent. I'm sure Russian intelligence did a very thorough background check on him.

@17 that's simply not true. He regularly tweets, gives online talks and publishes on his own. He has not used either Poitras or Greenwald as a means of communication for years. And he has never dropped a single hint of being disappointed or frustrated with how documents and info was published.

It just seems so implausible given the total lack of any sign of Snowden's dissatisfaction.

jayc , Dec 26, 2017 2:31:15 PM | 22
The revelation that the sole Russiagate "evidence" was the so-called Steele Dossier - i.e. opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign - which was used by the intelligence community to not only begin the public assertions of Trump's perfidy but to then initiate FISA approved surveillance on the Trump campaign, that is truly astonishing. Instructive then that the NY Times, Washington Post, etc have yet to acknowledge these facts to their readers, and instead have effectively doubled down on the story, insisting that the Russiagate allegations are established fact and constitute "objective reality." That suggests this fake news story will continue indefinitely.

What we see here is these bastions of establishment thinking in the USA promoting "objective reality" as partisan - i.e. there is a Clinton reality versus a Trump reality, or a Russian reality versus a "Western" reality, facts and documentation be damned. This divorce from objectivity is a symptom of the overall decline of American institutions, an indicate a future hard, rather than soft, landing near the end of the road.

Jen , Dec 26, 2017 2:50:16 PM | 25
G @ 1 and 18: My understanding is that Edward Snowden has been advised (warned?) by the Russian government or his lawyer in Moscow not to reveal any more than he has said so far. The asylum Moscow has offered him may be dependent on his keeping discreet. That may include not saying much about The Intercept, in case his communications are followed by the NSA or any other of the various US intel agencies which could lead to their tracking his physical movements in Russia and enable any US-connected agent or agency (including one based in Russia) to trace him, arrest him or kill him, and cover up and frame the seizure or murder in such a way as to place suspicion or blame on the Russian government or on local criminal elements in Russia.

I believe that Snowden does have a job in Russia and possibly this job does not permit him the time to say any more than what he currently tweets or says online.

There is nothing in MoA's article to suggest that Glenn Greenwald is deliberately burying stories in The Intercept. B has said that its management is chaotic which could suggest among other things that Greenwald himself is dissatisfied with its current operation.

G , Dec 26, 2017 2:57:40 PM | 26
@21 I'm not disputing that moneyed interests might have been leaned on by the CIA to stop publishing sensitive info. What I'm disputing is the idea that people like Greenwald have deliberately with-held information that is in the public interest. I doubt that, regardless of the strength of the Intercept as a publication.

@25 What interest would the Russian gov have in helping protect NSA? I assume Russia loves the idea of the US Intel agencies being embarrassed. Snowden speaks his mind about plenty of domestic and international events in US. I have never seen him act like he's being censored.

Jen , Dec 26, 2017 3:46:44 PM | 31
G @ 25: Moscow would have no interest in helping protect the NSA or any other US intel agency. The Russians would have advised Snowden not to say more than he has said so far, not because they are interested in helping the NSA but because they can only protect him as long as he is discreet and does not try to say or publish any more that would jeopardise his safety or give Washington an excuse to pressure Moscow to extradite him back to the US. That would include placing more sanctions on Russia until Snowden is given up.

There is the possibility also that Snowden trusts (or trusted) Greenwald to know what to do with the NSA documents. Perhaps that trust was naively placed - we do not know.

Red Ryder , Dec 26, 2017 3:48:47 PM | 33
b, a big exposition of facts, rich in links to more facts.

This is important material for all to understand.

Snowden is "the squirrel over there!" A distraction turned into a hope.
Compared to Assange, who is being slow-martyred in captivity, Snowden is a boy playing with gadgets.

Why did not Snowden make certain a copy of his theft went to Wikileaks? That would have been insurance.
Since he did not, it all could be just a distraction.

What is known about the Snowden affair is we received proof of what we knew. Not much else. For those who didn't know, they received news.
And ever since, the shape of things from the Deep State/Shadow Government/IC has been lies and warmongering against American freedoms and world cooperation among nations.

Fascism is corporate + the police state. The US government is a pure fascist tyranny that also protects the Empire and Global Hegemony.

We connect the dots and it's always the same picture. It was this way in the 60s,70s,80s,90s, 00s, and this forlorn decade.
Fascism more bold each decade. Billionaires and millionaires have always been in the mix.

[Dec 10, 2017] When Washington Cheered the Jihadists Consortiumnews

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... William Roebuck, the American embassy's chargé d'affaires in Damascus, thus urged Washington in 2006 to coordinate with Egypt and Saudi Arabia to encourage Sunni Syrian fears of Shi'ite Iranian proselytizing even though such concerns are "often exaggerated." It was akin to playing up fears of Jewish dominance in the 1930s in coordination with Nazi Germany. ..."
"... A year later, former NATO commander Wesley Clark learned of a classified Defense Department memo stating that U.S. policy was now to "attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years," first Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. (Quote starts at 2:07 .) ..."
"... So the answer was not to oppose the Islamists, but to use them. Even though "the Islamist surge will not be a picnic for the Syrian people," Gambill said, "it has two important silver linings for US interests." One is that the jihadis "are simply more effective fighters than their secular counterparts" thanks to their skill with "suicide bombings and roadside bombs." ..."
"... The other is that a Sunni Islamist victory in Syria will result in "a full-blown strategic defeat" for Iran, thereby putting Washington at least part way toward fulfilling the seven-country demolition job discussed by Wesley Clark. ..."
"... The U.S. would settle with the jihadis only after the jihadis had settled with Assad. The good would ultimately outweigh the bad. This kind of self-centered moral calculus would not have mattered had Gambill only spoken for himself. But he didn't. Rather, he was expressing the viewpoint of Official Washington in general, which is why the ultra-respectable FP ran his piece in the first place. ..."
"... The parallels with the DIA are striking. "The west, gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition," the intelligence report declared, even though "the Salafist[s], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [i.e. Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency." ..."
"... ancien régime, ..."
"... With the Saudis footing the bill, the U.S. would exercise untrammeled sway. ..."
"... Has a forecast that ever gone more spectacularly wrong? Syria's Baathist government is hardly blameless in this affair. But thanks largely to the U.S.-backed sectarian offensive, 400,000 Syrians or more have died since Gambill's article appeared, with another 6.1 million displaced and an estimated 4.8 million fleeing abroad. ..."
"... So instead of advancing U.S. policy goals, Gambill helped do the opposite. The Middle East is more explosive than ever while U.S. influence has fallen to sub-basement levels. Iranian influence now extends from the Arabian Sea to the Mediterranean, while the country that now seems to be wobbling out of control is Saudi Arabia where Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman is lurching from one self-induced crisis to another. The country that Gambill counted on to shore up the status quo turns out to be undermining it. ..."
"... It's not easy to screw things up so badly, but somehow Washington's bloated foreign-policy establishment has done it. Since helping to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, Gambill has moved on to a post at the rightwing Middle East Forum where Daniel Pipes, the group's founder and chief, now inveighs against the same Sunni ethnic cleansing that his employee defended or at least apologized for. ..."
"... The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy ..."
"... I do not believe than anyone in the civil or military command ever believed that arming the jihadists would bring any sort of stability or peace to the region. I do not believe that peace was ever an interest of the US until it has once again gained hegemonic control of central Asia. This is a fight to retain US global domination – causalities do not matter. The US and its partners or co-rulers of the Empire the Saud family and the Zionist oligarchy will slaughter with impunity until someone stops them or their own corruption defeats them. ..."
"... The Empire can not exist without relentless ongoing slaughter it has been at it every day now for 73 years. It worked for them all that time but that time has run out. China has already set the date for when its currency will become fully freely exchanged, less than 5 years. ..."
"... Even the most stupid person on earth couldn't think that the US was using murdering, butchering head choppers in a bid to bring peace and stability to the middle East. The Neocons and the other criminals that infest Washington don't want peace at any price because its bad for business. ..."
"... It's the same GROTESQUE caricature of these wars that the mainstream media always presents: that the U.S. is on the side of good, and fights for good, even though every war INVARIABLY ends up in a bloodbath, with no one caring how many civilians have died, what state the country is left in, that civilian infrastructure and civilians were targeted, let alone whether war could have been prevented. For example, in 1991, shortly after the first Gulf War, Iraqis rose up against their regime, but George H. Bush allowed Saddam to fly his military helicopters (permission was needed due to the no-fly zones), and quell the rebellion in blood – tens of thousands were butchered! Bush said that when he told Iraqis to rebel, he meant the military generals, NOT the Iraqi people themselves. In other words, the U.S. wanted Saddam gone, but the same regime in place. The U.S. never cared about the people! ..."
"... The military-industrial-complex sicced Mueller on Trump because they despise his overtures towards rapprochement with the Kremlin. The military-industrial-complex MUST have a villain to justify the gigantic defense [sic] spending which permeates the entire U.S. politico-economic system. Putin and Russia were always the preferred demon because they easily fit the bill in the minds of an easily brainwashed American public. Of course saber rattling towards Moscow puts the world on the brink of nuclear war, but no matter, the careerism and fat contracts are all that matter to the MIC. Trump's rhetoric about making peace with the Kremlin has always mortified the MIC. ..."
"... This is a rare instance of our elites battling it out behind the scenes, both groups being reprehensible power hungry greed heads and sociopaths, it's hard to tell how this will end. ..."
"... Lets be clear: The military-industrial-complex wants plenty of low intensity conflict to fuel ever more fabulous weapons sales, not a really hot war where all those pretty expensive toys are falling out of the sky in droves. ..."
"... On 24 October 2017, the Intercept released an NSA document unearthed from leaked intelligence files provided by Edward Snowden which reveals that terrorist militants in Syria were under the direct command of foreign governments from the early years of the war which has now claimed half a million lives. ..."
"... The US intelligence memo is evidence of internal US government confirmation of the direct role that both the Saudi and US governments played in fueling attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, as well as military targets in pursuit of "regime change" in Syria. ..."
"... Israel's support for terrorist forces in Syria is well established. The Israelis and Saudis coordinate their activities. ..."
"... An August 2012 DIA report (written when the U.S. was monitoring weapons flows from Libya to Syria), said that the opposition in Syria was driven by al Qaeda and other extremist groups: "the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria." The "deterioration of the situation" was predicted to have "dire consequences" for Iraq, which included the "grave danger" of a terrorist "Islamic state". Some of the "dire consequences" are blacked out but the DIA warned one such consequence would be the "renewing facilitation of terrorist elements from all over the Arab world entering into Iraqi Arena." ..."
"... The heavily redacted DIA memo specifically mentions "the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)." ..."
"... To clarify just who these "supporting powers" were, mentioned in the document who sought the creation of a "Salafist principality," the DIA memo explained: "The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition; while Russia, China, and Iran support the regime." ..."
"... The DIA memo clearly indicates when it was decided to transform US, Saudi, and Turkish-backed Al Qaeda affiliates into ISIS: the "Salafist" (Islamic) "principality" (State). NATO member state Turkey has been directly supporting terrorism in Syria, and specifically, supporting ISIS. In 2014, Germany's international broadcaster Deutsche Welle's reported "'IS' supply channels through Turkey." DW exposed fleets of hundreds of trucks a day, passing unchallenged through Turkey's border crossings with Syria, clearly bound for the defacto ISIS capital of Raqqa. Starting in September 2015, Russian airpower in Syria successfully interdicted ISIS supply lines. ..."
"... The usual suspects in Western media launched a relentless propaganda campaign against Russian support for Syria. The Atlantic Council's Bellingcat disinformation operation started working overtime. ..."
"... The propaganda effort culminated in the 4 April 2017 Khan Shaykhun false flag chemical incident in Idlib. Bellingcat's Eliot Higgins and Dan Kaszeta have been paraded by "First Draft" coalition media "partners" in a vigorous effort to somehow implicate the Russians. ..."
"... In a January 2016 interview on Al Jazeera, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn admitted that he "paid very close attention" to the August 2012 DIA report predicting the rise of a "declared or undeclared Salafist Principality" in Syria. Flynn even asserts that the White House's sponsoring of terrorists (that would emerge as Al Nusra and ISIS) against the Syrian regime was "a willful decision." ..."
"... Flynn was interviewed by British journalist Mehdi Hasan for Al Jazeera's Head to Head program. Flynn made it clear that the policies that led to the "the rise of the Islamic State, the rise of terrorism" were not merely the result of ignorance or looking the other way, but the result of conscious decision making ..."
"... General Flynn explained to Hersh that 'If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic.' Hersh's investigative report exposed a kind of intelligence schism between the Pentagon and CIA concerning the covert program in Syria. ..."
"... The article raises a very serious charge. Up till now it appeared that supplying weapons to Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria was just another example of Pentagon incompetence but the suggestion here is that it was a concerted policy and it's hard to believe that there was no one in the Pentagon that was privy to that policy who wouldn't raise an objection. ..."
"... That it conformed with Israeli, Saudi and CIA designs is not surprising, but that there was no dissension within the Pentagon is appalling (or that Obama didn't raise objections). Clark's comment should put him on the hot seat for a congressional investigation but, of course, there is no one in congress to run with it. The policy is so manifestly evil that it seems to dwarf even the reckless ignorance of preceding "interventions". ..."
"... The DIA report released by Gen. Flynn in 2012 predicted the Islamic State with alarm. That is why Flynn was fired as Director of DIA. He objected to the insane policy of supporting the CIA/Saudi madness and saw it as not only counter-productive but disastrous. His comments to AlJazeera in 2016 reinforced this position. Gen Flynn's faction of the American military has been consistent in its opposition to CIA support of terrorist forces. ..."
"... I see Gen. Flynn as a whistleblower. The 2012 report he circulated saw the rise of the Salafist Islamic state with alarm ..."
"... Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. ..."
"... Thank you. Gen Flynn also urged coordination with Russia against ISIS, so it doesn't take much to see why he was targeted. ..."
"... The use of Islamist proxy warriors to help achieve American geo-political ends goes back to at least 1979, including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Libya, and Syria. One of the better books on 9/11 is Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's "The War On Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism". The first section of that book – "The Geopolitics of Terrorism" – covers, across 150 well-sourced pages, the history and background of this involvement. It is highly recommended for anyone who wishes to be better informed on this topic. ..."
"... Jaycee, actually you have to go back much further than that to WW2. Hitler used the marginalized Turkic people in Russia and turned them into effective fighters to create internal factions within the Soviet Union. After Hitler lost and the Cold War began, the US, who had no understanding of the Soviets at the time radicalized and empowered Islamist including the Muslim Brotherhood to weaponize Islam against the Soviet Union. ..."
"... All these western imperial geostrategic planners are certifiably insane and have no business anywhere near the levers of government policy. They are the number one enemy of humanity. If we don't find a way to remove them from power, they may actually succeed in destroying life on Earth. ..."
"... There is a volume of evidence that the war criminals in our midst were arming and training "jihadists." See link below. http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2016/10/the-evidence-of-planning-of-wars.html ..."
"... Incompetence and stupidity are their only defense because if anyone acknowledged that trillions of dollars have been made by the usual suspects committing these crimes, the industrialists of war would face a justice symbolized by Nuremberg. ..."
"... The American groupthink rarely allows propaganda and disinformation disturb: endless wars and endless lies and criminality, have not disturbed this mindset. It is clever to manipulate people to think in a way opposite of truth so consistently. All the atrocities by the US have been surrounded by media propaganda and mastery of groupthink techniques go down well. Mention something unusual or real news and you might get heavily criticized for daring to think outside the box and doubt what are (supposedly) "religious truths". Tell a lie long enough and it becomes the truth. ..."
"... The CIA was a key force behind the creation of both al Qaeda and ISIS. Most major incidents of "Islamic Terrorism" have some kind of CIA backing behind them. See this large collection of links for compiled evidence: http://www.pearltrees.com/joshstern/government-supporting/id18814292 ..."
"... This journalist and other journalists writing on some of my favorite Russian propaganda news websites, have reported the US empire routinely makes "deals with the devil", the enemy of my enemy is my friend, if doing so furthers their goal of perpetual war and global hegemony. Yet, inexplicably, these journalists buy the US empire's 911 story without question, in the face of many unanswered questions ..."
"... Bin Laden (CIA staffer) and a handful of his men, all from close allied countries to the US, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, delivered the 2nd Pearl Harbor on 911. What a timely coincidence! We accept the US Empire provides weapons and military support to the same enemy, and worse, who attacked us on 911, but one is labeled a "conspiracy nut" if they believe that same US Empire would orchestrate 911 to justify their long planned global war. One thing about being a "conspiracy nut", if you live long enough, often you will see your beliefs vindicated ..."
"... So many questions, and so much left unanswered, but don't worry America may run out of money for domestic vital needs but the U.S. always has the money to go fight another war. It's a culture thing, and if you ain't into it then you just don't pay no attention to it. In fact if your life is better off from all of these U.S. led invasions, then your probably not posting any comments here, either. ..."
"... From the October 1973 Yom Kippur War onward, the United States had no foreign policy in the Middle East other than Israel's. Daniel Lazare should read "A clean break: a new strategy for the Realm". ..."
"... For the majority of amoral opportunists of the US, money=power=virtue and they will attack all who disagree. ..."
"... I am stunned that anyone could be so foolish as to think that the US military machine, US imperialism, does things "naively", bumbling like a helpless giant into wars that destroy entire nations with no end in sight. One need not be a "conspiracy theorist" to understand that the Pentagon does not control the world with an ever-expanding war budget equal to the next 10 countries combined, that it does this just because it is stuck on the wrong path. No! US imperialism develops these "big guns" to use them, to overpower, take over and dominate the world for the sake of profits and protection of the right to exploit for private profit. ..."
"... Daniel Pipes, from what I've read of him, is among those who counsel the U.S. government to use its military power to support the losing side in any civil wars fought within Israel's enemy states, so that the wars will continue, sparing Israel the threat of unified enemy states. What normal human beings consider a humanitarian disaster, repeated in Iraq, Syria and Libya, would be reckoned a success according to this way of thinking. The thinking would appear to lead to similar treatment of Iran, with even more catastrophic consequences. ..."
"... I think this pattern of using Salafists for regime change started already in Afghanistan, with Brzezinski plotting with Saudi-Arabia and Pakistan to pay and train Osama bin Laden to attack the pro Russia regime and trying to get the USSR involved in it, also trying to blame the USSR for its agression, like they did in Syri"r? ..."
"... Yes, the Brzezinski/Reagan support of fanatic insurgencies began in AfPak and was revived for the zionists. Russia happened to be on the side more or less tending to progress in both cases, so it had to be opposed. The warmongers are always the US MIC/intel, allied with the anti-American zionist fascists for Mideast wars. ..."
"... Sheldon Adelson, Soros, Saban all wanted carving up of Arabic states into small sectarian pieces (No Nasseric pan-Arabic states, a threat to Israël). And protracted wars of total destruction. Easy. ..."
"... Of course, they were told (by whom?) that the jihadists were 'democratic rebels' and 'freedom fighters' who just wanted to 'bring democracy' to Syria, and get rid of the 'tyrant Assad.' 5 years later, so much of the nonsense about "local councils" and "white helmets" has been exposed for what it was. Yet many 'free thinking' people bought the propaganda. Just like they do on Russiagate. Who needs an "alt-right" when America's "left" is a total disgrace? ..."
Dec 10, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

When a Department of Defense intelligence report about the Syrian rebel movement became public in May 2015, lots of people didn't know what to make of it. After all, what the report said was unthinkable – not only that Al Qaeda had dominated the so-called democratic revolt against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for years, but that the West continued to support the jihadis regardless, even to the point of backing their goal of creating a Sunni Salafist principality in the eastern deserts.

Journalist James Foley shortly before he was executed by an Islamic State operative in August 2014.

The United States lining up behind Sunni terrorism – how could this be? How could a nice liberal like Barack Obama team up with the same people who had brought down the World Trade Center?

It was impossible, which perhaps explains why the report remained a non-story long after it was released courtesy of a Judicial Watch freedom-of-information lawsuit . The New York Times didn't mention it until six months later while the Washington Post waited more than a year before dismissing it as "loopy" and "relatively unimportant." With ISIS rampaging across much of Syria and Iraq, no one wanted to admit that U.S. attitudes were ever anything other than hostile.

But three years earlier, when the Defense Intelligence Agency was compiling the report, attitudes were different. Jihadis were heroes rather than terrorists, and all the experts agreed that they were a low-risk, high-yield way of removing Assad from office.

After spending five days with a Syrian rebel unit, for instance, New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers wrote that the group "mixes paramilitary discipline, civilian policing, Islamic law, and the harsh demands of necessity with battlefield coldness and outright cunning."

Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, assured the Washington Post that "al Qaeda is a fringe element" among the rebels, while, not to be outdone, the gossip site Buzzfeed published a pin-up of a "ridiculously photogenic" jihadi toting an RPG.

"Hey girl," said the subhead. "Nothing sexier than fighting the oppression of tyranny."

And then there was Foreign Policy, the magazine founded by neocon guru Samuel P. Huntington, which was most enthusiastic of all. Gary Gambill's " Two Cheers for Syrian Islamists ," which ran on the FP web site just a couple of weeks after the DIA report was completed, didn't distort the facts or make stuff up in any obvious way. Nonetheless, it is a classic of U.S. propaganda. Its subhead glibly observed: "So the rebels aren't secular Jeffersonians. As far as America is concerned, it doesn't much matter."

Assessing the Damage

Five years later, it's worth a second look to see how Washington uses self-serving logic to reduce an entire nation to rubble.

First a bit of background. After displacing France and Britain as the region's prime imperial overlord during the 1956 Suez Crisis and then breaking with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser a few years later, the United States committed itself to the goal of defeating Arab nationalism and Soviet Communism, two sides of the same coin as far as Washington was concerned. Over the next half-century, this would mean steering Egypt to the right with assistance from the Saudis, isolating Libyan strong man Muammar Gaddafi, and doing what it could to undermine the Syrian Baathist regime as well.

William Roebuck, the American embassy's chargé d'affaires in Damascus, thus urged Washington in 2006 to coordinate with Egypt and Saudi Arabia to encourage Sunni Syrian fears of Shi'ite Iranian proselytizing even though such concerns are "often exaggerated." It was akin to playing up fears of Jewish dominance in the 1930s in coordination with Nazi Germany.

A year later, former NATO commander Wesley Clark learned of a classified Defense Department memo stating that U.S. policy was now to "attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years," first Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. (Quote starts at 2:07 .)

Since the United States didn't like what such governments were doing, the solution was to install more pliable ones in their place. Hence Washington's joy when the Arab Spring struck Syria in March 2011 and it appeared that protesters would soon topple the Baathists on their own.

Even when lofty democratic rhetoric gave way to ominous sectarian chants of "Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the coffin," U.S. enthusiasm remained strong. With Sunnis accounting for perhaps 60 percent of the population, strategists figured that there was no way Assad could hold out against religious outrage welling up from below.

Enter Gambill and the FP. The big news, his article began, is that secularists are no longer in command of the burgeoning Syrian rebel movement and that Sunni Islamists are taking the lead instead. As unfortunate as this might seem, he argued that such a development was both unavoidable and far from entirely negative.

"Islamist political ascendancy is inevitable in a majority Sunni Muslim country brutalized for more than four decades by a secular minoritarian dictatorship," he wrote in reference to the Baathists. "Moreover, enormous financial resources are pouring in from the Arab-Islamic world to promote explicitly Islamist resistance to Assad's Alawite-dominated, Iranian-backed regime."

So the answer was not to oppose the Islamists, but to use them. Even though "the Islamist surge will not be a picnic for the Syrian people," Gambill said, "it has two important silver linings for US interests." One is that the jihadis "are simply more effective fighters than their secular counterparts" thanks to their skill with "suicide bombings and roadside bombs."

The other is that a Sunni Islamist victory in Syria will result in "a full-blown strategic defeat" for Iran, thereby putting Washington at least part way toward fulfilling the seven-country demolition job discussed by Wesley Clark.

"So long as Syrian jihadis are committed to fighting Iran and its Arab proxies," the article concluded, "we should quietly root for them – while keeping our distance from a conflict that is going to get very ugly before the smoke clears. There will be plenty of time to tame the beast after Iran's regional hegemonic ambitions have gone down in flames."

Deals with the Devil

The U.S. would settle with the jihadis only after the jihadis had settled with Assad. The good would ultimately outweigh the bad. This kind of self-centered moral calculus would not have mattered had Gambill only spoken for himself. But he didn't. Rather, he was expressing the viewpoint of Official Washington in general, which is why the ultra-respectable FP ran his piece in the first place.The Islamists were something America could employ to their advantage and then throw away like a squeezed lemon. A few Syrians would suffer, but America would win, and that's all that counts.

The parallels with the DIA are striking. "The west, gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition," the intelligence report declared, even though "the Salafist[s], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [i.e. Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency."

Where Gambill predicted that "Assad and his minions will likely retreat to northwestern Syria," the DIA speculated that the jihadis might establish "a declared or undeclared Salafist principality" at the other end of the country near cities like Hasaka and Der Zor (also known as Deir ez-Zor).

Where the FP said that the ultimate aim was to roll back Iranian influence and undermine Shi'ite rule, the DIA said that a Salafist principality "is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)."

Bottle up the Shi'ites in northwestern Syria, in other words, while encouraging Sunni extremists to establish a base in the east so as to put pressure on Shi'ite-influenced Iraq and Shi'ite-ruled Iran.

As Gambill put it: "Whatever misfortunes Sunni Islamists may visit upon the Syrian people, any government they form will be strategically preferable to the Assad regime, for three reasons: A new government in Damascus will find continuing the alliance with Tehran unthinkable, it won't have to distract Syrians from its minority status with foreign policy adventurism like the ancien régime, and it will be flush with petrodollars from Arab Gulf states (relatively) friendly to Washington."

With the Saudis footing the bill, the U.S. would exercise untrammeled sway.

Disastrous Thinking

Has a forecast that ever gone more spectacularly wrong? Syria's Baathist government is hardly blameless in this affair. But thanks largely to the U.S.-backed sectarian offensive, 400,000 Syrians or more have died since Gambill's article appeared, with another 6.1 million displaced and an estimated 4.8 million fleeing abroad.

U.S.-backed Syrian "moderate" rebels smile as they prepare to behead a 12-year-old boy (left), whose severed head is held aloft triumphantly in a later part of the video. [Screenshot from the YouTube video] War-time destruction totals around $250 billion , according to U.N. estimates, a staggering sum for a country of 18.8 million people where per-capita income prior to the outbreak of violence was under $3,000. From Syria, the specter of sectarian violence has spread across Asia and Africa and into Europe and North America as well. Political leaders throughout the advanced industrial world are still struggling to contain the populist fury that the Middle East refugee crisis, the result of U.S.-instituted regime change, helped set off.

So instead of advancing U.S. policy goals, Gambill helped do the opposite. The Middle East is more explosive than ever while U.S. influence has fallen to sub-basement levels. Iranian influence now extends from the Arabian Sea to the Mediterranean, while the country that now seems to be wobbling out of control is Saudi Arabia where Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman is lurching from one self-induced crisis to another. The country that Gambill counted on to shore up the status quo turns out to be undermining it.

It's not easy to screw things up so badly, but somehow Washington's bloated foreign-policy establishment has done it. Since helping to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, Gambill has moved on to a post at the rightwing Middle East Forum where Daniel Pipes, the group's founder and chief, now inveighs against the same Sunni ethnic cleansing that his employee defended or at least apologized for.

The forum is particularly well known for its Campus Watch program, which targets academic critics of Israel, Islamists, and – despite Gambill's kind words about "suicide bombings and roadside bombs" – anyone it considers the least bit apologetic about Islamic terrorism.

Double your standard, double the fun. Terrorism, it seems, is only terrorism when others do it to the U.S., not when the U.S. does it to others.

Daniel Lazare is the author of several books including The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace).

Babyl-on , December 8, 2017 at 5:26 pm

I do not believe than anyone in the civil or military command ever believed that arming the jihadists would bring any sort of stability or peace to the region. I do not believe that peace was ever an interest of the US until it has once again gained hegemonic control of central Asia. This is a fight to retain US global domination – causalities do not matter. The US and its partners or co-rulers of the Empire the Saud family and the Zionist oligarchy will slaughter with impunity until someone stops them or their own corruption defeats them.

The Empire can not exist without relentless ongoing slaughter it has been at it every day now for 73 years. It worked for them all that time but that time has run out. China has already set the date for when its currency will become fully freely exchanged, less than 5 years. When that happens the world will return to the gold standard + Bitcoin possibly and US dollar hegemony will end. After that the trillion dollar a year military and the 20 trillion debt take on a different meaning. Before that slaughter non-stop will continue.

john wilson , December 9, 2017 at 6:31 am

Really, Baby-lon, your first short paragraph sums this piece by Lazare perfectly and makes the rest of his blog seem rather pointless. Even the most stupid person on earth couldn't think that the US was using murdering, butchering head choppers in a bid to bring peace and stability to the middle East. The Neocons and the other criminals that infest Washington don't want peace at any price because its bad for business.

Jerald Davidson , December 9, 2017 at 11:53 am

Babyl-on and John Wilson: you have nailed it. The last thing the US (gov't.) wants is peace. War is big business; casualties are of no concern (3 million Koreans died in the Korean War; 3 million Vietnamese in that war; 100's of thousands in Iraq [including Clinton's sanctions] and Afghanistan). The US has used jihadi proxies since the mujahedeen in 1980's Afghanistan and Contras in Nicaragua. To the US (gov't.), a Salafist dictatorship (such as Saudi Arabia) is highly preferable to a secular, nationalist ruler (such as Egypt's Nasser, Libya's Gaddafi, Syria's Assad).
So the cover story of the jjihadi's has changed – first they are freedom fighters, then terrorists. What does not change is that in either case they are pawns of the US (gov't.) goal of hegemony.
(Incidentally, Drew Hunkins must be responding to a different article.)

BannanaBoat , December 9, 2017 at 4:31 pm

Exactly Baby right on, Either USA strategists are extremely ignorant or they are attempting to create chaos, probably both. Perhaps not continuously but surely frequently the USA has promoted war prior to the last 73 years. Native Genocide , Mexican Wars, Spanish War, WWI ( USA banker repayment war)

Richard , December 9, 2017 at 5:24 pm

Exactly Babylon! Looks like consortiumnews is turning into another propaganda rag. Assad was allied with Russia and Iran – that's why the U.S. wanted him removed. Israel said that they would preferred ISIS in power over Assad. The U.S. would have happily wiped out 90% of the population using its terrorist proxies if it thought it could have got what it wanted.

Sam F , December 10, 2017 at 8:50 am

CN tends to make moderate statements so as to communicate with those most in need of them. One must start with the understandings of the audience and show them that the evidence leads further.

Richard , December 10, 2017 at 10:27 am

Sam F, no, it's a DELIBERATE lie in support of U.S. foreign policy. The guy wrote: "the NAIVE belief that jihadist proxies could be used to TRANSFORM THE REGION FOR THE BETTER." It could have been written as: "the stated justification by the president that he wanted to transform the region for the better, even though there are often ulterior motives."

It's the same GROTESQUE caricature of these wars that the mainstream media always presents: that the U.S. is on the side of good, and fights for good, even though every war INVARIABLY ends up in a bloodbath, with no one caring how many civilians have died, what state the country is left in, that civilian infrastructure and civilians were targeted, let alone whether war could have been prevented. For example, in 1991, shortly after the first Gulf War, Iraqis rose up against their regime, but George H. Bush allowed Saddam to fly his military helicopters (permission was needed due to the no-fly zones), and quell the rebellion in blood – tens of thousands were butchered! Bush said that when he told Iraqis to rebel, he meant the military generals, NOT the Iraqi people themselves. In other words, the U.S. wanted Saddam gone, but the same regime in place. The U.S. never cared about the people!

Either Robert Parry or the author wrote that introduction. I suspect Mr Parry – he always portrays the president as having a heart of gold, but, always, sadly, misinformed; being a professional journalist, he knows full well that people often only read the start and end of an article.

Drew Hunkins , December 8, 2017 at 5:31 pm

What we have occurring right now in the United States is a rare divergence of interests within our ruling class. The elites are currently made up of Zionist-militarists. What we're now witnessing is a rare conflict between the two factions. This particular internecine battle has reared its head in the past, the Dubai armaments deal comes to mind off the top of my head.

Trump started the Jerusalem imbroglio because he's concerned about Mueller's witch hunt.

The military-industrial-complex sicced Mueller on Trump because they despise his overtures towards rapprochement with the Kremlin. The military-industrial-complex MUST have a villain to justify the gigantic defense [sic] spending which permeates the entire U.S. politico-economic system. Putin and Russia were always the preferred demon because they easily fit the bill in the minds of an easily brainwashed American public. Of course saber rattling towards Moscow puts the world on the brink of nuclear war, but no matter, the careerism and fat contracts are all that matter to the MIC. Trump's rhetoric about making peace with the Kremlin has always mortified the MIC.

Since Trump's concerned about 1.) Mueller's witch hunt (he definitely should be deeply concerned, this is an out of control prosecutor on mission creep), and 2.) the almost total negative coverage the press has given him over the last two years, he's made a deal with the Zionist Power Configuration; Trump, effectively saying to them: "I'll give you Jerusalem, you use your immense influence in the American mass media to tamp down the relentlessly hostile coverage toward me, and perhaps smear Mueller's witch hunt a bit ".

This is a rare instance of our elites battling it out behind the scenes, both groups being reprehensible power hungry greed heads and sociopaths, it's hard to tell how this will end.

How this all eventually plays out is anyone's guess indeed. Let's just make sure it doesn't end with mushroom clouds over Tehran, Saint Petersburg, Paris, Chicago, London, NYC, Washington and Berlin.

Abe , December 8, 2017 at 7:57 pm

Trump's purported deviation from foreign policy orthodoxy regarding both Russia and Israel was a propaganda scam engineered by the pro-Israel Lobby from the very beginning. As Russia-gate fiction is progressively deconstructed, the Israel-gate reality becomes ever more despicably obvious.

The shamelessly Israel-pandering Trump received the "Liberty Award" for his contributions to US-Israel relations at a 3 February 2015 gala hosted by The Algemeiner Journal, a New York-based newspaper, covering American and international Jewish and Israel-related news.

"We love Israel. We will fight for Israel 100 percent, 1000 percent." VIDEO minutes 2:15-8:06 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiwBwBw7R-U

After the event, Trump did not renew his television contract for The Apprentice, which raised speculation about a Trump bid for the presidency. Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015.

Trump's purported break with GOP orthodoxy, questioning of Israel's commitment to peace, calls for even treatment in Israeli-Palestinian deal-making, and refusal to call for Jerusalem to be Israel's undivided capital, were all stage-managed for the campaign.

Cheap theatrics notwithstanding, the Netanyahu regime in Israel has "1000 percent" support from the Trump regime.

Drew Hunkins , December 8, 2017 at 8:10 pm

If Trump were totally and completely subservient to Netanyahu he would have bombed Damascus to remove Assad and would have bombed Tehran to obliterate Iran. Of course thus far he has done neither. Don't get me wrong, Trump is essentially part and parcel of the Zionist cabal, but I don't quite think he's 1,000% under their thumb (not yet?).

I don't think the Zionist Power Configuration concocted Trump's policy of relative peace with the Kremlin. Yes, the ZPC is extremely powerful in America, but Trump's position of detente with Moscow seemed to be genuine. He caught way too much heat from the mass media for it to be a stunt, it's almost torpedoed his presidency, and may eventually do just that. It was actually one of the very few things Trump got right; peace with Russia, cordial relations with the Kremlin are a no-brainer. A no-brainer to everyone but the military-industrial-complex.

Abe , December 8, 2017 at 10:59 pm

Russian. Missiles. Lets be clear: The military-industrial-complex wants plenty of low intensity conflict to fuel ever more fabulous weapons sales, not a really hot war where all those pretty expensive toys are falling out of the sky in droves.

Whether it was "bird strike" or something more technological that recently grounded the "mighty" Israeli F-35I, it's clear that America isn't eager to have those "Inherent Resolve" jets, so busily not bombing ISIS, painted with Russian SAM radar.

Russia made it clear that Trump's Tomahawk Tweet in April 2017 was not only under totally false pretenses. It had posed a threat to Russian troops and Moscow took extra measures to protect them.

Russian deployment of the advanced S-400 system on the Syrian coast in Latakia also impacts Israel's regional air superiority. The S-400 can track and shoot down targets some 400 kilometers (250 miles) away. That range encompasses half of Israel's airspace, including Ben Gurion International Airport. In addition to surface-to-air missiles installations, Russian aircraft in Syria are equipped with air-to-air missiles. Those weapons are part of an calculus of Israeli aggression in the region.

Of course, there's much more to say about this subject.

WC , December 9, 2017 at 3:44 pm

Here's a good one from Hedges (for what little good it will do). https://www.truthdig.com/articles/zero-hour-palestine/

john wilson , December 9, 2017 at 6:34 am

Surely, Drew, even the brain washed sheep otherwise known as the American public can't seriously believe that their government armed head choppers in a bid to bring peace to the region, can they?

Drew Hunkins , December 9, 2017 at 1:34 pm

Yup Mr. Wilson. It's too much cognitive dissonance for them to process. After all, we're the exceptional nation, the beacon on the hill, the country that ONLY intervenes abroad when there is a 'right to protect!' or it's a 'humanitarian intervention.' As Ken Burns would say: Washington only acts "with good intentions. They're just sometimes misplaced." That's all. The biggest global empire the world has ever seen is completely out of the picture.

mike k , December 8, 2017 at 5:34 pm

When evil people with evil intentions set out to do something in the world, the result is evil. Like Libya, or Iraq, or Syria. Why do I call these people who killed millions for their own selfish greed for power evil? If you have to ask that, then you just don't understand what evil is – and you have a lot of company, because many people believe that evil does not even exist! Such sheeple become the perfect victims of the evil ones, who are destroying our world.

john wilson , December 9, 2017 at 6:36 am

Correction, Mike. The public do believe that evil exists but they sincerely think that Putin and Russia are the evil ones'

mike k , December 9, 2017 at 5:41 pm

One of the ways to avoid recognizing evil is to ascribe it to inappropriate, incorrect sources usually as a result of believing misleading propaganda. Another common maneuver is to deny evil's presence in oneself, and believe it is always "out there". Or one can feel that "evil" is an outmoded religious concept that is only used to hit at those one does not like.

Mild - ly Facetious , December 8, 2017 at 6:22 pm

Oh Jerusalem: Requiem for the two-state solution (Gas masks required)

https://electronicintifada.net/content/oh-jerusalem-requiem-two-state-solution/22521

Abe , December 8, 2017 at 6:24 pm

On 24 October 2017, the Intercept released an NSA document unearthed from leaked intelligence files provided by Edward Snowden which reveals that terrorist militants in Syria were under the direct command of foreign governments from the early years of the war which has now claimed half a million lives.

https://theintercept.com/2017/10/24/syria-rebels-nsa-saudi-prince-assad/

Marked "Top Secret" the NSA memo focuses on events that unfolded outside Damascus in March of 2013.

The US intelligence memo is evidence of internal US government confirmation of the direct role that both the Saudi and US governments played in fueling attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, as well as military targets in pursuit of "regime change" in Syria.

Israel's support for terrorist forces in Syria is well established. The Israelis and Saudis coordinate their activities.

Abe , December 8, 2017 at 6:27 pm

An August 2012 DIA report (written when the U.S. was monitoring weapons flows from Libya to Syria), said that the opposition in Syria was driven by al Qaeda and other extremist groups: "the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria." The "deterioration of the situation" was predicted to have "dire consequences" for Iraq, which included the "grave danger" of a terrorist "Islamic state". Some of the "dire consequences" are blacked out but the DIA warned one such consequence would be the "renewing facilitation of terrorist elements from all over the Arab world entering into Iraqi Arena."

The heavily redacted DIA memo specifically mentions "the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)."

http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf

To clarify just who these "supporting powers" were, mentioned in the document who sought the creation of a "Salafist principality," the DIA memo explained: "The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition; while Russia, China, and Iran support the regime."

The DIA memo clearly indicates when it was decided to transform US, Saudi, and Turkish-backed Al Qaeda affiliates into ISIS: the "Salafist" (Islamic) "principality" (State). NATO member state Turkey has been directly supporting terrorism in Syria, and specifically, supporting ISIS. In 2014, Germany's international broadcaster Deutsche Welle's reported "'IS' supply channels through Turkey." DW exposed fleets of hundreds of trucks a day, passing unchallenged through Turkey's border crossings with Syria, clearly bound for the defacto ISIS capital of Raqqa. Starting in September 2015, Russian airpower in Syria successfully interdicted ISIS supply lines.

The usual suspects in Western media launched a relentless propaganda campaign against Russian support for Syria. The Atlantic Council's Bellingcat disinformation operation started working overtime.

The propaganda effort culminated in the 4 April 2017 Khan Shaykhun false flag chemical incident in Idlib. Bellingcat's Eliot Higgins and Dan Kaszeta have been paraded by "First Draft" coalition media "partners" in a vigorous effort to somehow implicate the Russians.

Abe , December 9, 2017 at 12:26 pm

In a January 2016 interview on Al Jazeera, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn admitted that he "paid very close attention" to the August 2012 DIA report predicting the rise of a "declared or undeclared Salafist Principality" in Syria. Flynn even asserts that the White House's sponsoring of terrorists (that would emerge as Al Nusra and ISIS) against the Syrian regime was "a willful decision."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6Y274U7QIs

Flynn was interviewed by British journalist Mehdi Hasan for Al Jazeera's Head to Head program. Flynn made it clear that the policies that led to the "the rise of the Islamic State, the rise of terrorism" were not merely the result of ignorance or looking the other way, but the result of conscious decision making:

Hasan: "You are basically saying that even in government at the time you knew these groups were around, you saw this analysis, and you were arguing against it, but who wasn't listening?"

Flynn: "I think the administration."

Hasan: "So the administration turned a blind eye to your analysis?"

Flynn: "I don't know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision."

Hasan: "A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?"

Flynn: "It was a willful decision to do what they're doing."

Holding up a paper copy of the 2012 DIA report declassified through FOIA, Hasan read aloud key passages such as, "there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria, and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime."

Rather than downplay the importance of the document and these startling passages, as did the State Department soon after its release, Flynn did the opposite: he confirmed that while acting DIA chief he "paid very close attention" to this report in particular and later added that "the intelligence was very clear."

Lt. Gen. Flynn, speaking safely from retirement, is the highest ranking intelligence official to go on record saying the United States and other state sponsors of rebels in Syria knowingly gave political backing and shipped weapons to Al-Qaeda in order to put pressure on the Syrian regime:

Hasan: "In 2012 the U.S. was helping coordinate arms transfers to those same groups [Salafists, Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda in Iraq], why did you not stop that if you're worried about the rise of quote-unquote Islamic extremists?"

Flynn: "I hate to say it's not my job but that my job was to was to to ensure that the accuracy of our intelligence that was being presented was as good as it could be."

Flynn unambiguously confirmed that the 2012 DIA document served as source material in his own discussions over Syria policy with the White House. Flynn served as Director of Intelligence for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) during a time when its prime global mission was dismantling Al-Qaeda.

Flynn's admission that the White House was in fact arming and bolstering Al-Qaeda linked groups in Syria is especially shocking given his stature. The Pentagon's former highest ranking intelligence officer in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden confessed that the United States directly aided the Al Qaeda terrorist legions of Ayman al-Zawahiri beginning in at least 2012 in Syria.

Abe , December 9, 2017 at 12:44 pm

Mehdi Hasan goes Head to Head with Michael Flynn, former head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency

Full Transcript: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/headtohead/2016/01/transcript-michael-flynn-160104174144334.html

Abe , December 9, 2017 at 2:11 pm

"Flynn would later tell the New York Times that this 2012 intelligence report in particular was seen at the White House where it was 'disregarded' because it 'didn't meet the narrative' on the war in Syria. He would further confirm to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that Defense Department (DoD) officials and DIA intelligence in particular, were loudly warning the administration that jihadists were leading the opposition in Syria -- warnings which were met with 'enormous pushback.' Instead of walking back his Al Jazeera comments, General Flynn explained to Hersh that 'If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic.' Hersh's investigative report exposed a kind of intelligence schism between the Pentagon and CIA concerning the covert program in Syria.

"In a personal exchange on his blog Sic Semper Tyrannis, legendary DoD intelligence officer and former presidential briefer Pat Lang explained [ ] that the DIA memo was used as a 'warning shot across the [administration's] bow.' Lang has elsewhere stated that DIA Director Flynn had 'tried to persuade people in the Obama Administration not to provide assistance to the Nusra group.' It must be remembered that in 2012 what would eventually emerge as distinct 'ISIS' and 'Nusra' (AQ in Syria) groups was at that time a singular entity desiring a unified 'Islamic State.' The nascent ISIS organization (referenced in the memo as 'ISI' or Islamic State in Iraq) was still one among many insurgent groups fighting to topple Assad.

"In fact, only one year after the DIA memo was produced (dated August 12, 2012) a coalition of rebels fighting under the US-backed Revolutionary Military Council of Aleppo were busy celebrating their most strategic victory to date, which served to open an opposition corridor in Northern Syria. The seizure of the Syrian government's Menagh Airbase in August 2013 was only accomplished with the military prowess of fighters identifying themselves in front of cameras and to reporters on the ground as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.

"Public embarrassment came for Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford who reluctantly confirmed that in fact, yes, the US-funded and supplied FSA commander on the ground had personally led ISIS and Nusra fighters in the attack (Ford himself was previously filmed alongside the commander). This after the New York Times publicized unambiguous video proof of the fact. Even the future high commander of Islamic State's military operations, Omar al-Shishani, himself played a leading role in the US sponsored FSA operation."

Obama and the DIA 'Islamic State' Memo: What Trump Gets Right
By Brad Hoff
https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/07/01/obama-and-the-dia-islamic-state-memo-what-trump-gets-right/

Abe , December 9, 2017 at 3:08 pm

"one first needs to understand what has happened in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries in recent years. The original plan of the US and Saudi Arabia (behind whom stood an invisible Israel) was the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad and his replacement with Islamic fundamentalists or takfiris (Daesh, al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra).

"The plan involved the following steps:

"It was an ambitious plan, and the Israelis were completely convinced that the United States would provide all the necessary resources to see it through. But the Syrian government has survived thanks to military intervention by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. Daesh is almost defeated and Iran and Hezbollah are so firmly entrenched in Syria that it has driven the Israelis into a state of fear bordering on panic. Lebanon remains stable, and even the recent attempt by the Saudis to abduct Prime Minister Saad Hariri failed.

"As a result, Saudi Arabia and Israel have developed a new plan: force the US to attack Iran. To this end, the 'axis of good"' (USA-Israel-Saudi Arabia) was created, although this is nothing new. Saudi Arabia and the other Arab States in the Persian Gulf have in the past spoken in favor of intervention in Syria. It is well known that the Saudis invaded Bahrain, are occupying it de facto, and are now at war in Yemen.

"The Israelis will participate in any plan that will finally split the Sunnis and Shiites, turning the region into rubble. It was not by chance that, having failed in Lebanon, they are now trying to do the same in Yemen after the murder of Ali Abdullah Saleh.

"For the Saudis and Israelis, the problem lies in the fact that they have rather weak armed forces; expensive and high-tech, but when it comes to full-scale hostilities, especially against a really strong opponent such as the Iranians or Hezbollah, the 'Israel/Wahhabis' have no chance and they know it, even if they do not admit it. So, one simply needs to think up some kind of plan to force the Shiites to pay a high price.

"So they developed a new plan. Firstly, the goal is now not the defeat of Hezbollah or Iran. For all their rhetoric, the Israelis know that neither they nor especially the Saudis are able to seriously threaten Iran or even Hezbollah. Their plan is much more basic: initiate a serious conflict and then force the US to intervene. Only today, the armed forces of the United States have no way of winning a war with Iran, and this may be a problem. The US military knows this and they are doing everything to tell the neo-cons 'sorry, we just can't.' This is the only reason why a US attack on Iran has not already taken place. From the Israeli point of view this is totally unacceptable and the solution is simple: just force the US to participate in a war they do not really need. As for the Iranians, the Israeli goal of provoking an attack on Iran by the US is not to defeat Iran, but just to bring about destruction – a lot of destruction [ ]

"You would need to be crazy to attack Iran. The problem, however, is that the Saudis and the Israelis are close to this state. And they have proved it many times. So it just remains to hope that Israel and the KSA are 'crazy', but 'not that crazy'."

The Likelihood of War with Iran By Petr Lvov https://journal-neo.org/2017/12/09/the-likelihood-of-war-with-iran/

BobH, December 8, 2017 at 7:13 pm

The article raises a very serious charge. Up till now it appeared that supplying weapons to Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria was just another example of Pentagon incompetence but the suggestion here is that it was a concerted policy and it's hard to believe that there was no one in the Pentagon that was privy to that policy who wouldn't raise an objection.

That it conformed with Israeli, Saudi and CIA designs is not surprising, but that there was no dissension within the Pentagon is appalling (or that Obama didn't raise objections). Clark's comment should put him on the hot seat for a congressional investigation but, of course, there is no one in congress to run with it. The policy is so manifestly evil that it seems to dwarf even the reckless ignorance of preceding "interventions".

Linda Wood , December 8, 2017 at 10:24 pm

There WAS dissension within the Pentagon, not only about being in a coalition with the Gulf States and Turkey in support of terrorist forces, but about allowing ISIS to invade Ramadi, which CENTCOM exposed by making public that US forces watched it happen and did nothing. In addition, CENTCOM and SOCOM publicly opposed switching sides in Yemen.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/4/17/us-generals-think-saudi-strikes-in-yemen-a-bad-idea.html

A senior commander at Central Command (CENTCOM), speaking on condition of anonymity, scoffed at that argument. "The reason the Saudis didn't inform us of their plans," he said, "is because they knew we would have told them exactly what we think -- that it was a bad idea.

Military sources said that a number of regional special forces officers and officers at U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) argued strenuously against supporting the Saudi-led intervention because the target of the intervention, the Shia Houthi movement -- which has taken over much of Yemen and which Riyadh accuses of being a proxy for Tehran -- has been an effective counter to Al-Qaeda.

The DIA report released by Gen. Flynn in 2012 predicted the Islamic State with alarm. That is why Flynn was fired as Director of DIA. He objected to the insane policy of supporting the CIA/Saudi madness and saw it as not only counter-productive but disastrous. His comments to AlJazeera in 2016 reinforced this position. Gen Flynn's faction of the American military has been consistent in its opposition to CIA support of terrorist forces.

BobH , December 8, 2017 at 10:55 pm

Thanks, I never read anything about it in the MSM (perhaps Aljazeera was an exception?). However, this doesn't explain Gen. Flynn's tight relationship with Turkey's Erdogan who clearly backed the Al Qaeda affiliated rebels to the point of shooting down a Russian jet over Syria.

Sam F , December 10, 2017 at 8:57 am

The fighter shoot-down incident was before Erdogan's reversals in Syria policy.

Linda Wood , December 8, 2017 at 10:28 pm

I see Gen. Flynn as a whistleblower. The 2012 report he circulated saw the rise of the Salafist Islamic state with alarm.

http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf

B. THE SALAFIST, THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, AND AQI ARE THE MAJOR FORCES DRIVING THE INSURGENCY IN SYRIA.

C. THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEY SUPPORT THE OPPOSITION; WHILE RUSSIA, CHINA, AND IRAN SUPPORT THE REGIME.

C. IF THE SITUATION UNRAVELS THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME, WHICH IS CONSIDERED THE STRATEGIC DEPTH OF THE SHIA EXPANSION (IRAQ AND IRAN).

D. THE DETERIORATION OF THE SITUATION HAS DIRE CONSEQUENCES ON THE IRAQI SITUATION AND ARE AS FOLLOWS:

–1. THIS CREATES THE IDEAL ATMOSPHERE FOR AQI TO RETURN TO ITS OLD POCKETS IN MOSUL AND RAMADI, AND WILL PROVIDE A RENEWED MOMENTUM UNDER THE PRESUMPTION OF UNIFYING THE JIHAD AMONG SUNNI IRAQ AND SYRIA ISI COULD ALSO DECLARE AN ISLAMIC STATE THROUGH ITS UNION WITH OTHER TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS IN IRAQ AND SYRIA, WHICH WILL CREATE GRAVE DANGER IN REGARDS TO UNIFYING IRAQ AND THE PROTECTION OF ITS TERRITORY

https://geopolitics.co/2015/12/22/dempseys-pentagon-aided-assad-with-military-intelligence-hersh/
London Review of Books Vol. 38 No. 1 · 7 January 2016
Military to Military: US intelligence sharing in the Syrian war
Seymour M. Hersh

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn't doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. 'If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,' Flynn told me. 'We understood Isis's long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.' The DIA's reporting, he said, 'got enormous pushback' from the Obama administration. 'I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.'

j. D. D. , December 9, 2017 at 8:33 am

Thank you. Gen Flynn also urged coordination with Russia against ISIS, so it doesn't take much to see why he was targeted. Ironically, the MSM is now going bananas over his support for nuclear power in the region, which he had tied to desalination of sea water, toward alleviating that crucial source of conflict in the area.

Abbybwood , December 9, 2017 at 11:24 pm

I believe Wesley Clark told Amy Goodman that he was handed the classified memo regarding the U.S. overthrowing seven countries in five years starting with Iraq and ending with Iran, in 2001, not 2006. He said it was right after 9/11 when he visited the Pentagon and Joint Chief of Staff's office and was handed the memo.

jaycee , December 8, 2017 at 7:19 pm

The use of Islamist proxy warriors to help achieve American geo-political ends goes back to at least 1979, including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Libya, and Syria. One of the better books on 9/11 is Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's "The War On Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism". The first section of that book – "The Geopolitics of Terrorism" – covers, across 150 well-sourced pages, the history and background of this involvement. It is highly recommended for anyone who wishes to be better informed on this topic.

One disturbing common feature across the years have been US sponsored airlifts of Islamist fighters facing defeat, as seen in Afghanistan in late 2001 and just recently in eastern Syria. In 2001, some of those fighters were relocated to North Africa, specifically Mali – the roots of the Islamist insurgency which has destabilized that country over the past few years. Where exactly the ISIS rebels assisted some weeks ago were relocated is yet unknown.

turk151 , December 9, 2017 at 10:03 pm

Jaycee, actually you have to go back much further than that to WW2. Hitler used the marginalized Turkic people in Russia and turned them into effective fighters to create internal factions within the Soviet Union. After Hitler lost and the Cold War began, the US, who had no understanding of the Soviets at the time radicalized and empowered Islamist including the Muslim Brotherhood to weaponize Islam against the Soviet Union.

Hence the birth of the Mujaheddin and Bin Laden, the rest is history.

j. D. D. , December 8, 2017 at 7:57 pm

The article does not support the sub-headline. There is no evidence provided, nor is there any evidence to be found, that Washington's policy in the region was motivated by anything other than geopolitical objectives.

David G , December 9, 2017 at 7:25 am

I think that phrasing may point to the hand of editor Robert Parry. The incredible value of CN notwithstanding, Parry in his own pieces (erroneously in my eyes) maintains a belief that Obama somehow meant well. Hence the imputation of some "naïve" but ultimately benevolent motive on the part of the U.S. genocidaires, as the whole Syria catastrophe got going on Obama's watch.

Anon , December 9, 2017 at 9:14 am

The imputation of naivete works to avoid accusation of a specific strategy without sufficient evidence.

Skip Scott , December 9, 2017 at 9:45 am

Although I am no fan of Obama, and most especially the continuation of the warmongering for his 8 years, he did balk at the "Red line" when he found out he was being set up, and it wasn't Assad who used chemical weapons. I don't think he "meant well" so much as he knew the exact length of his leash. His bragging about going against "The Washington playbook" was of course laughable; just as his whole hopey/changey thing was laughable with Citigroup picking his cabinet.

Stephen , December 9, 2017 at 2:49 pm

Off topic but you can listen to some of Obama's banking handiwork here: https://sputniknews.com/radio_loud_and_clear/201712091059844562-looming-government-shutdown-will-democrats-fight-trumps-pro-rich-plan/ It starts at about minute 28:14. It explains the whole reaction by Obama and Holder to the banking fiasco in my mind. Sorry but I had to get it from the evil Rooski radio program.

Lois Gagnon , December 8, 2017 at 8:41 pm

All these western imperial geostrategic planners are certifiably insane and have no business anywhere near the levers of government policy. They are the number one enemy of humanity. If we don't find a way to remove them from power, they may actually succeed in destroying life on Earth.

Stephen J. , December 8, 2017 at 8:42 pm

There is a volume of evidence that the war criminals in our midst were arming and training "jihadists." See link below. http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2016/10/the-evidence-of-planning-of-wars.html

MarkU , December 8, 2017 at 10:00 pm

"Official Washington helped unleash hell on Syria and across the Mideast behind the naïve belief that jihadist proxies could be used to transform the region for the better, explains Daniel Lazare." What a load of old rubbish, naïve belief indeed. it is difficult to believe that anyone could write this stuff with a straight face.

Linda Wood , December 8, 2017 at 10:37 pm

Incompetence and stupidity are their only defense because if anyone acknowledged that trillions of dollars have been made by the usual suspects committing these crimes, the industrialists of war would face a justice symbolized by Nuremberg.

Zachary Smith , December 8, 2017 at 11:37 pm

That Gary Gambill character "outed" himself as a Zionist on September 4 of this year. He appears to have mastered the propaganda associated with the breed. At the link see if you can find any mention of the murders, thefts, ethnic cleansing, or apartheid of his adopted nation. Blaming the victim may be this fellow's specialty. Sample:

The well-intentioned flocked in droves to the belief that Israeli- Palestinian peace was achievable provided Israel made the requisite concessions, and that this would liberate the Arab-Islamic world from a host of other problems allegedly arising from it: bloated military budgets, intolerance of dissent, Islamic extremism, you name it.

Why tackle each of these problems head on when they can be alleviated all at once when Israel is brought to heel? Twenty years later, the Middle East is suffering the consequences of this conspiracy of silence.

Zachary Smith , December 8, 2017 at 11:37 pm

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-accidental-Zionist-504221

Gerry , December 9, 2017 at 4:51 am

The American groupthink rarely allows propaganda and disinformation disturb: endless wars and endless lies and criminality, have not disturbed this mindset. It is clever to manipulate people to think in a way opposite of truth so consistently. All the atrocities by the US have been surrounded by media propaganda and mastery of groupthink techniques go down well. Mention something unusual or real news and you might get heavily criticized for daring to think outside the box and doubt what are (supposedly) "religious truths". Tell a lie long enough and it becomes the truth.

It takes courage to go against the flow of course and one can only hope that the Americans are what they think they are: courageous and strong enough to hear their cherished truths smashed, allow the scales before their eyes to fall and practise free speech and free thought.

Theo , December 9, 2017 at 6:35 am

Thanks for this article and many others on this site.In Europe and in Germany you hardly hear,read or see any of these facts and their connections.It seems to be only of marginal interest.

Josh Stern , December 9, 2017 at 6:49 am

The CIA was a key force behind the creation of both al Qaeda and ISIS. Most major incidents of "Islamic Terrorism" have some kind of CIA backing behind them. See this large collection of links for compiled evidence: http://www.pearltrees.com/joshstern/government-supporting/id18814292

triekc , December 9, 2017 at 8:27 am

This journalist and other journalists writing on some of my favorite Russian propaganda news websites, have reported the US empire routinely makes "deals with the devil", the enemy of my enemy is my friend, if doing so furthers their goal of perpetual war and global hegemony. Yet, inexplicably, these journalists buy the US empire's 911 story without question, in the face of many unanswered questions.

Beginning in the 1990's, neocons who would become W's cabinet, wrote detailed plans of military regime change in Middle East, but stating they needed a "strong external shock to the United States -- a latter-day 'Pearl Harbor", to get US sheeple to support increased militarism and global war. Few months after W took office, and had appointed those war mongering neocons to positions of power, Bin Laden (CIA staffer) and a handful of his men, all from close allied countries to the US, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, delivered the 2nd Pearl Harbor on 911. What a timely coincidence! We accept the US Empire provides weapons and military support to the same enemy, and worse, who attacked us on 911, but one is labeled a "conspiracy nut" if they believe that same US Empire would orchestrate 911 to justify their long planned global war. One thing about being a "conspiracy nut", if you live long enough, often you will see your beliefs vindicated

Joe Tedesky , December 9, 2017 at 11:27 am

You commented on what I was thinking, and that was, 'remember when al Queda was our enemy on 911'? So now that bin Laden is dead, and his al Queda now fights on our side, shouldn't the war be over? And, just for the record who did attack us on 911?

So many questions, and so much left unanswered, but don't worry America may run out of money for domestic vital needs but the U.S. always has the money to go fight another war. It's a culture thing, and if you ain't into it then you just don't pay no attention to it. In fact if your life is better off from all of these U.S. led invasions, then your probably not posting any comments here, either.

Knowing the Pentagon mentality they probably have an 'al Queda combat medal' to pin on the terrorists chest. Sarcasm I know, but seriously is anything not within the realm of believable when it comes to this MIC establishment?

Christene Bartels , December 9, 2017 at 8:53 am

Great article and spot on as far as the author takes it. But the world is hurtling towards Armageddon so I'd like to back things up about one hundred years and get down to brass tacks.

The fact of the matter is, the M.E. has never been at total peace but it has been nothing but one colossal FUBAR since the Ottoman Empire was defeated after WWI and the Allied Forces got their grubby, greedy mitts on its M.E. territories and all of that luscious black gold. First up was the British Empire and France and then it really went nuclear (literally) in 1946 when Truman and the U.S. joined in the fun and decided to figure out how we could carve out that ancient prime piece of real estate and resurrect Israel. By 1948 ..violà ..there she was.

So now here we sit as the hundred year delusion that we knew what the hell we were doing comes crashing down around us. Seriously, whoever the people have been who thought that a country with the historical perspective of a toddler was going to be able to successfully manage and manipulate a region filled with people who are still tribal in perspective and are still holding grudges and settling scores from five thousand years ago were complete and total arrogant morons. Every single one of them. Up to the present moment.

Which gets me down to those brass tacks I alluded to at the beginning of my comment. Delusional crusades lead by arrogant morons always, always, always end up as ash heaps. So, I would suggest we all prepare for that rapidly approaching conclusion accordingly. For me, that means hitting my knees.

Gregory Herr , December 9, 2017 at 1:00 pm

Middle Eastern people are no more "tribal" or prone to holding grudges than any other people. Middle Eastern people have exhibited and practiced peaceful and tolerant living arrangements within several different contexts over the centuries. Iraq had a fairly thriving middle class and the Syrians are a cultured and educated people.

Gregory Herr , December 9, 2017 at 10:07 pm

Syrian society is constructed very much within the construct of close family ties and a sense of a Syrian homeland. It is solely the business of the Syrian people to decide whether the socialist Ba'ath government functions according to their own sense of realities and standards. Some of those realities may include aspects of a necessitated national security state (necessitated by CIA and Israeli subterfuge) that prompts shills to immediately characterize the Assad government as "an authoritarian regime" and of course that's all you need to know. Part of what pisses the West off about the Syrians is that they are so competent, and that includes their intelligence and security services. One of the other parts is the socialist example of government functioning in interests of the general population, not selling out to vultures.

It bothers me that Mr. Lazare wrote: "Syria's Baathist government is hardly blameless in this affair." Really? Well the Syrian government can hardly be blamed for the vile strategy of using terrorist mercenaries to take or destroy a people's homeland–killing horrific numbers of fathers, mothers, and children on the way to establish some kind of Wild West control over Damascus that can then be manipulated for the typical elite deviances. What was purposely planned and visited upon the Syrian people has had human consequences that were known and disregarded by the planners. It has been and continues to be a grave crime against our common humanity that should be raised to the roof of objection! People like Gambill should be excoriated for their crass appraisal of human costs .and for their contrived and twisted rationalizations and deceits. President Assad recently gave an interview to teleSUR that is worth a listen. He talks about human costs with understanding for what he is talking about. Gambill doesn't give a damn.

BASLE , December 9, 2017 at 10:46 am

From the October 1973 Yom Kippur War onward, the United States had no foreign policy in the Middle East other than Israel's. Daniel Lazare should read "A clean break: a new strategy for the Realm".

Sam F , December 10, 2017 at 9:08 am

Yes, Israel is the cut-out or fence for US politicians stealing campaign money from the federal budget. US policy is that of the bribery sources and nothing else. And it believes that to be professional competence. For the majority of amoral opportunists of the US, money=power=virtue and they will attack all who disagree.

Herman , December 9, 2017 at 10:47 am

"Official Washington helped unleash hell on Syria and across the Mideast behind the naïve belief that jihadist proxies could be used to transform the region for the better, explains Daniel Lazare."

Lazare makes the case very well about our amoral foreign policy but I think he errs in saying our aim was to "transform the region for the better." Recent history, going back to Afghanistan shows a very different goal, to defeat our enemies and the enemies of our allies with little concern for the aftermath. Just observing what has happened to the people where we supported extremists is evidence enough.

Peace on Earth, Goodwill toward men. We hope the conscience of our nation is bothered by our behavior but we know that is not true, and we sleep very well, thank you.

Marilyn Vogt-Downey , December 9, 2017 at 11:18 am

I am stunned that anyone could be so foolish as to think that the US military machine, US imperialism, does things "naively", bumbling like a helpless giant into wars that destroy entire nations with no end in sight. One need not be a "conspiracy theorist" to understand that the Pentagon does not control the world with an ever-expanding war budget equal to the next 10 countries combined, that it does this just because it is stuck on the wrong path. No! US imperialism develops these "big guns" to use them, to overpower, take over and dominate the world for the sake of profits and protection of the right to exploit for private profit.

There is ample evidence–see the Brookings Institute study among many others–that the Gulf monarchies–flunkies of US imperialism–who "host" dozens of US military bases in the region, some of them central to US war strategy–initiated and nourished and armed and financed the "jihadi armies" in Syria AND Libya AND elsewhere; they did not do this on their own. The US government–the executive committee of the US ruling class–does not naively support the Gulf monarchies because it doesn't know any better! Washington (following British imperialism) organized, established and backed these flunky regimes. They are autocratic, antediluvian regimes, allowing virtually civil rights, with no local proletariat to speak of, no popular base. They are no more than sheriffs for imperialism in that region of the world, along with the Zionist state of Israel, helping imperialism do the really dirty work.

I research this and gathered the evidence to support what I just asserted in a long study printed back in Dec. 2015 in Truthout. Here is the link: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34151-what-is-the-war-on-terror-and-how-to-fight-it

Look at the evidence. Stop the totally foolish assessment that the US government spends all this money on a war machine just to "naively" blunder into wars that level entire nations–and is not taking on destruction of the entire continent of Africa to eliminate any obstacles to its domination.

No! That is foolish and destructive. Unless we look in the face what is going on–the US government since its "secret" intervention in Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s, has recruited, trained, armed, funded and relied on jihadi armies to unseat regimes and destabilize and destroy populations and regimes the US government wants to overthrow, and destroy, any that could potentially develop into an alternative model of nationalist, bourgeois industrial development on any level.

Wake up!!! The evidence is there. There is no reason to bumble and bungle along as if we are in the dark.

Randal Marlin , December 9, 2017 at 11:26 am

Daniel Pipes, from what I've read of him, is among those who counsel the U.S. government to use its military power to support the losing side in any civil wars fought within Israel's enemy states, so that the wars will continue, sparing Israel the threat of unified enemy states. What normal human beings consider a humanitarian disaster, repeated in Iraq, Syria and Libya, would be reckoned a success according to this way of thinking.
The thinking would appear to lead to similar treatment of Iran, with even more catastrophic consequences.

Behind all this is the thinking that the survival of Israel outweighs anything else in any global ethical calculus. Those who don't accept this moral premise but who believe in supporting the survival of Israel have their work cut out for them. This work would be made easier if the U.S. population saw clearly what was going on, instead of being preoccupied with salacious sexual misconduct stories or other distractions.

Zachary Smith , December 9, 2017 at 2:43 pm

A Russian interceptor has been scrambled to stop a rogue US fighter jet from actively interfering with an anti-terrorist operation, the Russian Defense Ministry said. It also accused the US of provoking close encounters with the Russian jets in Syria.

A US F-22 fighter was preventing two Russian Su-25 strike aircraft from bombing an Islamic State (IS, former ISIS) base to the west of the Euphrates November 23, according to the ministry. The ministry's spokesman, Major General Igor Konashenkov described the episode as yet another example of US aircraft attempts to prevent Russian forces from carrying out strikes against Islamic State.

"The F-22 launched decoy flares and used airbrakes while constantly maneuvering [near the Russian strike jets], imitating an air fight," Konashenkov said. He added that the US jet ceased its dangerous maneuvers only after a Russian Su-35S fighter jet joined the two strike planes.

If this story is true, then it illustrates a number of things. First, the US is still providing ISIS air cover. Second, either the F-22 pilot or his commander is dumber than dirt. The F-22 may be a fine airplane, but getting into a contest with an equally fine non-stealth airplane at eyeball distances means throwing away every advantage of the super-expensive stealth.

Zachary Smith , December 9, 2017 at 2:43 pm

https://www.rt.com/news/412590-russia-us-syria-air-force/

Pablo Diablo , December 9, 2017 at 2:53 pm

Gotta keep the War Machine well fed and insure Corporate control of markets and taking of resources.

Abe , December 9, 2017 at 2:54 pm

In October 1973, a nuclear armed rogue state almost triggered a global thermonuclear war.

Yom Kippur: Israel's 1973 nuclear alert
By Richard Sale
https://www.upi.com/Yom-Kippur-Israels-1973-nuclear-alert/64941032228992/

Israel obtained operational nuclear weapons capability by 1967, with the mass production of nuclear warheads occurring immediately after the Six-Day War. In addition to the Israeli nuclear arsenal, Israel has offensive chemical and biological warfare stockpiles.

Israel, the Middle East's sole nuclear power, is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

In 2015, the US-based Institute for Science and International Security estimated that Israel had 115 nuclear warheads. Outside estimates of Israel's nuclear arsenal range up to 400 nuclear weapons.

Israeli nuclear weapons delivery mechanisms include Jericho 3 missiles, with a range of 4,800 km to 6,500 km (though a 2004 source estimated its range at up to 11,500 km), as well as regional coverage from road mobile Jericho 2 IRBMs.

Additionally, Israel is believed to have an offshore nuclear capability using submarine-launched nuclear-capable cruise missiles, which can be launched from the Israeli Navy's Dolphin-class submarines.

The Israeli Air Force has F-15I and F-16I Sufa fighter aircraft are capable of delivering tactical and strategic nuclear weapons at long distances using conformal fuel tanks and supported by their aerial refueling fleet of modified Boeing 707's.

In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at Dimona, fled to the United Kingdom and revealed to the media some evidence of Israel's nuclear program and explained the purposes of each building, also revealing a top-secret underground facility directly below the installation.

The Mossad, Israel's secret service, sent a female agent who lured Vanunu to Italy, where he was kidnapped by Mossad agents and smuggled to Israel aboard a freighter. An Israeli court then tried him in secret on charges of treason and espionage, and sentenced him to eighteen years imprisonment.

At the time of Vanunu's kidnapping, The Times reported that Israel had material for approximately 20 hydrogen bombs and 200 fission bombs by 1986. In the spring of 2004, Vanunu was released from prison, and placed under several strict restrictions, such as the denial of a passport, freedom of movement limitations and restrictions on communications with the press. Since his release, he has been rearrested and charged multiple times for violations of the terms of his release.

Safety concerns about this 40-year-old reactor have been reported. In 2004, as a preventive measure, Israeli authorities distributed potassium iodide anti-radiation tablets to thousands of residents living nearby. Local residents have raised concerns regarding serious threats to health from living near the reactor.

According to a lawsuit filed in Be'er Sheva Labor Tribunal, workers at the center were subjected to human experimentation in 1998. According to Julius Malick, the worker who submitted the lawsuit, they were given drinks containing uranium without medical supervision and without obtaining written consent or warning them about risks of side effects.

In April 2016 the U.S. National Security Archive declassified dozens of documents from 1960 to 1970, which detail what American intelligence viewed as Israel's attempts to obfuscate the purpose and details of its nuclear program. The Americans involved in discussions with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and other Israelis believed the country was providing "untruthful cover" about intentions to build nuclear weapons.

mike k , December 9, 2017 at 6:38 pm

The machinations of those seeking to gain advantages for themselves by hurting others, are truly appalling. If we fail to name evil for what it is, then we fail as human beings.Those who look the other way as their country engages in an organized reign of terror, are complicit in that enormous crime.

Den Lille Abe , December 9, 2017 at 8:54 pm

The path the US has chosen since the end of WWII has been over dead bodies. In the name of "security", bringing "Freedom" and "Democracy" and complete unconstrained greed it has trampled countless nations into piles of rubble. To say it is despised or loathed is an overwhelming understatement. It is almost universally hated in the third world. Rightly. Bringing this monstrosity to a halt is a difficult task, and probably cannot be done militarily without a nuclear war, economically could in the end have the same outcome, then how?

Easy! Ruin its population. This process has started, long ago. The decline in the US of health, general wealth, nutrition, production, education, equality, ethics and morals is already showing as cracks in the fabrics of the US.

A population of incarcerated, obese, low iQ zealot junkies, armed to teeth with guns, in a country with a crumbling infrastructure, full of environmental disasters is 21 st century for most Americans. In all the areas I mentioned the US is going backwards compared to most other countries. So the monster will come down.

turk151 , December 9, 2017 at 10:20 pm

I think you are being a little hard on the incarcerated, obese, low iQ zealot junkies, armed to teeth with guns

I am not sure who is more loathsome the evangelicals who were supporting the Bush / Cheney cabal murderous wars until the bitter end or the liberal intelligentsia careerist cheerleaders for Obama and Hilary's Wars in Iraq and Syria, who also dont give a damn about another Arab country being destroyed and sold into slavery as long as Hillary gets elected. At least with the former group, you can chalk it up to a lack of education.

Linda Wood , December 10, 2017 at 1:52 am

This is possibly the most intelligent and hopeful discussion I have read since 9/11. It says that at least some Americans do see that we have a fascist cell in our government. That is the first step in finding a way to unplug it. Best wishes to all of you who have written here. We will find a way to put war out of business.

Barbara van der Wal-Kylstra , December 10, 2017 at 2:46 am

I think this pattern of using Salafists for regime change started already in Afghanistan, with Brzezinski plotting with Saudi-Arabia and Pakistan to pay and train Osama bin Laden to attack the pro Russia regime and trying to get the USSR involved in it, also trying to blame the USSR for its agression, like they did in Syri"r?

Sam F , December 10, 2017 at 9:18 am

Yes, the Brzezinski/Reagan support of fanatic insurgencies began in AfPak and was revived for the zionists. Russia happened to be on the side more or less tending to progress in both cases, so it had to be opposed. The warmongers are always the US MIC/intel, allied with the anti-American zionist fascists for Mideast wars.

Luutzen , December 10, 2017 at 9:15 am

Sheldon Adelson, Soros, Saban all wanted carving up of Arabic states into small sectarian pieces (No Nasseric pan-Arabic states, a threat to Israël). And protracted wars of total destruction. Easy.

mike k , December 10, 2017 at 11:05 am

The US Military is part of the largest terrorist organization on Earth. For the super rich and powerful rulers of that US Mafia, the ignorant religious fanatics and other tools of Empire are just pawns in their game of world domination and universal slavery for all but themselves. These monsters of evil delight in profiting from the destruction of others; but their insatiable greed for more power will never be satisfied, and will become the cause of the annihilation of every living thing – including themselves. But like other sold out human addicts, at this point they don't really care, and will blindly pursue their nightmare quest to the very end – and perhaps they secretly hope that that final end of everything will at last quench their burning appetite for blood and gold.

Joe Tedesky , December 10, 2017 at 11:12 am

I'm leaving a link to a very long David Swanson article, where Mr Swanson goes into quite a lot of detail to how the U.S. wages war.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2017/12/76-years-pearl-harbor-lies.html

Brendan , December 10, 2017 at 12:09 pm

What's interesting of course is how not just Washington, but much of the 'left' also cheered on the jihadists.

Of course, they were told (by whom?) that the jihadists were 'democratic rebels' and 'freedom fighters' who just wanted to 'bring democracy' to Syria, and get rid of the 'tyrant Assad.' 5 years later, so much of the nonsense about "local councils" and "white helmets" has been exposed for what it was. Yet many 'free thinking' people bought the propaganda. Just like they do on Russiagate. Who needs an "alt-right" when America's "left" is a total disgrace?

[Dec 01, 2017] NSA hacks system administrators, new leak reveals

Highly recommended!
"I hunt sysadm" policy is the most realosnableif you you want to get into some coporate netwrok. So republication of this three years old post is just a reminder. Any sysadmin that access corporates netwrok not from a dedicated computer using VPN (corporate laptop) is engangering the corporation. As simple as that. The level of non-professionalism demonstrated by Hillary Clinton IT staff suggests that this can be a problem in government too. After all Snowden documents now are studied by all major intelligence agencies of the world.
This also outlines the main danger of "shadow It".
Notable quotes:
"... Journalist Ryan Gallagher reported that Edward Snowden , a former sys admin for NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, provided The Intercept with the internal documents, including one from 2012 that's bluntly titled "I hunt sys admins." ..."
"... "Who better to target than the person that already has the 'keys to the kingdom'?" ..."
"... "They were written by an NSA official involved in the agency's effort to break into foreign network routers, the devices that connect computer networks and transport data across the Internet," ..."
"... "By infiltrating the computers of system administrators who work for foreign phone and Internet companies, the NSA can gain access to the calls and emails that flow over their networks." ..."
"... The latest leak suggests that some NSA analysts took a much different approach when tasked with trying to collect signals intelligence that otherwise might not be easily available. According to the posts, the author advocated for a technique that involves identifying the IP address used by the network's sys admin, then scouring other NSA tools to see what online accounts used those addresses to log-in. Then by using a ..."
"... that tricks targets into installing malware by being misdirected to fake Facebook servers, the intelligence analyst can hope that the sys admin's computer is sufficiently compromised and exploited. ..."
"... Once the NSA has access to the same machine a sys admin does, American spies can mine for a trove of possibly invaluable information, including maps of entire networks, log-in credentials, lists of customers and other details about how systems are wired. In turn, the NSA has found yet another way to, in theory, watch over all traffic on a targeted network. ..."
"... "Up front, sys admins generally are not my end target. My end target is the extremist/terrorist or government official that happens to be using the network some admin takes care of," the NSA employee says in the documents. ..."
"... "A key part of the protections that apply to both US persons and citizens of other countries is the mandate that information be in support of a valid foreign intelligence requirement, and comply with US Attorney General-approved procedures to protect privacy rights." ..."
"... Coincidentally, outgoing-NSA Director Keith Alexander said last year that he was working on drastically cutting the number of sys admins at that agency by upwards of 90 percent - but didn't say it was because they could be exploited by similar tactics waged by adversarial intelligence groups. ..."
Mar 21, 2014 | news.slashdot.org

In its quest to take down suspected terrorists and criminals abroad, the United States National Security Agency has adopted the practice of hacking the system administrators that oversee private computer networks, new documents reveal.

In its quest to take down suspected terrorists and criminals abroad, the United States National Security Agency has adopted the practice of hacking the system administrators that oversee private computer networks, new documents reveal.

The Intercept has published a handful of leaked screenshots taken from an internal NSA message board where one spy agency specialist spoke extensively about compromising not the computers of specific targets, but rather the machines of the system administrators who control entire networks.

Journalist Ryan Gallagher reported that Edward Snowden, a former sys admin for NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, provided The Intercept with the internal documents, including one from 2012 that's bluntly titled "I hunt sys admins."

According to the posts - some labeled "top secret" - NSA staffers should not shy away from hacking sys admins: a successful offensive mission waged against an IT professional with extensive access to a privileged network could provide the NSA with unfettered capabilities, the analyst acknowledged.

"Who better to target than the person that already has the 'keys to the kingdom'?" one of the posts reads.

"They were written by an NSA official involved in the agency's effort to break into foreign network routers, the devices that connect computer networks and transport data across the Internet," Gallagher wrote for the article published late Thursday. "By infiltrating the computers of system administrators who work for foreign phone and Internet companies, the NSA can gain access to the calls and emails that flow over their networks."

Since last June, classified NSA materials taken by Snowden and provided to certain journalists have exposed an increasing number of previously-secret surveillance operations that range from purposely degrading international encryption standards and implanting malware in targeted machines, to tapping into fiber-optic cables that transfer internet traffic and even vacuuming up data as its moved into servers in a decrypted state.

The latest leak suggests that some NSA analysts took a much different approach when tasked with trying to collect signals intelligence that otherwise might not be easily available. According to the posts, the author advocated for a technique that involves identifying the IP address used by the network's sys admin, then scouring other NSA tools to see what online accounts used those addresses to log-in. Then by using a previously-disclosed NSA tool that tricks targets into installing malware by being misdirected to fake Facebook servers, the intelligence analyst can hope that the sys admin's computer is sufficiently compromised and exploited.

Once the NSA has access to the same machine a sys admin does, American spies can mine for a trove of possibly invaluable information, including maps of entire networks, log-in credentials, lists of customers and other details about how systems are wired. In turn, the NSA has found yet another way to, in theory, watch over all traffic on a targeted network.

"Up front, sys admins generally are not my end target. My end target is the extremist/terrorist or government official that happens to be using the network some admin takes care of," the NSA employee says in the documents.

When reached for comment by The Intercept, NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines said that, "A key part of the protections that apply to both US persons and citizens of other countries is the mandate that information be in support of a valid foreign intelligence requirement, and comply with US Attorney General-approved procedures to protect privacy rights."

Coincidentally, outgoing-NSA Director Keith Alexander said last year that he was working on drastically cutting the number of sys admins at that agency by upwards of 90 percent - but didn't say it was because they could be exploited by similar tactics waged by adversarial intelligence groups. Gen. Alexander's decision came just weeks after Snowden - previously one of around 1,000 sys admins working on the NSA's networks, according to Reuters - walked away from his role managing those networks with a trove of classified information.

[Dec 01, 2017] JFK The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy by L. Fletcher Prouty, Oliver Stone, Jesse Ventura

Highly recommended!
The most important part of power elite in neoliberal society might not be financial oligarchy, but intelligence agencies elite. If you look at the role of Brennan in "Purple color revolution" against Trump that became clear that heads of the agencies are powerful political players with resources at hand, that are not available to other politicians.
Notable quotes:
"... Men in positions of great power have been forced to realize that their aspirations and responsibilities have exceeded the horizons of their own experience, knowledge, and capability. Yet, because they are in chargeof this high-technology society, they are compelled to do something. This overpowering necessity to do something -- although our leaders do not know precisely what to do or how to do it -- creates in the power elite an overbearing fear of the people. It is the fear not of you and me as individuals but of the smoldering threat of vast populations and of potential uprisings of the masses. ..."
"... This power elite is not easy to define; but the fact that it exists makes itself known from time to time. Concerning the power elite, R. Buckminster Fuller wrote of the "vastly ambitious individuals who [have] become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery." Fuller noted also, "Always their victories [are] in the name of some powerful sovereign-ruled country. The real power structures [are] always the invisible ones behind the visible sovereign powers." ..."
"... This report, as presented in the novel, avers that war is necessary to sustain society, the nation, and national sovereignty, a view that has existed for millennia. Through the ages, totally uncontrolled warfare -- the only kind of "real" war -- got bigger and "better" as time and technology churned on, finally culminating in World War II with the introduction of atomic bombs. ..."
"... This is why, even before the end of World War II, the newly structured bipolar confrontation between the world of Communism and the West resulted in the employment of enormous intelligence agencies that had the power, invisibly, to wage underground warfare, economic and well as military, anywhere -- including methods of warfare never before imagined. These conflicts had to be tactically designed to remain short of the utilization of the H-bomb by either side. There can never be victories in such wars, but tremendous loss of life could occur, and there is the much-desired consumption and attrition of trillions of dollars', and rubles', worth of war equipment. ..."
"... Since WWII, there has been an epidemic of murders at the highest level in many countries. Without question the most dynamic of these assassinations was the murder of President John F. Kennedy, but JFK was just one of many in a long list that includes bankers, corporate leaders, newsmen, rising political spokesmen, and religious leaders. ..."
"... The ever-present threat of assassination seriously limits the number of men who would normally attempt to strive for positions of leadership, if for no other reason than that they could be singled out for murder at any time. This is not a new tactic, but it is one that has become increasingly utilized in pressure spots around the world. ..."
"... Under totalitarian or highly centralized nondemocratic regimes, the intelligence organization is a political, secret service with police powers. It is designed primarily to provide personal security to those who control the authority of the state against all political opponents, foreign and domestic. These leaders are forced to depend upon these secret elite forces to remain alive and in power. Such an organization operates in deep secrecy and has the responsibility for carrying out espionage, counterespionage, and pseudoterrorism. This methodology is as true of Israel, Chile, or Jordan as it has been of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The second category of intelligence organization is one whose agents are limited to the gathering and reporting of intelligence and who have no police functions or the power to arrest at home or abroad. This type of organization is what the CIA was created to be; however, it does not exist. ..."
"... Over the decades since the CIA was created, it has acquired more sinister functions. All intelligence agencies, in time, tend to develop along similar lines. The CIA today is a far cry hum the agency that was created in 1947 by the National Security Act. As President Harry S. Truman confided to close friends, the greatest mistake of his administration took place when he signed that National Security Act of 1947 into law. It was that act which, among other things it did, created the Central Intelligence Agency.3 ..."
Oct 08, 2017 | www.amazon.com

True existence of these multimegaton hydrogen bombs has so drastically changed the Grand Strategy of world powers that, today and for the future, that strategy is being carried out by the invisible forces of the CIA, what remains of the KGB, and their lesser counterparts around the world.

Men in positions of great power have been forced to realize that their aspirations and responsibilities have exceeded the horizons of their own experience, knowledge, and capability. Yet, because they are in chargeof this high-technology society, they are compelled to do something. This overpowering necessity to do something -- although our leaders do not know precisely what to do or how to do it -- creates in the power elite an overbearing fear of the people. It is the fear not of you and me as individuals but of the smoldering threat of vast populations and of potential uprisings of the masses.

This power elite is not easy to define; but the fact that it exists makes itself known from time to time. Concerning the power elite, R. Buckminster Fuller wrote of the "vastly ambitious individuals who [have] become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery." Fuller noted also, "Always their victories [are] in the name of some powerful sovereign-ruled country. The real power structures [are] always the invisible ones behind the visible sovereign powers."

The power elite is not a group from one nation or even of one alliance of nations. It operates throughout the world and no doubt has done so for many, many centuries.

... ... ...

From this point ot view, warfare, and the preparation tor war, is an absolute necessity for the welfare of the state and for control of population masses, as has been so ably documented in that remarkable novel by Leonard Lewin Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace and attributed by Lewin to "the Special Study Group in 1966," an organization whose existence was so highly classified that there is no record, to this day, of who the men in the group were or with what sectors of the government or private life they were connected.

This report, as presented in the novel, avers that war is necessary to sustain society, the nation, and national sovereignty, a view that has existed for millennia. Through the ages, totally uncontrolled warfare -- the only kind of "real" war -- got bigger and "better" as time and technology churned on, finally culminating in World War II with the introduction of atomic bombs.

Not long after that great war, the world leaders were faced suddenly with the reality of a great dilemma. At the root of this dilemma was the new fission-fusion-fission H-bomb. Is it some uncontrollable Manichean device, or is it truly a weapon of war?

... ... ...

Such knowledge is sufficient. The dilemma is now fact. There can no longer be a classic or traditional war, at least not the all-out, go-for-broke-type warfare there has been down through the ages, a war that leads to a meaningful victory for one side and abject defeat for the other.

Witness what has been called warfare in Korea, and Vietnam, and the later, more limited experiment with new weaponry called the Gulf War in Iraq.

... ... ...

This is why, even before the end of World War II, the newly structured bipolar confrontation between the world of Communism and the West resulted in the employment of enormous intelligence agencies that had the power, invisibly, to wage underground warfare, economic and well as military, anywhere -- including methods of warfare never before imagined. These conflicts had to be tactically designed to remain short of the utilization of the H-bomb by either side. There can never be victories in such wars, but tremendous loss of life could occur, and there is the much-desired consumption and attrition of trillions of dollars', and rubles', worth of war equipment.

One objective of this book is to discuss these new forces. It will present an insider's view of the CIA story and provide comparisons with the intelligence organizations -- those invisible forces -- of other countries. To be more realistic with the priorities of these agencies themselves, more will be said about operational matters than about actual intelligence gathering as a profession.

This subject cannot be explored fully without a discussion of assassination. Since WWII, there has been an epidemic of murders at the highest level in many countries. Without question the most dynamic of these assassinations was the murder of President John F. Kennedy, but JFK was just one of many in a long list that includes bankers, corporate leaders, newsmen, rising political spokesmen, and religious leaders.

The ever-present threat of assassination seriously limits the number of men who would normally attempt to strive for positions of leadership, if for no other reason than that they could be singled out for murder at any time. This is not a new tactic, but it is one that has become increasingly utilized in pressure spots around the world.

It is essential to note that there are two principal categories of intelligence organizations and that their functions are determined generally by the characteristics of the type of government they serve -- not by the citizens of the government, but by its leaders.

Under totalitarian or highly centralized nondemocratic regimes, the intelligence organization is a political, secret service with police powers. It is designed primarily to provide personal security to those who control the authority of the state against all political opponents, foreign and domestic. These leaders are forced to depend upon these secret elite forces to remain alive and in power. Such an organization operates in deep secrecy and has the responsibility for carrying out espionage, counterespionage, and pseudoterrorism. This methodology is as true of Israel, Chile, or Jordan as it has been of the Soviet Union.

The second category of intelligence organization is one whose agents are limited to the gathering and reporting of intelligence and who have no police functions or the power to arrest at home or abroad. This type of organization is what the CIA was created to be; however, it does not exist.

Over the decades since the CIA was created, it has acquired more sinister functions. All intelligence agencies, in time, tend to develop along similar lines. The CIA today is a far cry hum the agency that was created in 1947 by the National Security Act. As President Harry S. Truman confided to close friends, the greatest mistake of his administration took place when he signed that National Security Act of 1947 into law. It was that act which, among other things it did, created the Central Intelligence Agency.3

[Nov 08, 2017] Learning to Love McCarthyism by Robert Parry

Highly recommended!
Russiagate witch hunt is destroying CIA franchise in Facebook and Twitter, which were used by many Russians and Eastern Europeans in general.
One telling sign of the national security state is "demonizing enemies of the state" including using neo-McCarthyism methods, typically for Russiagate.
In the beginning, "Russiagate" was about alleged actions by Russian secret services. Evidence for these allegations has never emerged, and it seems that the Russiagate conspiracy theorists largely gave up on this part (they still sometimes write about it as if it was an established fact, but since the only thing in support of it they can adduce is the canard about the 17 intelligence services, it probably is not that interesting any more).
Now, they have dropped the mask, and the object of their hatred are openly all Russian people, as the new Undermensch. If these people and US MSM recognized the reality that they are now a particularly rabid part of the xenophobic far right in the United States
Notable quotes:
"... Buried in the story's "jump" is the acknowledgement that Milner's "companies sold those holdings several years ago." But such is the anti-Russia madness gripping the Establishment of Washington and New York that any contact with any Russian constitutes a scandal worthy of front-page coverage. On Monday, The Washington Post published a page-one article entitled, "9 in Trump's orbit had contacts with Russians." ..."
"... The anti-Russian madness has reached such extremes that even when you say something that's obviously true – but that RT, the Russian television network, also reported – you are attacked for spreading "Russian propaganda." ..."
"... We saw that when former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile disclosed in her new book that she considered the possibility of replacing Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket after Clinton's public fainting spell and worries about her health. ..."
"... In other words, the go-to excuse for everything these days is to blame the Russians and smear anyone who says anything – no matter how true – if it also was reported on RT. ..."
"... The CIA has an entire bureaucracy dedicated to propaganda and disinformation, with some of those efforts farmed out to newer entities such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) or paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). NATO has a special command in Latvia that undertakes "strategic communications." ..."
"... Israel is another skilled player in this field, tapping into its supporters around the world to harass people who criticize the Zionist project. Indeed, since the 1980s, Israel has pioneered many of the tactics of computer spying and sabotage that were adopted and expanded by America's National Security Agency, explaining why the Obama administration teamed up with Israel in a scheme to plant malicious code into Iranian centrifuges to sabotage Iran's nuclear program. ..."
"... And, if you're really concerned about foreign interference in U.S. elections and policies, there's the remarkable influence of Israel and its perceived ability to effect the defeat of almost any politician who deviates from what the Israeli government wants, going back at least to the 1980s when Sen. Chuck Percy and Rep. Paul Findley were among the political casualties after pursuing contacts with the Palestinians. ..."
"... The answer seems to be the widespread hatred for President Trump combined with vested interests in favor of whipping up the New Cold War. That is a goal valued by both the Military-Industrial Complex, which sees trillions of dollars in strategic weapons systems in the future, and the neoconservatives, who view Russia as a threat to their "regime change" agendas for Syria and Iran. ..."
"... After all, if Russia and its independent-minded President Putin can be beaten back and beaten down, then a big obstacle to the neocon/Israeli goal of expanding the Mideast wars will be removed. ..."
"... Right now, the neocons are openly lusting for a "regime change" in Moscow despite the obvious risks that such turmoil in a nuclear-armed country might create, including the possibility that Putin would be succeeded not by some compliant Western client like the late Boris Yeltsin but by an extreme nationalist who might consider launching a nuclear strike to protect the honor of Mother Russia. ..."
"... The likely outcome from the anti-Russian show trials on Capitol Hill is that technology giants will bow to the bipartisan demand for new algorithms and other methods for stigmatizing, marginalizing and eliminating information that challenges the mainstream storylines in the cause of fighting "Russian propaganda." ..."
"... America's Stolen Narrative, ..."
"... witch hunt by congressional Democrats, working with the intelligence agencies and leading media outlets, to legitimize censorship and attack free speech on the Internet. ..."
"... The aim of this campaign is to claim that social conflict within the United States arises not from the scale of social inequality in America, greater than in any other country in the developed world, but rather from the actions of "outside agitators" working in the service of the Kremlin. ..."
"... The McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s sought to suppress left-wing thought and label all forms of dissent as illegitimate and treasonous. Those who led them worked to purge left-wing opinion from Hollywood, the trade unions and the universities. ..."
"... Likewise, the new McCarthyism is aimed at creating a political climate in which left-wing organizations and figures are demonized as agents of the Kremlin who are essentially engaged in treasonous activity deserving of criminal prosecution. ..."
"... Danny there was a time not to long ago, I would have said of how we are 'moving towards' to us becoming a police state, well instead replace that prediction of 'moving towards' to the stark reality to be described as 'that now we are', and there you will have it that we have finally arrived to becoming a full blown 'police state'. ..."
"... Thanks to Mr. Parry for this very fair and complete review of the latest attempts to generate a fake foreign enemy. The tyrant over a democracy must generate fake foreign enemies to pose falsely as a protector, so as to demand domestic power and accuse his opponents of disloyalty, as Aristotle and Plato warned thousands of years ago. ..."
"... The insanity of the entire "Russian hacking" narrative has been revealed over and over, including this past weekend when +/-100 Clinton loyalists published a screed on Medium saying Donna Brazile had been taken in by Russian propaganda. ..."
"... I have come to expect just about anything when it comes to Russia-Gate, but I was taken aback by the Hillary bots' accusation that videos of Hillary stumbling and others showing her apparently having a fit of some kind and also needing to be helped up the steps to someone's house -- which were taken by Americans and shown by Americans and seen by millions of shocked Americans -- were driven by Russia-Gate. ..."
"... Now, since the extremist xenophobic idea that contact with *any* Russians is a scandal has taken hold in the United States, people are probably not too eager to mention these contacts in these atmosphere of extreme xenophobic anti-Russian hatred in today's United States. Furthermore, people who have contact with large numbers of people probably really have difficulties remembering and listing these all. ..."
"... Their contacts are with Russian business and maybe the Russian mob, not the Russian state. There is really not question that Trump and his cronies are crooks, but they are crooks in the US and in all the other countries where they do business, not just Russia. I'm sure Mueller will be able to tie Trump directly to some of the sleeze. But there is no evidence that the Russian government is involved in any of it. "Russia-gate" implies Russian government involvement, not just random Russians. There is no evidence of that and moreover the logic is against. ..."
"... Mr. Cash . I think George Papadopoulis, Trump's young Aide, was an inside mole for neocon pro-Israel interests. Those interests needed to knock the unreliable President Trump out of the way to get the "system" back where it belonged – in their pocket. Papadopoulis, on his own, was rummaging around making Trump/Russian connections that finally ended with the the William (Richard?) Browder (well-known Washington DC neocon)/Natalia Veselnitskaya/Donald Trump, Jr. fiasco. The Trumps knew nothing of those negotiations, and young Trump left when he realized Natalia was only interested in Americans being allowed to adopt Russian children again and had no dirt on Hillary. ..."
"... It was never my impression that Cold War liberals opposed McCarthy or the anti-Communist witch hunt. Where they didn't gleefully join in, they watched quietly from the sidelines while the American left was eviscerated, jailed, driven from public life. Then the liberals stepped in when it was clear things were going a little too far and just as the steam had run out of McCarthy's slander machine. ..."
"... At that point figures like Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy found the path clear for their brand of political stagecraft. They were imperialists to a man, something they proved abundantly when given the chance. Liberals supplanted the left in U.S. life- in the unions, the teaching profession, publishing and every other field where criticism of the Cold War and the enduring prevalence of worker solidarity across international lines threatened the new order. ..."
"... The book concludes that by equating dissent with disloyalty, promoting guilt by association, and personally commanding loyalty programs, ""Truman and his advisors employed all the political and programmatic techniques that in later years were to become associated with the broad phenomenon of McCarthyism."" ..."
"... Formed by Google in June 2015 with Eliot Higgins of the Atlantic Council's Bellingcat as a founding member, the "First Draft" coalition includes all the usual mainstream media "partners" in "regime change" war propaganda: the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, the UK Guardian and Telegraph, BBC News, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab and Kiev-based Stopfake. ..."
"... In the beginning, "Russiagate" was about alleged actions by Russian secret services. Evidence for these allegations has never emerged, and it seems that the Russiagate conspiracy theorists largely gave up on this part (they still sometimes write about it as if it was an established fact, but since the only thing in support of it they can adduce is the canard about the 17 intelligence services, it probably is not that interesting any more) ..."
"... Now, they have dropped the mask, and the object of their hatred are openly all Russian people, anyone who is "Russian linked" by ever having logged in to social networks from Russia or using Cyrillic letters. If these people and their media at least recognized the reality that they are now a particularly rabid part of the xenophobic far right in the United States ..."
"... The interview of Roger Waters on RT is one of the best I have seen in a long while. I wish some other artists get the courage to raise their voices. The link to the Roger Waters interview is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7jcvfbLoIA This Roger Waters interview is worth watching. ..."
"... It would seem that everyone on the US telivision , newspaper and internet news has mastered the art of hand over mouth , gasp and looking horrified every time Russia is mentioned. It looks to me that the US is in the middle of another of it´s mid life crises. Panic reigns supreme every where. If it was not so sad it would be funny. i was born in the 1940s and remember the McCarthy witch hunts and the daily shower of people jumping out of windows as a result of it. ..."
"... In The Fifties (1993), American journalist and historian David Halberstam addressed the noxious effect of McCarthyism: "McCarthy's carnival like four year spree of accusation charges, and threats touched something deep in the American body politic, something that lasted long after his own recklessness, carelessness and boozing ended his career in shame." (page 53) ..."
"... Halberstam specifically discussed how readily the so-called "free" press acquiesced to McCarthy's masquerading: "The real scandal in all this was the behavior of the members of the Washington press corps, who, more often than not, knew better. They were delighted to be a part of his traveling road show, chronicling each charge and then moving on to the next town, instead of bothering to stay behind and follow up. They had little interest in reporting how careless McCarthy was or how little it all meant to him." (page 55) ..."
"... Why have they not investigated James Comey? Why has the MSM instead created a Russian Boogeyman? Why was he invited to testify about the Russian connection but never cross examined about his own influence? Why is the clearest reason for election meddling by James Comey not even spoken of by the MSM? This is because the MSM does not want to cover events as they happened but wants to recreate a alternate reality suitable to themselves which serves their interests and convinces us that the MSM has no part at all in downplaying the involvement of themselves in the election but wants to create a foreign enemy to blame. ..."
Nov 08, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

Special Report: Many American liberals who once denounced McCarthyism as evil are now learning to love the ugly tactic when it can be used to advance the Russia-gate "scandal" and silence dissent, reports Robert Parry.

The New York Times has finally detected some modern-day McCarthyism, but not in the anti-Russia hysteria that the newspaper has fueled for several years amid the smearing of American skeptics as "useful idiots" and the like. No, the Times editors are accusing a Long Island Republican of McCarthyism for linking his Democratic rival to "New York City special interest groups." As the Times laments, "It's the old guilt by association."

Yet, the Times sees no McCarthyism in the frenzy of Russia-bashing and guilt by association for any American who can be linked even indirectly to any Russian who might have some ill-defined links to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On Monday, in the same edition that expressed editorial outrage over that Long Island political ad's McCarthyism, the Times ran two front-page articles under the headline: "A Complex Paper Trail: Blurring Kremlin's Ties to Key U.S. Businesses."

The two subheads read: " Shipping Firm Links Commerce Chief to Putin 'Cronies' " and " Millions in Facebook Shares Rooted in Russian Cash ." The latter story, which meshes nicely with the current U.S. political pressure on Facebook and Twitter to get in line behind the New Cold War against Russia, cites investments by Russian Yuri Milner that date back to the start of the decade.

Buried in the story's "jump" is the acknowledgement that Milner's "companies sold those holdings several years ago." But such is the anti-Russia madness gripping the Establishment of Washington and New York that any contact with any Russian constitutes a scandal worthy of front-page coverage. On Monday, The Washington Post published a page-one article entitled, "9 in Trump's orbit had contacts with Russians."

The anti-Russian madness has reached such extremes that even when you say something that's obviously true – but that RT, the Russian television network, also reported – you are attacked for spreading "Russian propaganda."

We saw that when former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile disclosed in her new book that she considered the possibility of replacing Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket after Clinton's public fainting spell and worries about her health.

Though there was a video of Clinton's collapse on Sept. 11, 2016, followed by her departure from the campaign trail to fight pneumonia – not to mention her earlier scare with blood clots – the response from a group of 100 Clinton supporters was to question Brazile's patriotism: "It is particularly troubling and puzzling that she would seemingly buy into false Russian-fueled propaganda, spread by both the Russians and our opponents about our candidate's health."

In other words, the go-to excuse for everything these days is to blame the Russians and smear anyone who says anything – no matter how true – if it also was reported on RT.

Pressing the Tech Companies

Just as Sen. Joe McCarthy liked to haul suspected "communists" and "fellow-travelers" before his committee in the 1950s, the New McCarthyism has its own witch-hunt hearings, such as last week's Senate grilling of executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google for supposedly allowing Russians to have input into the Internet's social networks. Executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google hauled before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism on Oct. 31, 2017. Trying to appease Congress and fend off threats of government regulation, the rich tech companies displayed their eagerness to eradicate any Russian taint.

Twitter's general counsel Sean J. Edgett told the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism that Twitter adopted an "expansive approach to defining what qualifies as a Russian-linked account."

Edgett said the criteria included "whether the account was created in Russia, whether the user registered the account with a Russian phone carrier or a Russian email address, whether the user's display name contains Cyrillic characters, whether the user frequently Tweets in Russian, and whether the user has logged in from any Russian IP address, even a single time. We considered an account to be Russian-linked if it had even one of the relevant criteria."

The trouble with Twitter's methodology was that none of those criteria would connect an account to the Russian government, let alone Russian intelligence or some Kremlin-controlled "troll farm." But the criteria could capture individual Russians with no link to the Kremlin as well as people who weren't Russian at all, including, say, American or European visitors to Russia who logged onto Twitter through a Moscow hotel.

Also left unsaid is that Russians are not the only national group that uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is considered a standard script for writing in Belarus, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbo-Croatia and Ukraine. So, for instance, a Ukrainian using the Cyrillic alphabet could end up falling into the category of "Russian-linked" even if he or she hated Putin.

Twitter's attorney also said the company conducted a separate analysis from information provided by unidentified "third party sources" who pointed toward accounts supposedly controlled by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), totaling 2,752 accounts. The IRA is typically described in the U.S. press as a "troll farm" which employs tech-savvy employees who combat news and opinions that are hostile to Russia and the Russian government. But exactly how those specific accounts were traced back to this organization was not made clear.

And, to put that number in some perspective, Twitter claims 330 million active monthly users, which makes the 2,752 accounts less than 0.001 percent of the total.

The Trouble with 'Trolling'

While the Russia-gate investigation has sought to portray the IRA effort as exotic and somehow unique to Russia, the strategy is followed by any number of governments, political movements and corporations – sometimes using enthusiastic volunteers but often employing professionals skilled at challenging critical information or at least muddying the waters.

Those of us who operate on the Internet are familiar with harassment from "trolls" who may use access to "comment" sections to inject propaganda and disinformation to sow confusion, to cause disruption, or to discredit the site by promoting ugly opinions and nutty conspiracy theories.

As annoying as this "trolling" is, it's just a modern version of more traditional strategies used by powerful entities for generations – hiring public-relations specialists, lobbyists, lawyers and supposedly impartial "activists" to burnish images, fend off negative news and intimidate nosy investigators. In this competition, modern Russia is both a late-comer and a piker.

The U.S. government fields legions of publicists, propagandists, paid journalists, psy-ops specialists , contractors and non-governmental organizations to promote Washington's positions and undermine rivals through information warfare.

The CIA has an entire bureaucracy dedicated to propaganda and disinformation, with some of those efforts farmed out to newer entities such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) or paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). NATO has a special command in Latvia that undertakes "strategic communications."

Israel is another skilled player in this field, tapping into its supporters around the world to harass people who criticize the Zionist project. Indeed, since the 1980s, Israel has pioneered many of the tactics of computer spying and sabotage that were adopted and expanded by America's National Security Agency, explaining why the Obama administration teamed up with Israel in a scheme to plant malicious code into Iranian centrifuges to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.

It's also ironic that the U.S. government touted social media as a great benefit in advancing so-called "color revolutions" aimed at "regime change" in troublesome countries. For instance, when the "green revolution" was underway in Iran in 2009 after the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Obama administration asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance so the street protesters could continue using the platform to organize against Ahmadinejad and to distribute their side of the story to the outside world.

During the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, Facebook, Twitter and Skype won praise as a means of organizing mass demonstrations to destabilize governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. Back then, the U.S. government denounced any attempts to throttle these social media platforms and the free flow of information that they permitted as proof of dictatorship.

Social media also was a favorite of the U.S. government in Ukraine in 2013-14 when the Maidan protests exploited these platforms to help destabilize and ultimately overthrow the elected government of Ukraine, the key event that launched the New Cold War with Russia.

Swinging the Social Media Club

The truth is that, in those instances, the U.S. governments and its agencies were eagerly exploiting the platforms to advance Washington's geopolitical agenda by disseminating American propaganda and deploying U.S.-funded non-governmental organizations, which taught activists how to use social media to advance "regime change" scenarios.

A White Helmets volunteer pointing to the aftermath of a military attack.

While these uprisings were sold to Western audiences as genuine outpourings of public anger – and there surely was some of that – the protests also benefited from U.S. funding and expertise. In particular, NED and USAID provided money, equipment and training for anti-government operatives challenging regimes in U.S. disfavor.

One of the most successful of these propaganda operations occurred in Syria where anti-government rebels operating in areas controlled by Al Qaeda and its fellow Islamic militants used social media to get their messaging to Western mainstream journalists who couldn't enter those sectors without fear of beheading.

Since the rebels' goal of overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad meshed with the objectives of the U.S. government and its allies in Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Western journalists uncritically accepted the words and images provided by Al Qaeda's collaborators.

The success of this propaganda was so extraordinary that the White Helmets, a "civil defense" group that worked in Al Qaeda territory, became the go-to source for dramatic video and even was awarded the short-documentary Oscar for an info-mercial produced for Netflix – despite evidence that the White Helmets were staging some of the scenes for propaganda purposes.

Indeed, one argument for believing that Putin and the Kremlin might have "meddled" in last year's U.S. election is that they could have felt it was time to give the United States a taste of its own medicine.

After all, the United States intervened in the 1996 Russian election to ensure the continued rule of the corrupt and pliable Boris Yeltsin. And there were the U.S.-backed street protests in Moscow against the 2011 and 2012 elections in which Putin strengthened his political mandate. Those protests earned the "color" designation the "snow revolution."

However, whatever Russia may or may not have done before last year's U.S. election, the Russia-gate investigations have always sought to exaggerate the impact of that alleged "meddling" and molded the narrative to whatever weak evidence was available.

The original storyline was that Putin authorized the "hacking" of Democratic emails as part of a "disinformation" operation to undermine Hillary Clinton's candidacy and to help elect Donald Trump – although no hard evidence has been presented to establish that Putin gave such an order or that Russia "hacked" the emails. WikiLeaks has repeatedly denied getting the emails from Russia, which also denies any meddling.

Further, the emails were not "disinformation"; they were both real and, in many cases, newsworthy. The DNC emails provided evidence that the DNC unethically tilted the playing field in favor of Clinton and against Sen. Bernie Sanders, a point that Brazile also discovered in reviewing staffing and financing relationships that Clinton had with the DNC under the prior chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The purloined emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta revealed the contents of Clinton's paid speeches to Wall Street (information that she was trying to hide from voters) and pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation.

A Manchurian Candidate?

Still, the original narrative was that Putin wanted his Manchurian Candidate (Trump) in the White House and took the extraordinary risk of infuriating the odds-on favorite (Clinton) by releasing the emails even though they appeared unlikely to prevent Clinton's victory. So, there was always that logical gap in the Russia-gate theory.

Since then, however, the U.S. mainstream narrative has shifted, in part, because the evidence of Russian election "meddling" was so shaky. Under intense congressional pressure to find something, Facebook reported $100,000 in allegedly "Russian-linked" ads purchased in 2015-17, but noted that only 44 percent were bought before the election. So, not only was the "Russian-linked" pebble tiny – compared to Facebook's annual revenue of $27 billion – but more than half of the pebble was tossed into this very large lake after Clinton had already lost.

So, the storyline was transformed into some vague Russian scheme to exacerbate social tensions in the United States by taking different sides of hot-button issues, such as police brutality against blacks. The New York Times reported that one of these "Russian-linked" pages featured photos of cute puppies , which the Times speculated must have had some evil purpose although it was hard to fathom. (Oh, those devious Russians!).

The estimate of how many Americans may have seen one of these "Russian-linked" ads also keeps growing, now up to as many as 126 million or about one-third of the U.S. population. Of course, the way the Internet works – with any item possibly going viral – you might as well say the ads could have reached billions of people.

Whenever I write an article or send out a Tweet, I too could be reaching 126 million or even billions of people, but the reality is that I'd be lucky if the number were in the thousands. But amid the Russia-gate frenzy, no exaggeration is too outlandish or too extreme.

Another odd element of Russia-gate is that the intensity of this investigation is disproportionate to the lack of interest shown toward far better documented cases of actual foreign-government interference in American elections and policymaking.

For instance, the major U.S. media long ignored the extremely well-documented case of Richard Nixon colluding with South Vietnamese officials to sabotage President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam War peace talks to gain an advantage for Nixon in the 1968 election. That important chapter of history only gained The New York Times' seal of approval earlier this year after the Times had dismissed the earlier volumes of evidence as "rumors."

In the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan's team – especially his campaign director William Casey in collaboration with Israel and Iran – appeared to have gone behind President Jimmy Carter's back to undercut Carter's negotiations to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran and essentially doom Carter's reelection hopes.

There were a couple of dozen witnesses to that scheme who spoke with me and other investigative journalists – as well as documentary evidence showing that President Reagan did authorize secret arms shipments to Iran via Israel shortly after the hostages were freed during Reagan's inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981.

However, since Vice President (later President) George H.W. Bush, who was implicated in the scheme, was well-liked on both sides of the aisle and because Reagan had become a Republican icon, the October Surprise case of 1980 was pooh-poohed by the major media and dismissed by a congressional investigation in the early 1990s. Despite the extraordinary number of witnesses and supporting documents, Wikipedia listed the scandal as a "conspiracy theory."

Israeli Influence

And, if you're really concerned about foreign interference in U.S. elections and policies, there's the remarkable influence of Israel and its perceived ability to effect the defeat of almost any politician who deviates from what the Israeli government wants, going back at least to the 1980s when Sen. Chuck Percy and Rep. Paul Findley were among the political casualties after pursuing contacts with the Palestinians.

If anyone doubts how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued to pull the strings of U.S. politicians, just watch one of his record-tying three addresses to joint sessions of Congress and count how often Republicans and Democrats jump to their feet in enthusiastic applause. (The only other foreign leader to get the joint-session honor three times was Great Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill.)

So, what makes Russia-gate different from the other cases? Did Putin conspire with Trump to extend a bloody war as Nixon did with the South Vietnamese leaders? Did Putin lengthen the captivity of U.S. hostages to give Trump a political edge? Did Putin manipulate U.S. policy in the Middle East to entice President George W. Bush to invade Iraq and set the region ablaze, as Israel's Netanyahu did? Is Putin even now pushing for wider Mideast wars, as Netanyahu is?

Indeed, one point that's never addressed in any serious way is why is the U.S. so angry with Russia while these other cases, in which U.S. interests were clearly damaged and American democracy compromised, were treated largely as non-stories.

Why is Russia-gate a big deal while the other cases weren't? Why are opposite rules in play now – with Democrats, many Republicans and the major news media flogging fragile "links," needling what little evidence there is, and assuming the worst rather than insisting that only perfect evidence and perfect witnesses be accepted as in the earlier cases?

The answer seems to be the widespread hatred for President Trump combined with vested interests in favor of whipping up the New Cold War. That is a goal valued by both the Military-Industrial Complex, which sees trillions of dollars in strategic weapons systems in the future, and the neoconservatives, who view Russia as a threat to their "regime change" agendas for Syria and Iran.

After all, if Russia and its independent-minded President Putin can be beaten back and beaten down, then a big obstacle to the neocon/Israeli goal of expanding the Mideast wars will be removed.

Right now, the neocons are openly lusting for a "regime change" in Moscow despite the obvious risks that such turmoil in a nuclear-armed country might create, including the possibility that Putin would be succeeded not by some compliant Western client like the late Boris Yeltsin but by an extreme nationalist who might consider launching a nuclear strike to protect the honor of Mother Russia.

The Democrats, the liberals and even many progressives justify their collusion with the neocons by the need to remove Trump by any means necessary and "stop fascism." But their contempt for Trump and their exaggeration of the "Hitler" threat that this incompetent buffoon supposedly poses have blinded them to the extraordinary risks attendant to their course of action and how they are playing into the hands of the war-hungry neocons.

A Smokescreen for Repression

There also seems to be little or no concern that the Establishment is using Russia-gate as a smokescreen for clamping down on independent media sites on the Internet. Traditional supporters of civil liberties have looked the other way as the rights of people associated with the Trump campaign have been trampled and journalists who simply question the State Department's narratives on, say, Syria and Ukraine are denounced as "Moscow stooges" and "useful idiots."

The likely outcome from the anti-Russian show trials on Capitol Hill is that technology giants will bow to the bipartisan demand for new algorithms and other methods for stigmatizing, marginalizing and eliminating information that challenges the mainstream storylines in the cause of fighting "Russian propaganda."

The warning from powerful senators was crystal clear. "I don't think you get it," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, warned social media executives last week. "You bear this responsibility. You created these platforms, and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it. Or we will."

As this authoritarian if not totalitarian future looms and as the dangers of nuclear annihilation from an intentional or unintentional nuclear war with Russia grow, many people who should know better are caught up in the Russia-gate frenzy.

I used to think that liberals and progressives opposed McCarthyism because they regarded it as a grave threat to freedom of thought and to genuine democracy, but now it appears that they have learned to love McCarthyism except, of course, when it rears its ugly head in some Long Island political ad criticizing New York City.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ).

Joe Tedesky , November 6, 2017 at 3:12 pm

I watched the C-Span 'Russian/2016 Election Investigation Hearings' in horror, as each congressperson grilled the Hi-Tech executives in a way to suggest that our First Amendment Rights are now on life support, and our Congress is ready to pull the plug at any moment. I thought, of how this wasn't the America I was brought up to believe in. So as I have reached the age in life where nothing should surprise me, I realize now how fragile our Rights are, in this warring nation that calls itself America.

When it comes to Israel I have two names, Jonathan Pollard & the USS Liberty, and with that, that is enough said.

Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:33 pm

This week's congressional hearings on "extremist content" on the Internet mark a new stage in the McCarthyite witch hunt by congressional Democrats, working with the intelligence agencies and leading media outlets, to legitimize censorship and attack free speech on the Internet.

One after another, congressmen and senators goaded representatives of Google, Twitter and Facebook to admit that their platforms were used to sow "social divisions" and "extremist" political opinions. The aim of this campaign is to claim that social conflict within the United States arises not from the scale of social inequality in America, greater than in any other country in the developed world, but rather from the actions of "outside agitators" working in the service of the Kremlin.

The hearings revolved around claims that Russia sought to "weaponize" the Internet by harnessing social anger within the United States. "Russia," said Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, promoted "discord in the US by inflaming passions on a range of divisive issues." It sought to "mobilize real Americans to sign online petitions and join rallies and protests."

The McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s sought to suppress left-wing thought and label all forms of dissent as illegitimate and treasonous. Those who led them worked to purge left-wing opinion from Hollywood, the trade unions and the universities.

Likewise, the new McCarthyism is aimed at creating a political climate in which left-wing organizations and figures are demonized as agents of the Kremlin who are essentially engaged in treasonous activity deserving of criminal prosecution.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/03/pers-n03.html

Joe Tedesky , November 7, 2017 at 12:32 am

Thanks for the informative link Danny.

Watching this Orwellian tragedy play out in our American society, where our Congress is insisting that disclaimers and restrictions be placed upon suspicious adbuys and editorial essays, is counterintuitive to what we Americans were brought up to belief. Why, all my life teachers, and adults, would warn us students of reading the news to not to believe everything we read as pure fact, but to research a subject before coming to a conclusion toward your accepting an opinion to wit. And with these warnings of avoiding us being suckered into a wrong belief, we were told that this was the price we were required to pay for having a free press society. This freedom of speech was, and has always been the bedrock of our hopes and wishes for our belief in the American Dream.

Danny there was a time not to long ago, I would have said of how we are 'moving towards' to us becoming a police state, well instead replace that prediction of 'moving towards' to the stark reality to be described as 'that now we are', and there you will have it that we have finally arrived to becoming a full blown 'police state'. Little by little, and especially since 911 one by one our civil liberties were taken away. Here again our freedom of speech is being destroyed, and with this America is now where Germany had been in the mid-thirties. America's own guilty conscience is rapidly doing some physiological projections onto their imaginary villain Russia.

All I keep hearing is my dear sweet mother lecturing me on how one lie always leads to another lie until the truth will finally jump up and bite you in the ass, and think to myself of how wise my mother had been with her young girl Southside philosophy. May you Rest In Peace Mum.

Martin , November 7, 2017 at 3:21 pm

Yankees chicks are coming home to roost. So many peoples rights and lives had to be extinguished for Americans to have the illusion of pursuing their happiness, well, what goes around comes around.

Gregory Herr , November 7, 2017 at 8:39 pm

Gee wiz Adam Schiff you make it sound as if signing petitions and rallying to causes and civil protests are unamerican or something. And Russians on the internet are harnessing social anger! Pathetic. These jerks who would have us believe they are interested in "saving" democracy or stopping fascism have sure got it backward.

Geoffrey de Galles , November 8, 2017 at 12:33 pm

Joe, Allow me please, respectfully, to add Mordecai Vanunu -- Israel's own Daniel Ellsberg -- to your two names.

Erik G , November 6, 2017 at 3:55 pm

Thanks to Mr. Parry for this very fair and complete review of the latest attempts to generate a fake foreign enemy. The tyrant over a democracy must generate fake foreign enemies to pose falsely as a protector, so as to demand domestic power and accuse his opponents of disloyalty, as Aristotle and Plato warned thousands of years ago.

It is especially significant that the zionists are the sole beneficiaries of this scam as well as the primary sponsors of the DNC, hoping to attack Russia and Iran to support Israeli land thefts in the Mideast. It is well established that zionists control US mass media, which never examine the central issue of our times, the corruption of democracy by the zionist/MIC/WallSt influence upon the US government and mass media. Russia-gate is in fact a coverup for Israel-gate.

Those who would like to petition the NYT to make Robert Parry their senior editor may do so here:
https://www.change.org/p/new-york-times-bring-a-new-editor-to-the-new-york-times?recruiter=72650402&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink
While Mr. Parry may prefer independence, and we all know the NYT ownership makes it unlikely, and the NYT may try to ignore it, it is instructive to them that intelligent readers know better journalism when they see it. A petition demonstrates the concerns of a far larger number of potential or lost subscribers.

mike k , November 6, 2017 at 4:10 pm

Why did we ever believe that the democrat party was a defender of free speech? These bought and paid for tools of the economic elites are only interested in serving their masters with slavish devotion. Selfishness and immorality are their stock in trade; betraying the public their real intention.

Cratylus , November 6, 2017 at 4:11 pm

Great essay.

But one disagreement. I may agree with Trump on very, very few things, among them getting rid of the horrible TPP, one cornerstone of Hillary's pivot; meeting with Putin in Hamburg; the Lavrov-Tillerson arranged cease-fire in SE Syria; the termination of the CIA's support for anti-Assad jihadis in Syria; a second meeting with Putin at the ASEAN conference this week; and in general the idea of "getting along with Russia" (a biggie) which Russia-gate is slowing to a crawl as designed by the neocons.

But Trump as an "incompetent buffoon" is a stretch albeit de rigueur on the pages of the NYT, the programs of NPR and in all "respectable" precincts. Trump won the presidency for god's sake – something that eluded the 17 other GOP primary candidates, some of them considered very"smart" and Bernie and Jill, and in the past, Ralph Nader and Ron Paul – and the supposedly "very smart" Hillary for which we should be eternally grateful. "Incompetent" hardly seems accurate. The respectable commentariat has continually underestimated Trump. We should heed Putin who marveled at Trump's seemingly impossible victory.

Bill Cash , November 6, 2017 at 4:13 pm

How do you explain all the connections between Trump acolytes and Russia and their lying about it. I think they've all lied about their contacts. Why would they do that?I lived through the real McCarthyism and, so far, this isn't close to what happened then.

Bill , November 6, 2017 at 4:40 pm

Probably because they are corruptly involved. Thing is, the higher priority is to avoid another decades-long cold war risking nuclear war. Do you remember how many close calls we had in the last one?

I'm more suspicious of Trump than most here, but even I think we need some priorities. Far more extensive corruption of a similar variety keeps occurring and no one cares, as Mr. Parry points out here yet again.

As for McCarthyism, whatever the current severity, the result is unfolding as a new campaign against dissenting voices on the internet. That's supremely not-okay with me.

Gregory Herr , November 7, 2017 at 8:46 pm

Right. Just because we don't yet have another fulll-fledged HUAC happening doesn't mean severe perils aren't attached to this new McCarthyism. Censorship of dissent is supremely not-okay with me as well.

Elizabeth Burton , November 6, 2017 at 4:58 pm

That class of people lie as a matter of course; it's standard procedure. If you exacerbate it by adding on the anti-Russia hysteria that was spewed out by the Democrats before the ink was dry on the ballots, what possible reason would they have for being truthful?

The insanity of the entire "Russian hacking" narrative has been revealed over and over, including this past weekend when +/-100 Clinton loyalists published a screed on Medium saying Donna Brazile had been taken in by Russian propaganda.

Litchfield , November 6, 2017 at 7:10 pm

I have come to expect just about anything when it comes to Russia-Gate, but I was taken aback by the Hillary bots' accusation that videos of Hillary stumbling and others showing her apparently having a fit of some kind and also needing to be helped up the steps to someone's house -- which were taken by Americans and shown by Americans and seen by millions of shocked Americans -- were driven by Russia-Gate.

Obviously, Brazile, like millions of voters, saw these films and made appropriate inferences: that Hillary's basic health and stamina were a question mark. Of course, Hillary also offered Americans nothing in her campaign rhetoric. She came across as the mother-in-law from hell.

Was it also a Russia-Gate initiative when Hillary hid from her supporters on election night and let Podesta face the screaming sobbing supporters? Too much spiked vodka or something? Our political stage in the USA is a madhouse.

Adrian Engler , November 6, 2017 at 6:20 pm

These people probably have "connections" with a relatively large number of people, and only very small fraction of the people they have contact with are probably Russians. Now, since the extremist xenophobic idea that contact with *any* Russians is a scandal has taken hold in the United States, people are probably not too eager to mention these contacts in these atmosphere of extreme xenophobic anti-Russian hatred in today's United States. Furthermore, people who have contact with large numbers of people probably really have difficulties remembering and listing these all.

Today's political atmosphere in the United States probably has a lot in common with the Soviet Union. There, people got in trouble if they had contacts with people from Western, capitalist countries – and if they were asked and did not mention these contacts in order to avoid problems, they could get in trouble even more.

I think it is absolutely clear that no one who takes part in this hateful anti-Russian campaign can pretend to be liberal or progressive. The kind of society these xenophobes who detest pluralism and accuse everyone who has opinions outside the mainstream of being a foreign agent is absolutely abhorrent, in my view.

Leslie F , November 6, 2017 at 6:40 pm

Their contacts are with Russian business and maybe the Russian mob, not the Russian state. There is really not question that Trump and his cronies are crooks, but they are crooks in the US and in all the other countries where they do business, not just Russia. I'm sure Mueller will be able to tie Trump directly to some of the sleeze. But there is no evidence that the Russian government is involved in any of it. "Russia-gate" implies Russian government involvement, not just random Russians. There is no evidence of that and moreover the logic is against.

occupy on , November 7, 2017 at 12:47 am

Mr. Cash . I think George Papadopoulis, Trump's young Aide, was an inside mole for neocon pro-Israel interests. Those interests needed to knock the unreliable President Trump out of the way to get the "system" back where it belonged – in their pocket. Papadopoulis, on his own, was rummaging around making Trump/Russian connections that finally ended with the the William (Richard?) Browder (well-known Washington DC neocon)/Natalia Veselnitskaya/Donald Trump, Jr. fiasco. The Trumps knew nothing of those negotiations, and young Trump left when he realized Natalia was only interested in Americans being allowed to adopt Russian children again and had no dirt on Hillary.

In the meantime, Trump Jr. was connected with an evil Russian (Natalia), William Browder was able to link the neocon-hated Trump Sr with neocon-hated, evil Russians (who currently have a warrant out for Browder's arrest on a 15 [or 50?] million dollar tax evasion charge), and neocons have a good chance of claiming victory out of chaos (as is their style and was their intent for the Middle East [not Washington DC!] in the neocon Project For a New American Century – 1998). Clinton may have lost power in Washington DC, but Clinton-supporting neocons may not have – thanks to George Papadopoulis. We shall see. Something tells me the best is yet to come out of the Mueller Investigations.

Roy G Biv , November 7, 2017 at 2:03 pm

You are seeing it clearly Bill. This site was once a go-to-source for investigative journalism. Now it is a place for opinion screeds, mostly with head buried in the sand about the blatant Russian manipulation of the 2016 election. The dominant gang of posters here squash any dissent and dissenting comments usually get deleted within a day. I don't understand why and how it came to be so, but the hysterical labeling of Comey/Mueller investigations as McCarthyism by Parry has ruined his sterling reputation for me.

Stygg , November 7, 2017 at 2:24 pm

If this "Russian manipulation" was as blatant as everyone keeps telling me, how come it's all based on ridiculous BS instead of evidence? Where's the beef?

anon , November 7, 2017 at 3:22 pm

Unable to substantiate anything you say nor argue against anything said here, you disgrace yourself. Do you think anyone is fooled by your repeated lie that you are a disaffected former supporter of this site? And you made the "Stygg" reply above.

Tom Hall , November 6, 2017 at 4:46 pm

It was never my impression that Cold War liberals opposed McCarthy or the anti-Communist witch hunt. Where they didn't gleefully join in, they watched quietly from the sidelines while the American left was eviscerated, jailed, driven from public life. Then the liberals stepped in when it was clear things were going a little too far and just as the steam had run out of McCarthy's slander machine.

At that point figures like Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy found the path clear for their brand of political stagecraft. They were imperialists to a man, something they proved abundantly when given the chance. Liberals supplanted the left in U.S. life- in the unions, the teaching profession, publishing and every other field where criticism of the Cold War and the enduring prevalence of worker solidarity across international lines threatened the new order.

So it's no surprise that liberalism is the rallying point for a new wave of repression. The dangerous buffoon currently occupying the White House stands as a perfect foil to the phony indignation of the liberal leadership- Schumer, Pelosi et al.. The jerk was made to order, and they mean to dump him as their ideological forebears unloaded old Tail Gunner Joe. In fact, Trump is so odious, the Democrats, their media colleagues and major elements of the national security state believe that bringing down the bozo can be made to look like a triumph of democracy. Of course, by then dissent will have been stamped out far more efficiently than Trump and his half-assed cohorts could have achieved. And it will be done in the name of restoring sanity, honoring the constitution, and protecting everyone from the Russians. I was born in the fifties, and it looks like I'm going to die in the fifties.

Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:37 pm

Truman started it. And he used it very well.

THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE AND ORIGINS OF ""McCARTHYISM
By Richard M. Freeland

This book argues that Truman used anti-Communist scare tactics to force Congress to implement his plans for multilateral free trade and specifically to pass the Marshall Plan. This is a sound emphasis, but other elements of postwar anti-Communist campaigns are neglected, especially anti-labor legislation; and Freeland attributes to Truman a ""go-soft"" attitude toward the Soviets, which is certainly not proven by the fact that he restrained the ultras Forrestal, Kennan, and Byrnes -- indeed, some of Freeland's own citations confirm Truman's violent anti-Soviet spirit.

The book concludes that by equating dissent with disloyalty, promoting guilt by association, and personally commanding loyalty programs, ""Truman and his advisors employed all the political and programmatic techniques that in later years were to become associated with the broad phenomenon of McCarthyism."" Freeland's revisionism is confined and conservative: he deems the Soviets most responsible for the Cold War and implies that ""subversion"" was in fact a menace.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/richard-m-freeland/the-truman-doctrine-and-origins-of-mccarthyism/

Howard Mettee , November 6, 2017 at 4:50 pm

Bob,

You are one of the very few critical journalists today willing to print objective measures of the truth, while the MSM spins out of control under the guise of "protecting America" (and their vital sources), while at the same time actually undermining the very principles of a working democracy they sanctimoniously pretend to defend. It makes me nostalgic for the McCarthy era, when we could safely satirize the Army-McCarthy Hearings (unless you were a witness!). I offer the following as a retrospective of a lost era.:

Top-Ten Criteria for being a Putin Stooge, and a Chance at Winning A One Way Lottery Ticket:to the Gala Gitmo Hotel:
:
(1) Reading Consortium News, Truth Dig, The Real News Network, RT and Al Jeziera
(2) Drinking Starbucks and vodka at the Russian Tea Room with Russian tourists (with an embedded FSS agent) in NYC.
(3) Meeting suspicious tour guides in Red Square who accept dollars for their historical jokes.
(4) Claiming to catch a cell phone photo of the Putin limousine passing through the Kremlin Tower gate.
(4) Starting a joint venture with a Russian trading partner who sells grain to feed Putin's stable of stallions. .
(5) Catching the flu while being sneezed upon in Niagara Falls by a Russian violinist.
(6) Finding the hidden jewels in the Twelfth Chair were nothing but cut glass.
(7) Reading War and Peace on the Brighton Beach ferry.
(8) Playing the iPod version of Rachmaninoff's "Vespers" through ear buds while attending mass in Dallas, TX..
(9) Water skiing on the Potomac flying a pennant saying "Wasn't Boris Good Enough?"
(10) Having audibly chuckled even once at items (1) – (9). Thanks Bob, Please don't let up!

Lisa , November 6, 2017 at 7:47 pm

Howard,

I chuckled loudly more than once – but luckily, no one heard me! No witnesses! So you are acquainted with the masterpiece "12 chairs"? Very suspicious.

David G , November 6, 2017 at 8:42 pm

I've heard that's Mel Brooks favorite among his own movies.

David G , November 6, 2017 at 8:48 pm

I always find it exasperating when I have to remind the waiter at the diner to bring Russian dressing along with the reuben sandwich, but these days I wonder if my loyalty is being tested.

Dave P. , November 6, 2017 at 10:27 pm

David G –

They will change the name of dressing very soon. Remember 2003 when French refused to endorse the invasion of Iraq. I think they unofficially changed the name of "French Fries" to "Freedom Fries".

It is just the start. The whole History is being rewritten – in compliance with Zionist Ideology. Those evil Russkies will be shown as they are!

Elizabeth Burton , November 6, 2017 at 4:53 pm

Clearly, since I've published one book by a Russian, one by a now-deceased US ex-pat living in Russia, and have our catalog made available in Russia via our international distributor, I am a traitor to the US. If you add in my staunch resistance to the whole Russiagate narrative AND the fact I post links to stories in RT America, I'm doomed.

I wish I could think I'm being wholly sarcastic.

Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:38 pm

You are not alone. Many of us live outside the open air prison and feel the same way

Abe , November 6, 2017 at 5:29 pm

Robert Parry has described "the New McCarthyism" having "its own witch-hunt hearings". In fact "last week's Senate grilling of executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google" was merely an exercise in political theatre because all three entities already belong to the "First Draft" coalition:

http://fortune.com/2016/09/13/facebook-twitter-join-first-draft-coalition/

Formed by Google in June 2015 with Eliot Higgins of the Atlantic Council's Bellingcat as a founding member, the "First Draft" coalition includes all the usual mainstream media "partners" in "regime change" war propaganda: the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, the UK Guardian and Telegraph, BBC News, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab and Kiev-based Stopfake.

In a remarkable post-truth declaration, the "First Draft" coalition insists that members will "work together to tackle common issues, including ways to streamline the verification process".

In the "post-truth" regime of US and NATO hybrid warfare, the deliberate distortion of truth and facts is called "verification".

The Washington Post / PropOrNot imbroglio, and "First Draft" coalition "partner" organizations' zeal to "verify" US intelligence-backed fake news claims about Russian hacking of the US presidential election, reveal the "post-truth" mission of this new Google-backed hybrid war propaganda alliance.

Abe , November 6, 2017 at 5:45 pm

The Russia-gate "witch-hunt" has graduated from McCarthyism to full Monty Pythonism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3jt5ibfRzw

Dan Kuhn , November 6, 2017 at 6:41 pm

You get the gold star for best comment today.

Abe , November 7, 2017 at 1:57 pm

Hysterical demonization of Russia escalated dramatically after Russia thwarted the Israeli-Saudi-US plan to dismember the Syrian state.

With the rollback of ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorist proxy forces in Syria, and the failure of Kurdish separatist efforts in Iraq, Israel plans to launch military attacks against southern Lebanon and Syria.

South Front has presented a cogent and fairly detailed analysis of Israel's upcoming war in southern Lebanon.

Conspicuously absent from the South Front analysis is any discussion of the Israeli planned assault on Syria, or possible responses to the conflict from the United States or Russia.

Israeli propaganda preparations for attack are already in high gear. Unfortunately, sober heads are in perilously short supply in Israel and the U.S., so the prognosis can hardly be optimistic.

"Scenarios for the Third Lebanon War

Over time, IDF's military effectiveness had declined. [ ] In the Second Lebanon War of 2006 due to the overwhelming numerical superiority in men and equipment the IDF managed to occupy key strong points but failed to inflict a decisive defeat on Hezbollah. The frequency of attacks in Israeli territory was not reduced; the units of the IDF became bogged down in the fighting in the settlements and suffered significant losses. There now exists considerable political pressure to reassert IDF's lost military dominance and, despite the complexity and unpredictability of the situation we may assume the future conflict will feature only two sides, IDF and Hezbollah. Based on the bellicose statements of the leadership of the Jewish state, the fighting will be initiated by Israel.

"The operation will begin with a massive evacuation of residents from the settlements in the north and centre of Israel. Since Hezbollah has agents within the IDF, it will not be possible to keep secret the concentration of troops on the border and a mass evacuation of civilians. Hezbollah units will will be ordered to occupy a prepared defensive position and simultaneously open fire on places were IDF units are concentrated. The civilian population of southern Lebanon will most likely be evacuated. IDF will launch massive bombing causing great damage to the social infrastructure and some damage to Hezbollah's military infrastructure, but without destroying the carefully protected and camouflaged rocket launchers and launch sites.

"Hezbollah control and communications systems have elements of redundancy. Consequently, regardless of the use of specialized precision-guided munitions, the command posts and electronic warfare systems will not be paralysed, maintaining communications including through the use of fibre-optic communications means. IDF discovered that the movement has such equipment during the 2006 war. Smaller units will operate independently, working with open communication channels, using the pre-defined call signs and codes.

"Israeli troops will then cross the border of Lebanon, despite the presence of the UN peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon, beginning a ground operation with the involvement of a greater number of units than in the 2006 war. The IDF troops will occupy commanding heights and begin to prepare for assaults on settlements and actions in the tunnels. The Israelis do not score a quick victory as they suffer heavy losses in built-up areas. The need to secure occupied territory with patrols and checkpoints will cause further losses.

"The fact that Israel itself started the war and caused damage to the civilian infrastructure, allows the leadership of the movement to use its missile arsenal on Israeli cities. While Israel's missile defence systems can successfully intercept the launched missiles, there are not enough of them to blunt the bombardment. The civilian evacuation paralyzes life in the country. As soon IDF's Iron Dome and other medium-range systems are spent on short-range Hezbollah rockets, the bombardment of Israel with long-range missiles may commence. Hezbollah's Iranian solid-fuel rockets do not require much time to prepare for launch and may target the entire territory of Israel, causing further losses.

"It is difficult to assess the duration of actions of this war. One thing that seems certain is that Israel shouldn't count on its rapid conclusion, similar to last September's exercises. Hezbollah units are stronger and more capable than during the 2006 war, despite the fact that they are fighting in Syria and suffered losses there.

"Conclusions

"The combination of large-scale exercises and bellicose rhetoric is intended to muster Israeli public support for the aggression against Hezbollah by convincing the public the victory would be swift and bloodless. Instead of restraint based on a sober assessment of relative capabilities, Israeli leaders appear to be in a state of blood lust. In contrast, the Hezbollah has thus far demonstrated restraint and diplomacy.

"Underestimating the adversary is always the first step towards a defeat. Such mistakes are paid for with soldiers' blood and commanders' careers. The latest IDF exercises suggest Israeli leaders underestimate the opponent and, more importantly, consider them to be quite dumb. In reality, Hezbollah units will not cross the border. There is no need to provoke the already too nervous neighbor and to suffer losses solely to plant a flag and photograph it for their leader. For Hezbollah, it is easier and safer when the Israeli soldiers come to them. According to the IDF soldiers who served in Gaza and southern Lebanon, it is easier to operate on the plains of Gaza than the mountainous terrain of southern Lebanon. This is a problem for armoured vehicles fighting for control of heights, tunnels, and settlements, where they are exposed to anti-armor weapons.

"While the Israeli establishment is in a state of patriotic frenzy, it would be a good time for them to turn to the wisdom of their ancestors. After all, as the old Jewish proverb says: 'War is a big swamp, easy to go into but hard to get out'."

Israeli Defense Forces: Military Capabilities, Scenarios for the Third Lebanon War
https://southfront.org/israeli-defense-forces-military-capabilities-scenarios-for-the-third-lebanon-war/

Realist , November 6, 2017 at 5:36 pm

Yes, the latest "big fish" outed yesterday as an agent of the Kremlin was the U.S. Secretary of Commerce (Wilbur Ross) who was discovered to hold stock in a shipping company that does business with a Russian petrochemical company (Sibur) whose owners include Vladimir Putin's son-in-law (Kirill Shamalov). Obviously the orders flow directly from Putin to Shamalov to Sibur to the shipping company to Ross to Trump, all to the detriment of American citizens.

From RT (another tainted source!): "US Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr. has a stake in a shipping firm that receives millions of dollars a year in revenue from a company whose key owners include Russian President Vladimir Putin's son-in-law and a Russian tycoon sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department as a member of Putin's inner circle," says the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the main publisher of the Paradise Papers. After the report was published, some US lawmakers accused Ross of misleading Congress during his confirmation hearings." Don't go mistaking the "International Consortium of Investigative Journalists for "Consortium News." These guys are dedicated witch hunters, searching for anyone with six degrees of separation to Vladimir Putin and his grand plan to thwart the United States and effect regime change within its borders.

In a clear attempt to weasel out of his traitorous transgression, Ross stated "In a separate interview with CNBC, that Sibur [which is NOT the company he owned stock in] was not subject to US sanctions." 'A company not under sanction is just like any other company, period. It was a normal commercial relationship and one that I had nothing to do with the creation of, and do not know the shareholders who were apparently sanctioned at some later point in time,' he said." Since when can we start allowing excuses like that? Not knowing that someone holds stock in a company that does business with a company in which you own stock may at some later point in time become sanctioned by the all-wise and all-good American federal government?

I can't wait till they make the first Ben Stiller comedy based on this fiasco twenty years from now. It will be hilarious slap-stick, maybe titled "Can You Believe these Mother Fockers?" President Chelea Clinton of our great and noble idiocracy will throw out the first witch on opening day of the movie.

Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:27 pm

Let's be honest. Most Americans think McCarthy is a retail store. No education. And they think Russia is the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Trump is in Japan to start war with N. Korea to hide the blemishes or the canker on his ass. America is rapidly collapsing.

Adrian Engler , November 6, 2017 at 6:34 pm

In the beginning, "Russiagate" was about alleged actions by Russian secret services. Evidence for these allegations has never emerged, and it seems that the Russiagate conspiracy theorists largely gave up on this part (they still sometimes write about it as if it was an established fact, but since the only thing in support of it they can adduce is the canard about the 17 intelligence services, it probably is not that interesting any more).

Now, they have dropped the mask, and the object of their hatred are openly all Russian people, anyone who is "Russian linked" by ever having logged in to social networks from Russia or using Cyrillic letters. If these people and their media at least recognized the reality that they are now a particularly rabid part of the xenophobic far right in the United States

But when people daily spew hate against anything and anyone "Russia linked" and still don't recognize that they have gone over to the far right and even claim they are liberal or progressive, this is completely absurd.

McCarthyism, as terrible as it was, at least originally was motivated by hatred against a certain political ideology that also had its bad sides. But today's Russiagate peddlers clearly are motivated by hatred against a certain ethnicity, a certain country, and a certain language. I don't think there is any way to avoid the conclusion that with their hatred against anyone who is "Russia linked", they have become right-wing extremists.

Litchfield , November 6, 2017 at 6:46 pm

"Israel is another skilled player in this field, tapping into its supporters around the world to harass people who criticize the Zionist project."

Yes, very well organized.
In fact virtually every synagogue is a center for organizing people to harass others who are exercising their First Amendment rights to diseminate information about Israel's occupation of Palestine. The link below is to a protest and really, personal attack, against a Unitarian minister in Marblehead, Mass., for daring to screen the film ""The Occupation of the American Mind, Israel's Public Relations War in the United States." In other words, for daring to provide an dissenting opinion and, simply, to tell the truth. Ironic is that the protesters' comment actually reinforce the basic message of the film.
No other views on Israel will be allowed to enter the public for a good airing and discussion and debate. The truth about the illegal Israeli occupation will be shouted down, and those who try to provide information to the public on this subject will be vilified as "anti-semites." Kudos to this minister for screening the film.

http://www.salemnews.com/news/local_news/screening-of-film-sparks-protest-in-marblehead/article_0b075cbc-c2ae-5d46-916a-24eed79d30cd.html

http://cdn.field59.com/SALEMNEWS/ebb60114f782c4213f068bf0a39a4a46451ed871_fl9-360p.mp4

Abe , November 7, 2017 at 1:03 am

The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel's Public Relations War in the United States (2016) examines pro-Israel Hasbara propaganda efforts within the U.S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD7mOyfclIk

This important documentary, narrated by Roger waters, exposes how the Israeli government, the U.S. government, and the pro-Israel Lobby join forces to shape American media coverage in Israel's favor.

Documentary producer Sut Jhally is professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, and a leading scholar on advertising, public relations, and political propaganda. He is also the founder and Executive Director of the Media Education Foundation, a documentary film company that looks at issues related to U.S. media and public attitudes.

Jhally is the producer and director of dozens of documentaries about U.S. politics and media culture, including Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land: U.S. Media & the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict.

The Occupation of the American Mind provides a sweeping analysis of Israel's decades-long battle for the hearts, minds, and tax dollars of the American people – a battle that has only intensified over the past few years in the face of widening international condemnation of Israel's increasingly right-wing policies.

Dave P. , November 7, 2017 at 2:45 am

Abe –

The interview of Roger Waters on RT is one of the best I have seen in a long while. I wish some other artists get the courage to raise their voices. The link to the Roger Waters interview is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7jcvfbLoIA This Roger Waters interview is worth watching.

Dan Kuhn , November 6, 2017 at 6:57 pm

It would seem that everyone on the US telivision , newspaper and internet news has mastered the art of hand over mouth , gasp and looking horrified every time Russia is mentioned. It looks to me that the US is in the middle of another of it´s mid life crises. Panic reigns supreme every where. If it was not so sad it would be funny. i was born in the 1940s and remember the McCarthy witch hunts and the daily shower of people jumping out of windows as a result of it.

As a Canadian I could not get over, even though I was just a teenager back then, just how a people in a supposedly advanced country could be so collectively paniced. I think back then it was just a scam to get rid of unions and any kind of collective action against the owners of the country, and this time around I think it is just a continuation of that scam, to frighten people into subservience to the police state. I heard a women on TV today commenting on the Texas masscre, she said " The devil never sleeps", well in the USA the 1/10 of 1% never sleeps when it comes to more control, more pwoer and more wealth, in fact I think they are after the very last shekle still left in the pockets of the bottom 99.9 % of the population. Those evil Russians are just a ploy in the scam.

Litchfield , November 6, 2017 at 6:58 pm

"The Democrats, the liberals and even many progressives justify their collusion with the neocons by the need to remove Trump by any means necessary and "stop fascism." But their contempt for Trump and their exaggeration of the "Hitler" threat that this incompetent buffoon supposedly poses have blinded them to the extraordinary risks attendant to their course of action and how they are playing into the hands of the war-hungry neocons."

And they are driving more and more actual and potential Dem Party members away in droves, further weakening the party and depriving it of its most intelligent members. Any non-senile person knows that this is all BS and these people are not only turning their backs on the Dem Party but I think many of them are being driven to the right by their disgust with this circus and the exposure of the party's critical weaknesses and derangement.

Paolo , November 6, 2017 at 6:59 pm

You correctly write that "the United States intervened in the 1996 Russian election to ensure the continued rule of the corrupt and pliable Boris Yeltsin". The irony is that a few years later Yeltsin chose Putin as his successor, and presumably the 'mericans gave him a hand to win his first term.
How extremely sad it is to see the USA going totally nuts.

Abe , November 6, 2017 at 9:00 pm

In The Fifties (1993), American journalist and historian David Halberstam addressed the noxious effect of McCarthyism: "McCarthy's carnival like four year spree of accusation charges, and threats touched something deep in the American body politic, something that lasted long after his own recklessness, carelessness and boozing ended his career in shame." (page 53)

Halberstam specifically discussed how readily the so-called "free" press acquiesced to McCarthy's masquerading: "The real scandal in all this was the behavior of the members of the Washington press corps, who, more often than not, knew better. They were delighted to be a part of his traveling road show, chronicling each charge and then moving on to the next town, instead of bothering to stay behind and follow up. They had little interest in reporting how careless McCarthy was or how little it all meant to him." (page 55)

Abe , November 6, 2017 at 9:15 pm

On March 9, 1954, Edward R. Murrow and a news team at CBS produced a half-hour See It Now special titled "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy".

Murrow interspersed his own comments and clarifications into a damaging series of film clips from McCarthy's speeches. He ended the broadcast with a warning:

"As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves–as indeed we are–the defenders of freedom, what's left of it, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies, and whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create the situation of fear; he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right: 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.'"

CBS reported that of the 12,000 phone calls received within 24 hours of the broadcast, positive responses to the program outnumbered negative 15 to 1. McCarthy's favorable rating in the Gallup Poll dropped and was never to rise again.

Gary , November 6, 2017 at 11:34 pm

Sad to see so many hypocrites here espousing freedom from McCarthyism while they continue to vote for capitalist candidates year in year out. Think about the fact that in 2010 when Citizens United managed to get the Supreme Court to certify corporations as people the fear among many was that this would open US company subsidiaries to be infiltrated by foreign money. I guess it is happening in spades with collusion between Russian money & Trump's organization along with Facebook, Twitter & many others. How Mr. Parry can maintain that this parallels the 1950s anti-communist crusade is quite ingenuous. When libertarians, the likes of Bannon, Mercer, Trump et al, with their "destruction of the administrative state" credo are compared to the US communists of the 50s we know progressives have become about as disoriented as can be.

geeyp , November 7, 2017 at 3:30 am

I guess these "Paradise Papers" were released just yesterday, i.e., Sunday the 5th. Somehow I didn't get to it.

john wilson , November 7, 2017 at 6:01 am

So it looks like Hillary will be crossing Putin off her Xmas card list this year! I sometimes wonder if all we posters on here and other similar sites are on a list somewhere and when the day of reckoning comes, the list will be produced and we will have to account for our treasonous behaviour? Of course, one man's treason is another man's truth. I suppose in the end it boils down to the power thing. If you have a perceived enemy you can claim the need for an army. If you have an army you have power and with that power you can dispose of anyone who disagrees with you simply by calling them the enemy.

Lisa , November 7, 2017 at 9:38 am

John, your post made me wonder whether I would be on a list of traitors. I've written three posts, starting yesterday, and tried to explain something about the background of Yuri Milner, mentioned in the article. After "your comment has been posted, thank you" nothing has appeared on this thread.
Well, once more: Milner is known to me as a well-educated physicist from Moscow State University, and the co-founder and financier of The Breakthrough Prize, handing out yearly awards to promising scientists, with a much larger sum than the humble Nobel Prize. The awarding ceremony is held in December in Silicon Valley.

john wilson , November 7, 2017 at 12:34 pm

Hi Lisa, I have just looked up Milner on Wiki and he appears to be into everything including investment in internet companies. He is the co-founder of the "break through prize" that you mention and seems to have backed face book and twitter in their start up. I don't see why you posts haven't appeared as anyone can look Milner up on Wiki and elsewhere in great detail. You don't say where you have tried to post, but I would have thought on this site you would have no trouble whatever. If you have watched the last episode of 'cross talk' on RT you will see that anyone who as ever mentioned Russia in a public place is regarded as some kind of traitor. I guess you and me are due for rendition anytime now!! LOL

Lisa , November 7, 2017 at 1:49 pm

Hi John,
Naturally I had been trying to post on this site. First I tried three times in the comment space below all other posts, and they never went through. Only when I posted a reply to someone else's comment, my reply appeared. Maybe some technical problem on the site.

My motive was to show that Milner is doing worthwhile things with his millions, even if he is an "evil Russian oligarch". The mentioned prize has its own website: breakthroughprize.org. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) is a board member.

The prize is certainly a "Putin conspiracy", as it has links to Russia. (sarc)

Zachary Smith , November 7, 2017 at 8:05 pm

Maybe some technical problem on the site.

Possibly that's the case. Disappearing-forever posts happen to me from time to time. For at least a while afterwards I cut/paste what I'm about to attempt to "post" to a WORD file before hitting the "post comment" button.

In any event, avoid links whenever possible. By cut/pasting the exact title of the piece you're using as a reference, others can quickly locate it themselves without a link.

K , November 7, 2017 at 9:44 am

I'm a lifelong Democrat. I was a Bernie supporter. But logic dictates my thinking. The Russia nonsense is cover for Hillary's loss and a convenient hammer with which to attack Trump. Not biting. Bill Maher is fixated on this. The Rob Reiner crowd is an embarrassment. The whole thing is embarrassing. The media is inept. Very bizarre times.

Patricia Schaefer , November 7, 2017 at 10:14 am

Excellent article which should shed light on the misunderstandings manifested to manipulate and censor Americans. Personally, it's ludicrous to imply that Russia was the primary reason I could not vote for Hillary. My interest in Twitter peaked when Sidney Blumenthal's name popped up selling arms in Libya. He was on The Clinton Foundation's Payroll for $120K, while the Obama Administration specifically told HRC Sidney Blumenthal was not to work for the State Department.

Further research showed Chris Stevens had no knowledge of Sidney Blumenthal selling arms in Libya. Hillary NEVER even gave Chris Stevens, a candidate with an outstanding background for diplomatic relations in the Middle East, her email. Chris Stevens possessed a Law Degree in International Trade, and had previously worked for Senator Lugar (R). Senator Lugar had warned HRC not to co-mingle State Department business with The Clinton Foundation.

To add salt to the wound Hillary choose to put a third rate security firm in Libya, changing firms a couple of short weeks before the bombing. I think she anticipated the bombing, remarking "What difference does it make? " at the congressional hearings.

If you remember Guccifer (that hacker) he said he'd hacked both Hillary and Sidney Blumenthal. He also said he found Sidney Blumenthal's account more interesting.

That's just one reason why I started surfing the internet. Sidney Blumenthal was a name that hung in the cobwebs of my memory, and I wanted to know what this scum-job of a journalist was doing!

Then there was Clinton Cash, BoysonTheTracks, Clinton Chronicles, the outrageous audacity of the Democrats Superdelegates voting before a single primary ballot had been cast, MSM bias to Hillary, Kathy Shelton's video "I thought you should know." and maybe around September 2016, wondering what dirty things Hillary had done with Russia since 1993?

So I guess it's true. In the end after witnessing what has transpired since the election I would not vote for Hillary because she'd rather risk WWIII, than have the TRUTH come out why she lost.

Gary , November 7, 2017 at 3:16 pm

After living in Europe much of the last three years we've recently returned to the U.S. I must say that life here feels very much like I'm living within a strange Absurdist theatre play of some sort (not that Europe is vastly better). Truth, meaning, rationality, mean absolutely nothing at this juncture here in the United States. Reality has been turned on its head. The only difference between our political parties runs along identity politics lines: "do you prefer your drone strikes, illegal invasions, regime change black-ops, economic warfare and massive government spying 'with' or 'without' gender specific bathrooms?" MSM refer to this situation as "democracy" while of course any thinking person knows we are actually living within a totalitarian nightmare. Theatre of the Absurd as a way of life. I must admit it feels pretty creepy being home again.

Realist , November 7, 2017 at 4:09 pm

Should this give us hope? https://sputniknews.com/us/201711071058899018-trump-cia-meet-whistleblower-russian-hacking/ Trump ordered Pompeo to meet with Binney of VIPS re "Russian hacking." Is it time for the absurd Russia-gate narrative to finally be publicly deconstructed? Or is that asking too much?

Skip Scott , November 8, 2017 at 9:04 am

I wish it wasn't asking too much, but I suspect it is. If the NYT was reporting it, I'd feel better about our chances. But the Deep State controls the narrative, and thus controls Pompeo, Trump's order notwithstanding. I hope I'm wrong.

Dave P. , November 7, 2017 at 4:17 pm

Yes Joe. It is rather painful to watch as you said this Orwellian Tragedy playing out in the Country which has just about become a police state. For those of us who grew up admiring the Western Civilization starting with the Greeks and Romans, and then for its institutions enshrining Individual Rights; and its scientific, literary, and cultural achievements, it is as if it still happening in some dream, though it has been coming for some time now – more than two decades now at least. The System was not perfect but I think that it was good as it could get. The system had been in decline for four decades or so now.

From Robert Parry's article:

"The warning from powerful senators was crystal clear. "I don't think you get it," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, warned social media executives last week. "You bear this responsibility. You created these platforms, and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it. Or we will."

Diane Feinstein's multi-billionaire husband was implicated in those Loan and Savings scandals of Reagan and G.H.W. Bush Era and in many other financial scandals later on but Law did not touch him. He has a dual residency in Israel. These are very corrupt people.

Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Perle, Nulad-Kagan clan, Kristol, Gaffney . . . the list goes on; add Netanyahu to it. In the Hollywood Harvey Weinstein, Rob Reiner. and the rest . . . In Finance and wall Street characters like Sandy Weiss and the gang. The Media and TV is directly or indirectly owned and controlled by "The Chosen People". So, where would you put the blame for all what is going on in this country, and all this chaos, death, and destruction going on in ME and many countries in Africa.

Any body who points out their role in it or utters a word of criticism of Israel is immediately called an anti-semite. Just to tell my own connections, my wife youngest sister is married to person who is Jewish (non-practicing). In all the relatives we have, they are closest to us for more than thirty five years now. They are those transgender common restroom liberals, but we have many common views and interests. In life, I have never differentiated people based on their ethnic or racial backgrounds; you look at the principles they stand for.

As I see it, this era of Russia-Gate and witch hunt is hundred times worse than McCarthy era. It seems irreversible. There is no one in the political establishment or elsewhere in Media or academia left for regeneration of the "Body Politic". In fact, what we are witnessing here is much worse than it was in the Soviet Union. It is complete degeneration of political leadership in this country. It extends to Media and other institutions as well. People in Soviet Union did not believe the lies they were told by the government there. And there arose writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Soviet Union. What is left here now except are these few websites?

Maedhros , November 7, 2017 at 4:27 pm

If there is evidence, you should be able to provide some so that readers can analyze and discuss it. Exactly what evidence has been provided that the Russian government manipulated the 2016 election?

CitizenOne , November 7, 2017 at 10:42 pm

Robert Parry You Nailed It!!!

I need to do a little research to see how far back you used the term "New McCarthyism" to describe the next cold war with Russia. It was about the same time the first allegations of a Trump-Russia conspiracy was floated by the MSM. I do not pretend to know how much airtime they spent covering their coverup for all that the MSM did to profit from SuperPacs. They have webed a weave that conspires to conceive to the tunes of billions of dollars spent to reprieve their intent to deceive us and distract us away from their investment in Donald Trump which was the real influence in the public spaces to gain mega profits from extorting the SuperPacs into spending their dollars to defeat the trumped up candidate they created and boosted. One has to look no further than the Main Stream Press (MSM) to find the guilty party with motive and opportunity to cash in on a candidacy which if not for the money motive would not pass any test of journalistic integrity but would make money for the Media.

The Russian Boogeyman was created shortly after the election and is an obvious attempt to shield and defend the actions of the MSM which was the real fake news covered in the nightly news leading up to the election which sought to get money rather than present the facts.

This is an example of how much power and influence the MSM has on us all to be able to upend a National election and turn around and blame some foreign Devil for the results of an election.

The Russians had little to do with Trumps election. The MSM had everything to do with it. They cast blame on the Russians and in so doing create a new Cold War which suits the power establishment and suitably diverts all of our attention away from their machinations to influence the last presidential election.

Win Win. More Nuclear Weapons and more money for the MIC and more money for all of the corporations who would profit from a new Cold War.

Profit in times of deceit make more money from those who cheat.

CitizenOne , November 7, 2017 at 11:25 pm

Things not talked about:

1. James Comey and his very real influence on the election has never entered the media space for an instant. It has gone down the collective memory hole. That silence has been deafening because he was the person who against DOJ advice reopened the investigation into Hillary Clinton and the Servergate investigation after it had been closed by the FBI just days before the election.

The silence of the media on the influence on the election by the reopening of James Comey's Servergate investigation and how the mass media press coverage implicating Hillary Clinton (again) in supposed crimes (which never resulted in an indictment) influenced the National Election in ways that have never been examined by the MSM is a nail in the coffin of media impartiality.

Why have they not investigated James Comey? Why has the MSM instead created a Russian Boogeyman? Why was he invited to testify about the Russian connection but never cross examined about his own influence? Why is the clearest reason for election meddling by James Comey not even spoken of by the MSM? This is because the MSM does not want to cover events as they happened but wants to recreate a alternate reality suitable to themselves which serves their interests and convinces us that the MSM has no part at all in downplaying the involvement of themselves in the election but wants to create a foreign enemy to blame.

It serves many interests. The MSM lies to all of us for the benefit of the MIC. It serves to support White House which will deliver maximum investments in the Defense Industry. It does this by creating a foreign enemy which they create for us to fear and be afraid of.

It is obvious to everyone with a clear eyed history of how the last election went down and how the MSM and the government later played upon our fears to grab more cash have cashed in under the present administration.

It is up to us to elect leaders who will reject this manipulation by the media and who will not be cowed by the establishment. We have the power enshrined in our Constitution to elect leaders who will pave the path forward to a better future.

Those future leaders will have to do battle with a media infrastructure that serves the power structure and conspires to deceive us all.

Jessica K , November 8, 2017 at 9:43 am

Clear critical thinking must accompany free speech, however, and irrationality seems to have beset Americans, too stuck in the mud of identity politics. Can they get out? I have hopes that a push is coming from the new multipolar world Xi and Putin are advocating, as well as others (but not the George Soros NWO variety). The big bully American government, actually ruled by oligarchy, has not been serving its regular folks well, so things are falling apart. Seems like the sex scandals, political scandals especially of the Democrat brand, money scandals are unraveling to expose underlying societal sickness in the Disunited States of America.

It is interesting that this purge shakeup in Saudi Arabia is happening in 2017, one hundred years since the shakeup in Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution. So shake-ups are happening everywhere. I think a pattern is emerging of major changes in world events. Just yesterday I read that because "Russia-gate" isn't working well, senators are looking to start a "China-gate", for evidence of Trump collusion with Chinese oligarchs. Ludicrous. As Seer once said, "The Empire in panic mode".

Patricia, thanks for the info on Sid Blumenthal, HRC and the selling of arms from Libya to ME jihadists, which seems to exonerate Chris Stevens from those dirty deeds and lays blame squarely at Blumenthal's and Clinton's doorstep; changes my thinking. And thanks to Robert Parry for continuing to push back at the participation of MSM and government players in the Orwellian masquerade being pulled on the sheeple.

Truther , November 8, 2017 at 12:54 pm

Just the facts for those of you who have minds still open. suggest you bookmark it quickly as the moderator will delete it within the hour.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/a-timeline-of-the-trump-russia-scandal-w511067

[Oct 31, 2017] Above All - The Junta Expands Its Claim To Power

Highly recommended!
"All along Trump has been the candidate of the military. The other two power centers of the power triangle , the corporate and the executive government (CIA), had gone for Clinton. The Pentagon's proxy defeated the CIA proxy. (Last months' fight over Raqqa was similar - with a similar outcome.)"
Notable quotes:
"... All along Trump has been the candidate of the military. The other two power centers of the power triangle , the corporate and the executive government (CIA), had gone for Clinton. The Pentagon's proxy defeated the CIA proxy. (Last months' fight over Raqqa was similar - with a similar outcome.) ..."
"... Former U.S. Army Captain and now CIA director Mike Pompeo was educated at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is part of the Junta circle, installed to control the competition. ..."
"... Is the U.S. military really qualified to teach anyone how to respect human rights? Did it learn that from committing mass atrocities in about each campaign it ever fought? ..."
"... The deep-seated problems plaguing the USA do have solutions, but they are not those being forwarded by the very radical conservatives now in charge of Congress and many statehouses. And the junta members share their mindsets. So, I see the domestic situation continuing to spiral further out-of-control with no sign anywhere of a countervailing power arising with the potential to steer the ship-of-state away from the massive reef it's rapidly heading for ..."
"... Ah, Masha Gessen, literally cancer. Who elevated her? I find it interesting that she does the "translating" for the CIA-scripted FX show "The Americans", a show which has probably more effectively demonized Russians for the cud-chewing crowd than the sum total of Cold War propaganda since the 50s AND the daily Russian hate columns in Wapo et al that trickle down to the Buzzfeed crowd. ..."
"... Military junta or not b, make no mistake, the real power behind the throne are a cabal of billionaires who buy their way by co-opting the politicians who make the laws. Democracy is indeed dead here in the U$A. It's now a full-blown Oligarchy. ..."
"... I agree with this division of power and would add that Trump is also the candidate of the police. I see the media though as more being in the CIA/corporate camps. I think the military backing is necessary as you mention to take the CIA down a few notches. So far I'd say the result in Syria is promising. ..."
"... This tribal civil war is also spilling over into places like Las Vegas, which clearly is run by the Jewish Mafia. There still is no plausible motive given for the shooting incident, but we know that the owners of MGM would never willingly have allowed this to happen on their own property. So it clearly was a hit, and with Area 51 down the road and all the MIC contractors in Vegas, it is highly unlikely that they were not involved or at least aware of the operation. ..."
"... The ground work, or state-of-affairs that lead to what one might call a soft military coup in the US (see b) = within what, at one extreme could be called Ayn-Randian rabid individualism, and at the other a sort of neo-liberal capitalism which is nevertheless highly 'socialist' in the sense re-distributive from the center of power (if only to create a slave/subservient class and prevent uprisings), there is NO public space for 'solidarity' within (besides familial, or close, etc.) ..."
"... historically, dying empires invest in the double prong, military conquest + internal control (can be vicious) ..."
"... I don't think it is all that clear. Corps or better conglomerates of power like 'the media', the 'silicons', banking and finance, Energy, electronics, Big Pharma, etc. are politcally inclined (say!) to some form of corporate fascism, > bought pols from all-sides of any-aisle. Their ties to the military / milit. type power at home are not very strong, they may collaborate on occasion. Some of these 'industries' fear domination that goes beyond soft power and they loathe sanctions - think about who/what/how is doing lucrative deals and has continuing biz success in Iraq, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, etc. - NOT US cos./corps. ..."
"... First, if the only two choices were the Executive CIA and the Military "Junta" with Trump why would we continue the farce of elections? And if the elections were pre-determined and the ruling Junta took over in a coup, then how and why is the CIA out of power? ..."
"... The "farce of elections" is accurate because Trump is not doing what he claimed he would do, not unusual actually. It was Trump who sprang the "junta" on us. And who claimed that the CIA would be out of power? ..."
"... I used to think it was a counter-coup also. But sheep-dog Sanders and Trump's having supported Hillary in 2008 among other things caused me to conclude that it all bullshit. I now believe that the hyper-partisanship is just a show. The political system in the US is designed to prevent any real populist from gaining power. We are being played. Trump is the Republican Obama. ..."
"... The excuse for this was that while US hands were tied (because public wouldn't support further adventurism after Iraq) close allies could push forward. But the new Cold War has changed the calculus. ..."
"... The US isn't giving up on Empire. It's just a different type of Empire for a different type of environment. When Trump talks about "draining the swamp" I think he merely refers to foreign influence. ..."
"... Trump has one ally and that is the 65million voters who put him into office. He surrendered his top people. Saker says it was lack of character. I think when they point the gun at you, your family, your closest friends in your life, you acquiesce. They even took from him Keith Schiller, his personal security man for years. Kelly forced him out of the WH. ..."
"... On the bright side, members of Congress are at least nominally elected. Four star Generals, not so much. It's still a felony carrying a prison term of 5 to 10 years per incident to lie to Congress. The military have no precedent to recommend them either as a source of information or in their decision making ability. They are way out of their depth when it comes to administering a nation. ..."
"... Moon of Alabama always writes interesting and insightful critiques of the Deep State, the military, and the imperialist/war party, but falls flat on his face in his naive faith in the supposed anti-establishment, populist, and America First Nationalist proclivities of Donald Trump, and his arch-reactionary Svengali Steve Bannon. There is indeed at least one major split in the ranks of the ruling class, but to present Trump and Bannon as either valiant figures struggling for the national good, or noble isolated men surrounded by vipers and traitors is absurd. ..."
"... Now, in its late imperial decline, the U.S. has become unable to continue to exercise hegemony, the way it became accustomed to in the first 70+ years in the Post-WW 2 period. The number one Client/Ally/Master, Israel and their deeply embedded 5th Column in the U.S., the Zionists with their associated Pro-Zionist factions within the War Party, now nearly directly and openly controls U.S. foreign policy and military actions in the regions that the Likudnik faction in Israel cares about (i.e. the Levant, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa). ..."
"... Hollowed out economically and industrially the U.S. Empire is clearly on the way out. The various factions fighting for control of policy seem to be oblivious to this basic fact. ..."
Oct 31, 2017 | www.moonofalabama.org

In an advertising campaign in 2008 the U.S. Air Force declared itself to be "Above All". The slogan and symbol of the campaign was similar to the German "Deutschland Über Alles" campaign of 1933. It was a sign of things to come.

On Thursday Masha Gessen watched the press briefing of White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly and concluded :

The press briefing could serve as a preview of what a military coup in this country would look like, for it was in the logic of such a coup that Kelly advanced his four arguments .
  1. Those who criticize the President don't know what they're talking about because they haven't served in the military . ...
  2. The President did the right thing because he did exactly what his generals told him to do . ...
  3. Communication between the President and a military widow is no one's business but theirs. ...
  4. Citizens are ranked based on their proximity to dying for their country. ...

Gessen is late. The coup happened months ago. A military junta is in strong control of White House polices. It is now widening its claim to power.

All along Trump has been the candidate of the military. The other two power centers of the power triangle , the corporate and the executive government (CIA), had gone for Clinton. The Pentagon's proxy defeated the CIA proxy. (Last months' fight over Raqqa was similar - with a similar outcome.)

On January 20, the first day of the Not-Hillary presidency , I warned:

The military will demand its due beyond the three generals now in Trump's cabinet.

With the help of the media the generals in the White House defeated their civilian adversary. In August the Trump ship dropped its ideological pilot . Steve Bannon went from board. Bannon's militarist enemy, National Security Advisor General McMaster, had won. I stated :

A military junta is now ruling the United States

and later explained :

Trump's success as the "Not-Hillary" candidate was based on an anti-establishment insurgency. Representatives of that insurgency, Flynn, Bannon and the MAGA voters, drove him through his first months in office. An intense media campaign was launched to counter them and the military took control of the White House. The anti-establishment insurgents were fired. Trump is now reduced to public figure head of a stratocracy - a military junta which nominally follows the rule of law.

The military took full control of White House processes and policies:

Everything of importance now passes through the Junta's hands ... To control Trump the Junta filters his information input and eliminates any potentially alternative view ... The Junta members dictate their policies to Trump by only proposing certain alternatives to him. The one that is most preferable to them, will be presented as the only desirable one. "There are no alternatives," Trump will be told again and again.

With the power center captured the Junta starts to implement its ideology and to suppress any and all criticism against itself.

On Thursday the 19th Kelly criticized Congresswoman Frederica Wilson of South Florida for hearing in (invited) on a phone-call Trump had with some dead soldiers wife:

Kelly then continued his criticism of Wilson, mentioning the 2015 dedication of the Miramar FBI building, saying she focused in her speech that she "got the money" for the building.

The video of the Congresswoman's speech (above link) proves that Kelly's claim was a fabrication. But one is no longer allowed to point such out. The Junta, by definition, does not lie. When the next day journalists asked the White House Press Secretary about Kelly's unjustified attack she responded:

MS. SANDERS: If you want to go after General Kelly, that's up to you. But I think that that -- if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that that's something highly inappropriate

It is now "highly inappropriate" to even question the Junta that rules the empire.

... ... ...

If the soldiers do not work "for any other reason than that they love this country" why do they ask to be paid? Why is the public asked to finance 200 military golf courses ? Because the soldiers "love the country"? Only a few 10,000 of the 2,000,000 strong U.S. military will ever see an active front-line.

And imagine the "wonderful joy" Kelly "got in his heart" when he commanded the illegal torture camp of Guantanamo Bay:

Presiding over a population of detainees not charged or convicted of crimes, over whom he had maximum custodial control, Kelly treated them with brutality. His response to the detainees' peaceful hunger strike in 2013 was punitive force-feeding, solitary confinement, and rubber bullets. Furthermore, he sabotaged efforts by the Obama administration to resettle detainees, consistently undermining the will of his commander in chief.

Former U.S. Army Captain and now CIA director Mike Pompeo was educated at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is part of the Junta circle, installed to control the competition. Pompeo also wants to again feel the "wonderful joy". On Friday he promised that the CIA would become a "much more vicious agency". Instead of merely waterboarding 'terrorists' and drone-bombing brown families, Pompeo's more vicious CIA will rape the 'terrorist's' kids and nuke whole villages. Pompeo's remark was made at a get-together of the Junta and neo-conservative warmongers.

On October 19 Defense Secretary General Mattis was asked in Congress about the recent incident in Niger during which, among others, several U.S. soldiers were killed. Mattis set (vid 5:29pm) a curious new metric for deploying U.S. troops:

Any time we commit out troops anywhere it is based on a simple first question and that is - is the well-being of the American people sufficiently enhanced by putting our troops there , by putting our troops in a position to die?

In his October 20 press briefing General Kelly also tried to explain why U.S. soldiers are in Niger:

So why were they there ? They're there working with partners, local -- all across Africa -- in this case, Niger -- working with partners, teaching them how to be better soldiers; teaching them how to respect human rights ...

Is the U.S. military really qualified to teach anyone how to respect human rights? Did it learn that from committing mass atrocities in about each campaign it ever fought?

One of the soldiers who were killed in Niger while "teaching how to respect human rights" was a 39 year old "chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear specialist" with "more than a dozen awards and decorations". The U.S. military sent a highly qualified WMD specialist on a "routine patrol" in Niger to teach local soldiers "to respect human rights" due to which presumably "the well-being of the American people" would be "sufficiently enhanced"? Will anyone really buy that bridge?

But who would dare to ask more about this? It is" highly inappropriate " to doubt whatever the military says. Soon that will change into "verboten". Any doubt, any question will be declared "fake news" and a sign of devious foreign influence. Whoever spreads such will be blocked from communicating.

The military is now indeed "Above All". That air force slogan was a remake of a 1933 "Über Alles" campaign in Germany. One wonders what other historic similarities will develop from it.

Posted by b on October 21, 2017 at 03:58 PM | Permalink

nhs | Oct 21, 2017 4:10:12 PM | 1

Why Donald Trump is the perfect tool in the hands of neocons right now

Peter AU 1 | Oct 21, 2017 4:26:51 PM | 3

The military junta rely on the US dollar as reserve currency for their lurks and perks. The more they take power, the faster this will slip away. So called allies will move towards China/Russia and other currencies. Dangerous times but the downfall of the US is gaining momentum.
ruralito | Oct 21, 2017 4:30:08 PM | 4
Cedant arma togae - Cicero
les7 | Oct 21, 2017 4:30:38 PM | 5
@1 While I understand the temptation to link Trump to Neo-con policies, I think it over simplifies the issue.

Thierry Meyssan has a recent article in which he questions how seriously we should take the US's anti-Iran policy. In it he states "We have to keep in mind that Donald Trump is not a professional politician, but a real estate promoter, and that he acts like one. He gained his professional success by spreading panic with his outrageous statements and observing the reactions he had created amongst his competitors and his partners."

That statement is a great summary of one of the key precepts of what I called 'asymmetrical leadership' - which I think characterizes Trumps leadership style (an application of asymmetrical warfare techniques to the political arena). This does not mean that the Junta has not taken over control. I would agree with b on this. However, the forms by which that control get expressed will still run through Trump and will still reflect his 'asymmetric' style.

VietnamVet | Oct 21, 2017 4:32:33 PM | 6
It does take someone on the other side of the world to give perspective. I don't think it is as much a military junta as things are falling apart. The generals are attempting to keep their corrupt war profits flowing. The media moguls still hate Donald Trump; only as an oligarch hates another. Donald Trump is firing up his base. Expect, the whole of the alt-right propaganda is false. It relies on the hatred of others. All he will do is speed up the splintering. If your home is foreclosed, flooded, polluted, burned down or blown apart; reality is slapping you in the face.
Lochearn | Oct 21, 2017 4:51:42 PM | 7
One of your most important posts, b. At first I thought it strange that you would quote Masha Gessen, an infamous anti-Putin journalist and Khodorkovsky fan, but then it didn't seem so strange. Gessen is a Zionist, therefore she is aligned with the CIA/Wall Street faction, which as you perceptively say lost out with Trump and Raqqa. I say Wall Street as opposed to corporate because, as I have pointed out before, non-financial corporates - and that includes most of the Dow Jones or FTSE - have fuck all say on anything except how they are going to meet next quarterly's earnings estimates. And the CIA is very close to Wall Street.

What interests me is how this relates to Iran, on which both factions appear to be in agreement, but there must be nuances. The Saker published an article where,in my opinion, he failed to give enough weight to how circumstances around Iran have changed over the last decade. I see little green men in large green aircraft weaving their way down the Caspian Sea, not to mention invisible Chinese hardware in the sense of how did it get there, and a Europe which is in disarray with their tongues hanging out for deals with Iran. The success of the anti-Trump MSM narrative combined with fears of potentially millions of Iranian refugees would surely indicate this is the worst possible time to attack Iran. So how can they conjure a war out of this?

les7 | Oct 21, 2017 5:49:02 PM | 9
On a far more insidious note, one has to wonder what an radiological 'expert' was doing in Niger - thanks b for that important piece of info.

When that info is combined with:
1) US Special ops in Mali from 2006
2) US operation Oasis Enabler (2009) looking to infiltrate and control Elite Malian army units
3) March 2012 Coup brought to power American trained Capt. Amadou Sanogo
4) French Operation Serval, at the request of the 'interim government' fights to control northern Malian territory and URANIUM mines along the Mali - Niger border (they said they fought ISIS but what they actually fought was a Tuareg separatist movement)

together with the presence of ISIS (the US trained, evacuated from Syria version?) in the area... Ominous is hardly strong enough to describe the feeling...

karlof1 | Oct 21, 2017 5:54:56 PM | 10
China's leader, Xi, just outlined his nation's goals out to 2050, which Pepe Escobar nicely condensed for our consumption, http://www.atimes.com/article/xis-road-map-chinese-dream/ The full transcript can be read here, starting page middle to top, http://live.china.org.cn/2017/10/17/opening-ceremony-of-the-19th-cpc-national-congress/

I start my comment by referencing these since the operational doctrine of the Outlaw US Empire is to keep any such challenges to its perceived dominance--and quest for total dominance--subdued to the point of insignificance. As you can clearly read, Xi, China, Putin, Russia, and their allies aren't going to allow any junta to stop their integration and development plans preparing their nations and region for the future--plans and thinking woefully absent from any sector of the Outlaw US Empire excepting perhaps weapon development. The just completed Valdai Conference provides an excellent insight to the drama, the comments and visions are as important as they're powerful, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/55882 I could pile more of the same for barflies to digest, but I don't think that's required.

There's a very longstanding joke about the joining together of these two words--military intelligence--and for good reason, particularly within the Outlaw US Empire. I don't think anyone within the governmental establishment has any idea of what to do about the Eurasian/Muiltipolar Challenge other than trying to break it--no ideas of how to compete or join it so as to also profit from it. The reason for this as I see it is ideological--Zero Sumism and Randian junk economics is so deeply ingrained they've polluted minds to the point where their blinded and unable to think outside the box they've caged themselves within: Hoisted by their own petard as the saying goes. They just can't accept Win/Win as something viable--sharing is for sissies and commies. Problem is that well over half of humanity sees Win/Win as eminently viable and far more welcome than the demonstrably failed Zero Sum Game promoted by Randian political-economists and enforced through the barrel a gun.

The deep-seated problems plaguing the USA do have solutions, but they are not those being forwarded by the very radical conservatives now in charge of Congress and many statehouses. And the junta members share their mindsets. So, I see the domestic situation continuing to spiral further out-of-control with no sign anywhere of a countervailing power arising with the potential to steer the ship-of-state away from the massive reef it's rapidly heading for.

There might be a surprise in store from the junta, however--it might just take on a bit of the massive corruption plaguing the USA by attacking the Clinton Foundation and its related sewage. Although, that just solves one part of a huge host of problems.

pB | Oct 21, 2017 6:25:48 PM | 11
@karlof1 10

thanks for the link to pepe's take on the speech.

funny thing that just accord to me that i had not thought of for nearly ten years, one of the initial "benefits" of the state of Israel, was the cutting off of Africa from asia, and its pretty glaring that a project to connect Asia Africa and Europe does not include the logical land route as well.

Clueless Joe | Oct 21, 2017 6:28:30 PM | 12
At least in the times of Caesar and Augustus, military junta who seized power could claim to be effective and victorious military, able to crush significant enemy armies. The current top military in the US were at best kiddies the last time the US actually managed to defeat a truly powerful enemy, back in 1945. (though this criticism can apply to all major powers)
sejomoje | Oct 21, 2017 6:39:09 PM | 13
Ah, Masha Gessen, literally cancer. Who elevated her? I find it interesting that she does the "translating" for the CIA-scripted FX show "The Americans", a show which has probably more effectively demonized Russians for the cud-chewing crowd than the sum total of Cold War propaganda since the 50s AND the daily Russian hate columns in Wapo et al that trickle down to the Buzzfeed crowd.

We need to start calling the CIA traitors, actual traitors. Masha Gessen is CIA, CIA ghostwrites for most MSM. Traitors all. But even without the constant hagiographies, would people start to get it? "Americans", I mean?

karlof1 | Oct 21, 2017 6:46:49 PM | 14
Here's a bit of what Hamid Karzai at the Valdai Club had to say about what the junta accomplished in Afghanistan:

"Today, I am one of the greatest critics of the US policy in Afghanistan. Not because I am anti-Western, I am a very Western person. My education is Western, my ideas are Western. I am very democratic in my inner instincts. And I love their culture. But I am against the US policy because it is not succeeding. It is causing us immense trouble and the rise of extremism and radicalism and terrorism. I am against the US policy because on their watch, under their total control of the Afghan air space, the Afghan intelligence and the Afghan military, of all that they have, that super power, there is Daesh in Afghanistan. How come Daesh emerged in Afghanistan 14–15 years after the US presence in Afghanistan with that mass of resources and money and expenditure? Why is the world not as cooperative with America in Afghanistan today as it was before? How come Russia now has doubts about the intentions of the US in Afghanistan or the result of its work in Afghanistan? How come China does not view it the same way? How come Iran has immense difficulty with the way things are conducted in Afghanistan?

"Therefore, as an Afghan in the middle of this great game, I propose to our ally, the United States, the following: we will all succeed if you tell us that you have failed. We would understand. Russia would understand, China would understand. Iran, Pakistan, everybody would understand. India would understand. We have our Indian friends there. We see all signs of failure there, but if you do not tell us you failed, what is this, a game?"

I doubt the junta will do any better than its performed in Afghanistan because it only knows how to play the game Karzai describes. Link is same as one above.

AriusArmenian | Oct 21, 2017 7:24:02 PM | 15
We can now add the Air Force being 'Above All' to the supremacist 'exceptional and indispensable' lunatic attitude in the US that is definitely psychologically the same as another people that thought they were 'Uber Alles'.
Red Ryder | Oct 21, 2017 7:36:54 PM | 16
B,

You stated: The insurgency that brought Trump to the top was defeated by a counter-insurgency campaign waged by the U.S. military. (Historically its first successful one).

I differ. JFK was taken out by a combined US Naval Intel and CIA plot. The beneficiary was the MIC. Eleven days later, LBJ reversed the executive order by JFK to end the US involvement in Nam. For 11 more years the Military got what it wanted--war.

LBJ got what he wanted--the Presidency. The Cuban-Americans got what they wanted--revenge for failure at Bay of Pigs by Kennedy. The Mafia got what they wanted--revenge for Bobby Kennedy.

One other thing about the counter-insurgency. It was not so much Military. They waited while the IC ran the leaks and counter-insurgency. Then,Trump fell into the Military's arms. He had been cut off from his base and key supporters and had to empower them by obedience to their plans. Foreign policy is what they wanted. He can still have all the domestic policy he can get, which is basically nothing much. A SC justice, some EOs, and all the Twitter-shit he can muster.

Dr. Bill Wedin | Oct 21, 2017 7:42:38 PM | 17
American democracy is indeed dead. The US Military's only real victory after WWII. After Vietnam, the generals said: "Freedom of speech and of the press and of assembly and the right to trial by jury and all that crap has got to go! And they got rid of it all! The Junta is in control. And the only positive aspect is that we have a rolling Fukushima disaster in Trump, who could implode and then explode in a nuclear Holocaust any second from all the humiliation and investigations crushing in on him--if the Junta did not keep tight control over all the information coming in to him. So you better leave them in place or... BAM! That's the blackmail. But it only works as long as Trump has sole authority to launch our nuclear arsenal. If someone else with a 2nd launch key were required to agree, the Junta would no longer be needed to "protect" us Mafia-style.
ben | Oct 21, 2017 8:05:47 PM | 19
Military junta or not b, make no mistake, the real power behind the throne are a cabal of billionaires who buy their way by co-opting the politicians who make the laws. Democracy is indeed dead here in the U$A. It's now a full-blown Oligarchy.
Perimetr | Oct 21, 2017 8:26:46 PM | 20
Re Bill Wedin at 18, you wrote "the blackmail only works as long as Trump has sole authority to launch our nuclear arsenal."

Authority to launch also includes predelegation to some of the highest ranking military, in the event of a perceived nuclear attack, in which the National Command Authority is disrupted and unable to give launch orders. However, this leaves open the question as to whether the President could be bypassed in the process.

Trident sub commanders also have the necessary launch codes on board to initiate a nuclear strike. Yes, the codes are under lock and key, but the key is on board.

Don Bacon | Oct 21, 2017 8:32:11 PM | 21
The current US militarism also reflects on the kneeling during the national anthem, which is also an ode to the flag in a war setting -- "by the rockets red glare" etc. President Trump has said the protests (against police killing blacks) are unpatriotic and disrespectful of military veterans. Trump has initiated a petition: "The President has asked for a list of supporters who stand for the National Anthem. Add your name below to show your patriotism and support."

Randolph Bourne (see #8) had some thoughts on this.

. . . We reverence not our country but the flag. We may criticize ever so severely our country, but we are disrespectful to the flag at our peril. It is the flag and the uniform that make men's heart beat high and fill them with noble emotions, not the thought of and pious hopes for America as a free and enlightened nation. It cannot be said that the object of emotion is the same, because the flag is the symbol of the nation, so that in reverencing the American flag we are reverencing the nation. For the flag is not a symbol of the country as a cultural group, following certain ideals of life, but solely a symbol of the political State, inseparable from its prestige and expansion.
financial matters | Oct 21, 2017 9:18:09 PM | 23
""All along Trump has been the candidate of the military. The other two power centers of the power triangle, the corporate and the executive government (CIA), had gone for Clinton. The Pentagon proxy won over the CIA proxy. (Last months' fight over Raqqa was similar - with the same outcome.)""

I agree with this division of power and would add that Trump is also the candidate of the police. I see the media though as more being in the CIA/corporate camps. I think the military backing is necessary as you mention to take the CIA down a few notches. So far I'd say the result in Syria is promising.

I think this CIA/corporate power has to be dealt with first to give progressive/socialist ideas much of a chance. It's a fine line but the military is supposed to protect against enemies foreign and domestic.

The corporate part of course has huge power over Congress.

Yul | Oct 21, 2017 9:34:35 PM | 24
@ b

a 39 year old "chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear specialist"

This is Niger - Remember back in 2002/2003 : The Italian letter and Yellow Cake. These days we have Areva mining uranium in Niger Hence the French military offering both security and protecting the "assets" of French Establishment. Those soldiers were not ambushed but were conducting a raid and something went wrong!

Anon | Oct 21, 2017 10:28:24 PM | 30
If there was a coup Masha would be singing praises free n the rooftop because the waragenda she is paid to shill for would be back on. The fact that the lying bitch is gnashing her teeth would suggest that the NeoCon agenda, especially for war against Russia, has been derailed. Fuck you Masha. You suck.
mo' better | Oct 21, 2017 10:29:51 PM | 31
This is great news! I hope the military junta smashes the CIA into little tiny pieces. Why? Because the US military is in its most easily defeatable state ever - they haven't won a war in generations, their generals are armchair soldiers most who have never seen combat, and they have a fondness for massively overpriced technological pieces of MIC enriching garbage for weapons. The CIA owns the media, and without an effective propaganda arm, the military will only ever face another Vietnam.
Don Bacon | Oct 21, 2017 11:02:22 PM | 32
On the topic of losing generals I'm reminded of Harry Truman. A couple of Truman quotes: "It's the fellows who go to West Point and are trained to think they're gods in uniform that I plan to take apart". . ."I didn't fire him [General MacArthur] because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three quarters of them would be in jail."
> It's worse now. Most generals got where they are by sucking up, not performing.
> Donald Trump is no Harry Truman, for sure.
peter | Oct 21, 2017 11:59:56 PM | 35
Remember CNN? That fake MSM outlet that never tells the truth? Well, they have been skewering Kelly since he ran his mouth about that Florida congresswoman. So have the other outlets. Huckabee-Sanders is now something of a national joke after her comments. Kelly's shit doesn't hold up and he's been called out repeatedly. "It is now "highly inappropriate" to even question the Junta that rules over the empire." Bullshit.
Ralphieboy | Oct 22, 2017 3:37:33 AM | 36
Look in the Twitter archives and you will find a counter-tweet for almost anything Trump says, including one criticizing four-star general Colin Powell...
Ralphieboy | Oct 22, 2017 3:57:25 AM | 37
Look in the Twitter archives and you will find a Trump tweet criticizing four-star general Colin Powell...
Heros | Oct 22, 2017 4:41:13 AM | 38
"The slogan and symbol of the campaign was similar to the German "Deutschland Über Alles" campaign of 1933."

This is once again typical anti-German propaganda that was used to get both WWI and WWII started, and is now being used against Putin and Russia as well as nationalists across Europe and the Anglo world. In 1933 France still had control of the Saar and the Rhineland, Germany was saddled with monumental war debts, and Hitler was clearly not running a campaign on the slogan "Germany should rule the world", which is what the Anglo-Zionist narrative would have us believe. The meaning "Über Alles" was clearly "Germany First". That means look out for the German people first. The Weimar government clearly wasn't doing this. Call it Hitler's "MAGA".

The real truth is that it is this same US military industrial complex who worked for Roosevelt, Churchill, and their Zionist masters to get the second world war started, and who now are desperate for a third. They are sadistic, murdering globalists. Hitler was a nationalist. He never planned to rule the world the same way the Zionists already do, as is evidenced by the never ending strife in the Middle East, and their ongoing tribal civil war which is also being waged within the US government.

This tribal civil war is also spilling over into places like Las Vegas, which clearly is run by the Jewish Mafia. There still is no plausible motive given for the shooting incident, but we know that the owners of MGM would never willingly have allowed this to happen on their own property. So it clearly was a hit, and with Area 51 down the road and all the MIC contractors in Vegas, it is highly unlikely that they were not involved or at least aware of the operation.

Here is a LV company where for $3500 you can fly around the desert in a Helicopter shooting up targets with a SAW-249.

https://machinegunsvegas.com/product/machine-gun-helicopter/

How is it that this company can get away with this without MIC participation? Could this helicopter be available for uses at the right price?

ralphieboy | Oct 22, 2017 6:11:44 AM | 40
The original meaning of "Deutschland über alles" came about in the early 1800's when there was no united Germany: it meant that there should be a united Germany above all the minor German states, duchies and principalities that existed at the time.
fx | Oct 22, 2017 7:08:30 AM | 41
For those who want to avoid being datamined by nhs, the original link about "Why Donald Trump is the perfect tool in the hands of neocons right now" is here: https://failedevolution.blogspot.com/
fx | Oct 22, 2017 7:10:36 AM | 42
"One of the soldiers who were killed in Niger while "teaching how to respect human rights" was a 39 year old "chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear specialist" with "more than a dozen awards and decorations".

The U.S. military sent a highly qualified WMD specialist on a "routine patrol" in Niger to teach local soldiers "to respect human rights" due to which presumably "the well-being of the American people" would be "sufficiently enhanced"?" It's all about the uranium in Agades, then?

Jack Frost | Oct 22, 2017 7:49:08 AM | 43
Trump is either very gullible and ignorant (most likely) or he is diabolically clever. Everything he does - every action, every appointment, every utterance - could not be better formulated to undermine the Zioamerican empire. Which is kind of what he promised to do.
Camillus O'Byrne | Oct 22, 2017 7:52:58 AM | 44
The brazen arrogance of these jerks like Kelly is stupefying. Infuriatingly shameless.

The guy has never done an honest day's work IN HIS LIFE, has had his snout in the public trough continuously and has materially contributed to the ruination of his country. STFU you stupid twat. He is also a scumbag that no doubt had a lot to do with his son's demise - imagine being this a-hole's son?

These clowns call themselves "General" and we are supposed to think that puts them in the same class as a Wellington or a Caesar or Napoleon? They were all first class bastards, ruthless, but fine Generals. Tough, bold, audacious leaders of men and brilliant strategists, who took risks, including with their own lives. Hell, the Prussian officer training system turned out Quartermasters that were better field Generals than these American frauds.

As I have said in another thread, the US has none of the martial virtues. Not as a people, not as military institutions, not as individual soldiers or sailors (their airmen are obviously cowards or psychopaths so not necessary even to consider in this context). Virtues such as steadfastness in adversity, discipline when under fire, self-sacrifice for comrades and the cause. Not saying anything about the morality of any particular cause here, just what makes a professional army. To compare the US military with Rome's Legions, say, is laughable. The biggest difference between these American whackers is that in real armies individuals are expected to be able to contend with a worthy adversary. To take risks. To fight when it is HARD to fight. Even Rome's patricians understood that every now and then they had to expose themselves to danger if they were to have any honour, as Crassus, richest of them all, found out very dramatically when he met his end at the head of the Syrian Legions. (Defeated by the Iranians! - they've seen 'em all come and go). Windbags like Kelly wouldn't know what honour is.

The US has NEVER fought an adversary on anything like equal terms. They preen themselves about WW2. I call BS. They waited until the Soviets had broken the back of the most fearsome war machine in history, the Wehrmacht and then faced teenagers and old men in France. On the occasions when they did face professional German troops they had their whiney arses kicked. As for the Pacific war, they stood off island after island and rained a stupendous amount of naval shells and bombs on the Japanese garrisons to the point where they were insane with the cacophany and pure physical terror to turn your bowels to water, before setting foot on them, while the aerial destruction of Japanese cities is one of the great atrocities in history, disgraceful and completely without honour. I suspect a disproportionate number of US military casualties are due to being run over by a forklift, training accidents, friendly fire, syphilis or fragging of their own.

The qualities the US military (they don't deserve the epithet "army") exemplifies are cowardice, incompetence, viciousness and wanton destructiveness. No wonder, as the corruption (plenty of fiscal as well as moral) starts at the top with the Kellys and drips down like a putrid slime from there.

He and his ilk are just a bunch of murderous bags of human excrement. No decent person can have anything but contempt for them.

Petri Krohn | Oct 22, 2017 9:02:58 AM | 45
It is little surprise if a junta has taken over. Many Democrats would support a military junta over Trump. Now we are hearing similar calls from Republicans.

One of the latest is this opinion piece by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post from October 12, 2017: Republicans, it's time to panic The Washington Examiner has a short summary:

Ex-Bush adviser Michael Gerson tells Republicans: 'It's time to panic'

Michael Gerson, who's also a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote in an op-ed Friday that "the security of our country -- and potentially the lives of millions of people abroad -- depends on Trump being someone else entirely."

"The time for whispered criticisms and quiet snickering is over. The time for panic and decision is upon us. The thin line of sane, responsible advisers at the White House -- such as Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson -- could break at any moment," Gerson wrote. "The American government now has a dangerous fragility at its very center. Its welfare is as thin as an eggshell -- perhaps as thin as Donald Trump's skin."

The op-ed comes amid Trump's feud with Republican Sen. Bob Corker, who warned that the president's reckless threats could lead to "World War III."

"I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it's a situation of trying to contain him," Corker told the New York Times.

arze | Oct 22, 2017 9:48:36 AM | 46
At this point in history to be US president is to be a criminal. An "autonomous" US president has not existed at least since JFK, perhaps not since Lincoln. Kelley, like his boss, routinely "clowns" the media, and however unctuous Kelley's remarks are, they fit into that mode.

Our generals are weak men. If they weren't, they wouldn't need a Trump, or a whatever to run for office and win that office.

They can't run and win any better than they can conduct warfare as a rational means to a rational end; and as the post eloquently points out, again: they are experts at rape, murder, war crimes, mayhem and destruction. The ubiquitous propaganda to hide that is all they have that saves them from the penal colony where they belong.

Their project to rule the world would be as successful as any "they destroyed it in order to save it" attempts.

MG's fragmented consciousness permit her to be rational at times, and irresponsible at others.

Don Bacon | Oct 22, 2017 10:02:48 AM | 47
re: Presiding over a population of detainees not charged or convicted of crimes, over whom he had maximum custodial control, Kelly treated them with brutality. . .

The US needed go show progress in the "war on terror" and one way was to accumulate some prisoners of the "war." CIA operatives were sent to the tribal areas of Afghanistan & Pakistan with cash to entice "bounty hunters." It was easy, because every tribal chief had enemies, which he would capture and present for a big payoff. So the Guantanamo (Gitmo) prison was set up in Cuba and soon accumulated 7-800 "detainees" who were bullied and tortured.

None of them were tried because there was no evidence they had done anything wrong. The Supreme Court ruled that they should have a judicial process but (except a few cases) it was never done. Most of the prisoners detainees were released, including a 13 yo boy and a 92 yo man, and about 200 remained. I guess it's less now.

Meanwhile the Washington politicians were able to crow about all those dangerous people in Gitmo, and prattle about the "recidivism" danger if and when they would be released. What were they supposed to do, forgive and forget all the terrible treatment they had received?? So yes, Kelly is scum, but that's not unusual for a general.

Noirette | Oct 22, 2017 10:07:12 AM | 48
The ground work, or state-of-affairs that lead to what one might call a soft military coup in the US (see b) = within what, at one extreme could be called Ayn-Randian rabid individualism, and at the other a sort of neo-liberal capitalism which is nevertheless highly 'socialist' in the sense re-distributive from the center of power (if only to create a slave/subservient class and prevent uprisings), there is NO public space for 'solidarity' within (besides familial, or close, etc.)

Therefore, the belonging or 'solidarity' is activated only facing an outside enemy who is personalised as e.g. communist, ugly dictator, intends to attack the US, poisons babies, etc. That gives the military an edge.. Then natch, historically, dying empires invest in the double prong, military conquest + internal control (can be vicious), ain't flash news.

.... I don't think it is all that clear. Corps or better conglomerates of power like 'the media', the 'silicons', banking and finance, Energy, electronics, Big Pharma, etc. are politcally inclined (say!) to some form of corporate fascism, > bought pols from all-sides of any-aisle. Their ties to the military / milit. type power at home are not very strong, they may collaborate on occasion. Some of these 'industries' fear domination that goes beyond soft power and they loathe sanctions - think about who/what/how is doing lucrative deals and has continuing biz success in Iraq, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, etc. - NOT US cos./corps.

To me this looks more like total disorganisation than anything else.

J | Oct 22, 2017 10:53:49 AM | 49
What a load of hooey!

First, if the only two choices were the Executive CIA and the Military "Junta" with Trump why would we continue the farce of elections? And if the elections were pre-determined and the ruling Junta took over in a coup, then how and why is the CIA out of power?

Secondly, same question will be here for you when a) the military and Trump get booted with impeachment, or b) when the next election comes.

Van Morrison once penned "politics, superstition and religion go hand in hand." It never fails, those out of power go from being logical, critical thinkers to becoming outlandish bores who exaggerate things and fabricate what they see. It's called delusion.

Don Bacon | Oct 22, 2017 11:22:03 AM | 51
@J 49
The "farce of elections" is accurate because Trump is not doing what he claimed he would do, not unusual actually. It was Trump who sprang the "junta" on us. And who claimed that the CIA would be out of power?
Don Bacon | Oct 22, 2017 11:25:38 AM | 52
Kelly: So why were they there? They're there working with partners, local -- all across Africa -- in this case, Niger -- working with partners, teaching them how to be better soldiers; teaching them how to respect human rights

These guys didn't die teaching, nor in combat in Niger, they were (according to news reports) trying to track down an accomplice of one Abu Adnan al-Sahraoui. In other words they were doing police work in a foreign country, an absolutely ridiculous task which they were not trained or able to do and which put their lives needlessly in danger. This criticism applies to the whole "war on terror" which has proven to be a tragic farce (if there can be such a thing).

dahoit | Oct 22, 2017 11:37:28 AM | 53
b is quoting macha gessen? You got be kidding. MSN will look his site in homage. In what way MSM will JFK look CIA approval? Traitors.
Jackrabbit | Oct 22, 2017 12:38:59 PM | 54
I used to think it was a counter-coup also. But sheep-dog Sanders and Trump's having supported Hillary in 2008 among other things caused me to conclude that it all bullshit. I now believe that the hyper-partisanship is just a show. The political system in the US is designed to prevent any real populist from gaining power. We are being played. Trump is the Republican Obama.
Piotr Berman | Oct 22, 2017 1:10:28 PM | 56
Carry on, nothing to see here.

I really think that this is the case in this instance. Trump is bellicose and erratic. In the realm of foreign policy and military, it yielded one positive change: his obsession with ISIS led to huge decrease of fighting between "moderate opposition" in Syria with "SAA and allies", allowing the latter to effectively reduce the territory controlled by ISIS, similarly, Obama's efforts to sideline "sectarian forces trained by Iran" from fighting with ISIS were apparently abandoned with similar effect. But otherwise, no "reset" with Russia, clown show concerning the nuclear program of North Korea, berating allies who spend insufficiently to fight threats that they do not have, increasing domestic military budget (again, to fight threats that we do not have) and so on. Formation of the new axis of evil, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela is a notable novelty.

Trump was so contradictory is his campaign statements that it is almost amazing that ANY positive element can be discerned. At the time, I paid attention to his praises of John Bolton, a proud walrus-American who communicates using bellowing, in other words, resembles a walrus both in the way he looks, but also in the way he speaks.

Needless to say, Dotard in Chief can exercise power only through underlings that may try to make sense of what he says. In some cases, like reforming American healthcare according to his promises, this is flatly impossible. So generals are seemingly in the same position, and of course, when in doubt, they do what they would do anyway.

Lawrence Smith | Oct 22, 2017 1:22:16 PM | 57
Not that I am any more or less in the loop than any of these fine commenters, but what pops into my mind when reading of the ambush of the four special forces servicemen is the crash of the helicopter that took out so many of the seal team six who supposedly took out Osama. Maybe they knew too much would be my guess. Why else would they put such a knowledgable specialist out on the perimeter? Makes no sense. Offing your own is part and parcel in the military. Heroes of convenience.
Jackrabbit | Oct 22, 2017 1:39:09 PM | 58
What seems to have been lost in the discussion is what exactly the "counter-coup" is all about.

1. During the Obama years, "successes" like Lybia and Ukraine were matched by "failures" like the lost proxy war for Syria and pushing Russia into the arms of China. The new 'Cold War' makes US nationalism more important as 'hot' conflicts become more likely.

2. Obama/Clinton-led civilian authority was abusing power to promote an "Empire-first" vision of governance, Obama/Clinton:

>> replaced/retired many military officers;

>> placed US resources/forces in a support role ("leading from behind") ;

>> grew a 'radical center' (aka "Third Way") that sought to undermine traditional nationalist/patriotism via immigration and divisive 'wedge issues'.

The excuse for this was that while US hands were tied (because public wouldn't support further adventurism after Iraq) close allies could push forward. But the new Cold War has changed the calculus.

The US isn't giving up on Empire. It's just a different type of Empire for a different type of environment. When Trump talks about "draining the swamp" I think he merely refers to foreign influence.

So Trump pivots US policy based on Obama's record (as Obama did off Bush's record), and the next President will pivot off Trump's record, but the direction is always the same.

Red Ryder | Oct 22, 2017 2:34:25 PM | 59
Trump has one ally and that is the 65million voters who put him into office. He surrendered his top people. Saker says it was lack of character. I think when they point the gun at you, your family, your closest friends in your life, you acquiesce. They even took from him Keith Schiller, his personal security man for years. Kelly forced him out of the WH.

Trump is powerless except when he functions as Leader of the rallies. As President, even with the cabal running the Oval Office, they all are limited by the Shadow Government, Deep State, IC, Khazarian Matrix. No President is a free man empowered to act.

He now is focused on what is possible. Perhaps that will be a tax cut and a few more SC justices and a few score of judges for the fed district courts. Those don't interfere with Financial Power and MIC and the Hegemony of Empire.

There is one hope. Putin + Xi.
And we know the limits they face.

Inside the Tyranny of American government, there is no hope. During the Trump time Putin and Xi have to make the most of the Swamp creating their own problems. It is that moment of opportunity, though it looks bleak.

One thing for certain, the US military does not want a direct war. It wants more of these terror conflicts. Africa will become huge over the next few years. Graham is already selling it big. Trillions of dollars is what is the goal.

SE Asia and Africa are the new big "markets" for MIC. ISIS/AQ are the product. War is the service industry being sold as the "solution".

The Long War of anti-terror is the scam Smedley Butler told us about in the thirties.

-- Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long.

I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

CD Waller | Oct 22, 2017 2:39:29 PM | 60
On the bright side, members of Congress are at least nominally elected. Four star Generals, not so much. It's still a felony carrying a prison term of 5 to 10 years per incident to lie to Congress. The military have no precedent to recommend them either as a source of information or in their decision making ability. They are way out of their depth when it comes to administering a nation.

In none of their unwarranted invasions (all the result of bad information and poor judgment) of other nations have they been successful the day after the bombs stopped falling.

bob | Oct 22, 2017 3:21:56 PM | 61
IDIOTS!!! you forget the fact that if clinton won you would first be glowing GREEN and now dead. On Oct 16th 2016 Putin said "if hillary wins its WW3" on you tube. guess what we are alive and have to deal with that taxevader trump. we will survive!
james | Oct 22, 2017 4:04:30 PM | 62
@57 lawrence... plausible... thanks..truth eventually comes out..
Castellio | Oct 22, 2017 5:05:46 PM | 63
@16, @22

The time has long passed since one can ignore JFK's failed insistence on the inspections of the illegal Israeli nuclear weapons program at Dimona, and then his sudden death. Factoring Israel into the equation greatly simplifies understanding the make-up of the Warren Commission, LBJ's about turn on the relation to the illegal nuclear weapons program and his reaction to the attack on the Liberty, and the evolution of US politics more generally.

One would be more pressed to argue why one thinks it is not a primary cause.

Fidelios Automata | Oct 22, 2017 11:37:16 PM | 64
We voted for change and as usual, we got more of the same. All I can say is thank God it's not Hillary in the White House. At least Trump's not spoiling for a war with Russia.
Danny801 | Oct 23, 2017 11:09:10 AM | 65
Democracy has been dead in America for a long time. I'd rather Kelly run the country than Hillary Clinton. She would have us all annihilated in a war with Russia and China
ian | Oct 23, 2017 5:15:48 PM | 66
It's going to be hard to fight a junta. The military is at least halfway competent, something that can't be said for either the administration or congress. Look at this latest flap - on the one side you have Wilson the rodeo clown, on the other you have Trump, who can't resist the urge to pop off on twitter.

Then you have Kelly, who at least comes off like an adult. Before people start pointing to all the nefarious things the military is doing, let me just say I'm talking about perception.

This all seems like Rome all over.

Shyaku | Oct 23, 2017 10:06:35 PM | 67
Maybe this sums it up: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather#World_War_I

- Regards as always, Shyaku.

NemesisCalling | Oct 23, 2017 10:32:39 PM | 68
@59 Ryder

Good post sans the Africa bit. They are having a tough time explaining the Niger debacle to people. I don't think African conflicts have the same glamorous draw as MENA conflicts. Once the economy goes to shit, it will be an even tougher sell.

Trump is walking a narrow line. He has not brought us into a war with either Russia or NoKo...yet. This deserves some praise. The media blitz against Trump has always had a twofold reasoning behind it: it puts pressure on his ego to acquiesce and, two, if he doesn't, the public has been inoculated against feeling too bad when a lone-gunmen puts a bullet in his brain. I guess if you believe that, as I do, it explains why even a bumbling policy is a positive aspect of a Trump presidency, instead of the true-believer approach from Hillary and her ilk. There really is no other choice. It's either war or watch the empire crumble. The true believers might have chosen the former, but President Trump, I believe, has sabotaged that possibility. So take all the Trump-bashers in here with a grain or salt. They are asking for the stars, but watching the empire's police implode suits me just fine.

"But the white supremacists...KKK!" What a fucking joke.

dmorista | Oct 24, 2017 7:57:57 AM | 69
Moon of Alabama always writes interesting and insightful critiques of the Deep State, the military, and the imperialist/war party, but falls flat on his face in his naive faith in the supposed anti-establishment, populist, and America First Nationalist proclivities of Donald Trump, and his arch-reactionary Svengali Steve Bannon. There is indeed at least one major split in the ranks of the ruling class, but to present Trump and Bannon as either valiant figures struggling for the national good, or noble isolated men surrounded by vipers and traitors is absurd.

Now, in its late imperial decline, the U.S. has become unable to continue to exercise hegemony, the way it became accustomed to in the first 70+ years in the Post-WW 2 period. The number one Client/Ally/Master, Israel and their deeply embedded 5th Column in the U.S., the Zionists with their associated Pro-Zionist factions within the War Party, now nearly directly and openly controls U.S. foreign policy and military actions in the regions that the Likudnik faction in Israel cares about (i.e. the Levant, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa).

Hollowed out economically and industrially the U.S. Empire is clearly on the way out. The various factions fighting for control of policy seem to be oblivious to this basic fact. The actual situation is similar to that the U.S. participated in during period from the late 1800s - WW 2; the declining hegemon accustomed to calling the shots in international affairs (then the British Empire, now the U.S.), ends up overextended and committed in far too many areas, with declining resources and domestic solidarity to dedicate to the tasks; the rising hegemon (then the U.S. now China) is still focused on issues of internal and external economic development and the exercise of regional power. China is already either equal in power to the U.S. or more powerful and will only continue to grow in power as the U.S. continues to decline. The Israelis/Zionists fully realize that the U.S. would not survive another disastrous war (like the air war they want the U.S. to wage against Iran, the U.S. does not have the capability to conduct a land war against Iran) intact. They are willing to try to force the issue to achieve one more step in their plan to establish "Eretz Israel" whose territory would extend from the Nile to the Euphrates and from the Sinai to Turkey. Their plans are just as crazy as those of the NeoCons and the NeoLiberals and their endless disastrous wars; and Trump/Bannon are their agents in the U.S.

[Sep 25, 2017] I am presently reading the book JFK and the Unspeakable by James W.Douglass and it is exactly why Kennedy was assassinated by the very same group that desperately wants to see Trump gone and the rapprochement with Russia squashed

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Although I voted for Trump, only because he was a slightly smaller POS than Hillary, it's hard to have any sympathy for him. ..."
"... The Democrats and the Deep State should have accused Israel of interfering in US elections. That would have been a credible complaint. ..."
"... Felix, Except that Israel and her deep state puppets were interfering on behalf of the democrats. ..."
"... What is happening in the U.S. is the same MO the CIA has developed over the past 64 years to create turmoil within a nation to overthrow a ruler that would not comply with the dictates of Wall Street. ..."
"... I am presently reading the book " JFK and the Unspeakable" by James W.Douglass and it is exactly why Kennedy was assassinated by the very same group that desperately wants to see Trump gone and the rapprochement with Russia squashed. ..."
"... Russia-gate - Just another weapon of mass distraction, brought to you by the liars in charge. ..."
"... David Stockman's excellent analysis makes clear that Trump doesn't know what he's doing and has appointed poor advisors, many of whom have been working against him from the start. Yet, per Stockman, "he doesn't need to be the passive object of a witch hunt." He could have and should have exposed the crimes of his accusers from the beginning, while he still had 100% support from the anti-war Right, which put him in office in the first place. He should have ignored the hysteria emanating from his enemies, and made peace with Vladimir Putin as a first order of business. Millions would have supported him. ..."
"... But, after his provocations in Syria and against Russia, which really resulted because he gave control of military decisions to uber hawk and Russia-phobic Mad Dog Mattis, his support from the anti-war crowd has all but evaporated and is unlikely to return. In other words, although he has been treated extremely unfairly by the corporate media, ultimately he has no one to blame but himself. Trump, with his endless stupid tweeting, has become a sad caricature of himself. ..."
"... When an outsider (like Trump) is elected POTUS and promises to do harm to the Pentagon, against the will of the Deep State -- the battle is on. A coup was planned against him, even before he took the oath of office. And, BTW--against the will of the people ..."
"... The Deep State bureaucracy will never let him have full control. Apparently, Obomber and Killery are running a Shadow White House, with all major decisions coming from the Deep State actors thereof. ..."
"... Killery still has her security clearance, by which she knew where the US Military would strike in Syria before Trump had any idea what was going on ..."
"... The Pentagon has seized power and does not recognize any elected or appointed power of the US government. Trump's 'power' is non-existent. If this 'soft coup' becomes a hard one, I predict all hell breaking loose in America ..."
"... "In a word, the Little Putsch in Kiev is now begetting a Great Big Coup in the Imperial City." Interesting point of view from David Stockman. Whatever happens in Washington, one can be sure there will come another provocation against Russia. ..."
"... This will probably be the Joint Investigation Team's final word on the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014, not long after the little putsch in Kiev. The Joint Investigation Team relies on the Dutch Safety Board's Final Report on Flight MH17. With this report, the Dutch Safety Board has given the world a classic snow job, which I have pointed out in my critique on it. Please read it on my website at www.show-the-house.com/id119.html and share it with your elected representatives. Maybe a collective effort can head this off . ..."
"... Not the first time! "US Power Elite, at war among themselves?" https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/us-powe... ..."
"... Watching from Australia what passes for domestic politics in the US within the media, reminds me of a primitive tribe reacting to a solar eclipse. They run around in hysterical fear gnashing their teeth thinking the great evil spirit has come to steal their corn, carry off their daughters, and destroy their village. ..."
Jun 26, 2017 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

Jenny G · 3 days ago

Although I voted for Trump, only because he was a slightly smaller POS than Hillary, it's hard to have any sympathy for him.

Every time he walks out on a stage clapping his hands, encouraging applause, like a daytime TV game show host, I want to puke.

I honestly don't think Trump really expected to win the presidency. And when he did, he was clueless. His "Mission Accomplished" party at the White House for a bill which would never pass the senate, was pure Dubya Bush. The orange haired POS is an embarrassment to the country.

Felix · 4 days ago
The Democrats and the Deep State should have accused Israel of interfering in US elections. That would have been a credible complaint.
follyofwar · 3 days ago
Felix, Except that Israel and her deep state puppets were interfering on behalf of the democrats.
olde reb · 3 days ago
What is happening in the U.S. is the same MO the CIA has developed over the past 64 years to create turmoil within a nation to overthrow a ruler that would not comply with the dictates of Wall Street.

Detailed in --. http://farmwars.info/?p=15338 . A FACE FOR THE SHADOW GOVERNMENT

The "ultimate goal" (according to internal memos), is to collect on the fraudulent $20 trillion national debt which will result in Wall Street owning the United States. Hello, Greece.

Guysth · 3 days ago
I am presently reading the book " JFK and the Unspeakable" by James W.Douglass and it is exactly why Kennedy was assassinated by the very same group that desperately wants to see Trump gone and the rapprochement with Russia squashed.

Peace is not in their books,war is. John Kennedy had an epiphany and was wanting to make peace with the USSR at the time, after the Cuban crisis, and this could not be allowed to happen .

Same $hit different pile.

doray · 3 days ago
Russia-gate - Just another weapon of mass distraction, brought to you by the liars in charge.
astraeaisabella · 3 days ago
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2011/10/25... This may seem relevant, but considering Trump's visit to SAudi Arabia and then immediately "Israel", you might find it interesting.
follyofwar · 3 days ago

David Stockman's excellent analysis makes clear that Trump doesn't know what he's doing and has appointed poor advisors, many of whom have been working against him from the start. Yet, per Stockman, "he doesn't need to be the passive object of a witch hunt." He could have and should have exposed the crimes of his accusers from the beginning, while he still had 100% support from the anti-war Right, which put him in office in the first place. He should have ignored the hysteria emanating from his enemies, and made peace with Vladimir Putin as a first order of business. Millions would have supported him.

But, after his provocations in Syria and against Russia, which really resulted because he gave control of military decisions to uber hawk and Russia-phobic Mad Dog Mattis, his support from the anti-war crowd has all but evaporated and is unlikely to return. In other words, although he has been treated extremely unfairly by the corporate media, ultimately he has no one to blame but himself. Trump, with his endless stupid tweeting, has become a sad caricature of himself.

RedRubies · 3 days ago
Stockman has only been a Congressman. They are allowed more leeway.

When an outsider (like Trump) is elected POTUS and promises to do harm to the Pentagon, against the will of the Deep State -- the battle is on. A coup was planned against him, even before he took the oath of office. And, BTW--against the will of the people, themselves.

The Deep State bureaucracy will never let him have full control. Apparently, Obomber and Killery are running a Shadow White House, with all major decisions coming from the Deep State actors thereof.

Killery still has her security clearance, by which she knew where the US Military would strike in Syria before Trump had any idea what was going on (http://headlinebits.com/2017-06-21/deep-state-hillary-clinton-staffers-still-have-security-clearances-access-to-sensitive-governmen.AlsHBgBSVVwAV1FWVwdSAwBWAg8HXQYE.html) .

You can't write an article about a 'soft coup' and NOT mention her name in connection with it!

The Pentagon has seized power and does not recognize any elected or appointed power of the US government. Trump's 'power' is non-existent. If this 'soft coup' becomes a hard one, I predict all hell breaking loose in America.

Stephen M. St. John · 3 days ago

"In a word, the Little Putsch in Kiev is now begetting a Great Big Coup in the Imperial City." Interesting point of view from David Stockman. Whatever happens in Washington, one can be sure there will come another provocation against Russia.

This will probably be the Joint Investigation Team's final word on the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014, not long after the little putsch in Kiev. The Joint Investigation Team relies on the Dutch Safety Board's Final Report on Flight MH17. With this report, the Dutch Safety Board has given the world a classic snow job, which I have pointed out in my critique on it. Please read it on my website at www.show-the-house.com/id119.html and share it with your elected representatives. Maybe a collective effort can head this off .

Schlüter 91p · 3 days ago
Not the first time! "US Power Elite, at war among themselves?" https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/us-powe...
Dick · 3 days ago
Watching from Australia what passes for domestic politics in the US within the media, reminds me of a primitive tribe reacting to a solar eclipse. They run around in hysterical fear gnashing their teeth thinking the great evil spirit has come to steal their corn, carry off their daughters, and destroy their village.

Emotional ignorance and blindness to the rational reality will only lead to more tears.

[Sep 18, 2017] Google was seed funded by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The company now enjoys lavish partnerships with military contractors like SAIC, Northrop Grumman and Blackbird.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... In addition to funding Bellingcat and joint ventures with the CIA, Brin's Google is heavily invested in Crowdstrike, an American cybersecurity technology firm based in Irvine, California. ..."
"... Crowdstrike is the main "source" of the "Russians hacked the DNC" story. ..."
"... Allegations of Russian perfidy are routinely issued by private companies with lucrative US Department of Defense (DoD) contracts. The companies claiming to protect the nation against "threats" have the ability to manufacture "threats". ..."
"... US offensive cyber operations have emphasized political coercion and opinion shaping, shifting public perception in NATO countries as well as globally in ways favorable to the US, and to create a sense of unease and distrust among perceived adversaries such as Russia and China. ..."
"... The Snowden revelations made it clear that US offensive cyber capabilities can and have been directed both domestically and internationally. The notion that US and NATO cyber operations are purely defensive is a myth. ..."
"... The perception that a foreign attacker may have infiltrated US networks, is monitoring communications, and perhaps considering even more damaging actions, can have a disorienting effect. ..."
"... In the world of US "hybrid warfare" against Russia, offensive cyber operations work in tandem with NATO propaganda efforts, perhaps best exemplified by the "online investigation" antics of the Atlantic Council's Eliot Higgins and his Bellingcat disinformation site. ..."
consortiumnews.com

Abe , September 16, 2017 at 7:00 pm

There is no reason to assume that the trollish rants of "Voytenko" are from some outraged flag-waving "patriot" in Kiev. There are plenty of other "useful idiots" ready, willing and able to make mischief.

For example, about a million Jews emigrated to Israel ("made Aliyah") from the post-Soviet states during the 1990s. Some 266,300 were Ukrainian Jews. A large number of Ukrainian Jews also emigrated to the United States during this period. For example, out of an estimated 400 thousand Russian-speaking Jews in Metro New York, the largest number (thirty-six percent) hail from Ukraine. Needless to say, many among them are not so well disposed toward the nations of Russia or Ukraine, and quite capable of all manner of mischief.

A particularly "useful idiot" making mischief the days is Sergey Brin of Google. Brin's parents were graduates of Moscow State University who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1979 when their son was five years old.

Google, the company that runs the most visited website in the world, the company that owns YouTube, is very snugly in bed with the US military-industrial-surveillance complex.

In fact, Google was seed funded by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The company now enjoys lavish "partnerships" with military contractors like SAIC, Northrop Grumman and Blackbird.

Google's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".

In a 2004 letter prior to their initial public offering, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin explained their "Don't be evil" culture required objectivity and an absence of bias: "We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see."

The corporate giant appears to have replaced the original motto altogether. A carefully reworded version appears in the Google Code of Conduct: "You can make money without doing evil".

This new gospel allows Google and its "partners" to make money promoting propaganda and engaging in surveillance, and somehow manage to not "be evil". That's "post-truth" logic for you.

Google has been enthusiastically promoting Eliot Higgins "arm chair analytics" since 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbWhcWizSFY

Indeed, a very cozy cross-promotion is happening between Google and Bellingcat.

In November 2014, Google Ideas and Google For Media, partnered the George Soros-funded Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) to host an "Investigathon" in New York City. Google Ideas promoted Higgins' "War and Pieces: Social Media Investigations" song and dance via their YouTube page.

Higgins constantly insists that Bellingcat "findings" are "reaffirmed" by accessing imagery in Google Earth.

Google Earth, originally called EarthViewer 3D, was created by Keyhole, Inc, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funded company acquired by Google in 2004. Google Earth uses satellite images provided by the company Digital Globe, a supplier of the US Department of Defense (DoD) with deep connections to both the military and intelligence communities.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is both a combat support agency under the United States Department of Defense, and an intelligence agency of the United States Intelligence Community. Robert T. Cardillo, director of the NGA, lavishly praised Digital Globe as "a true mission partner in every sense of the word". Examination of the Board of Directors of Digital Globe reveals intimate connections to DoD and CIA.

Google has quite the history of malicious behavior. In what became known as the "Wi-Spy" scandal, it was revealed that Google had been collecting hundreds of gigabytes of payload data, including personal and sensitive information. First names, email addresses, physical addresses, and a conversation between two married individuals planning an extra-marital affair were all cited by the FCC. In a 2012 settlement, the Federal Trade Commission announced that Google will pay $22.5 million for overriding privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser. Though it was the largest civil penalty the Federal Trade Commission had ever imposed for violating one of its orders, the penalty as little more than symbolic for a company that had $2.8 billion in earnings the previous quarter.

Google is a joint venture partner with the CIA. In 2009, Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel invested "under $10 million each" into Recorded Future shortly after the company was founded. The company developed technology that strips information from web pages, blogs, and Twitter accounts.

In addition to funding Bellingcat and joint ventures with the CIA, Brin's Google is heavily invested in Crowdstrike, an American cybersecurity technology firm based in Irvine, California.

Crowdstrike is the main "source" of the "Russians hacked the DNC" story.

Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council "regime change" think tank. Alperovitz said that Crowdstrike has "high confidence" it was "Russian hackers". "But we don't have hard evidence," Alperovitch admitted in a June 16, 2016 Washington Post interview.

Allegations of Russian perfidy are routinely issued by private companies with lucrative US Department of Defense (DoD) contracts. The companies claiming to protect the nation against "threats" have the ability to manufacture "threats".

The US and UK possess elite cyber capabilities for both cyberspace espionage and offensive operations.

Both the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) are intelligence agencies with a long history of supporting military operations. US military cyber operations are the responsibility of US Cyber Command, whose commander is also the head of the NSA.

US offensive cyber operations have emphasized political coercion and opinion shaping, shifting public perception in NATO countries as well as globally in ways favorable to the US, and to create a sense of unease and distrust among perceived adversaries such as Russia and China.

The Snowden revelations made it clear that US offensive cyber capabilities can and have been directed both domestically and internationally. The notion that US and NATO cyber operations are purely defensive is a myth.

Recent US domestic cyber operations have been used for coercive effect, creating uncertainty and concern within the American government and population.

The perception that a foreign attacker may have infiltrated US networks, is monitoring communications, and perhaps considering even more damaging actions, can have a disorienting effect.

In the world of US "hybrid warfare" against Russia, offensive cyber operations work in tandem with NATO propaganda efforts, perhaps best exemplified by the "online investigation" antics of the Atlantic Council's Eliot Higgins and his Bellingcat disinformation site.

Abe , September 16, 2017 at 1:58 pm

Higgins and Bellingcat receives direct funding from the Open Society Foundations (OSF) founded by business magnate George Soros, and from Google's Digital News Initiatives (DNI).

Google's 2017 DNI Fund Annual Report describes Higgins as "a world–leading expert in news verification".

Higgins claims the DNI funding "allowed us to push this to the next level".
https://digitalnewsinitiative.com/news/case-study-codifying-social-conflict-data/

In their zeal to propagate the story of Higgins as a courageous former "unemployed man" now busy independently "Codifying social conflict data", Google neglects to mention Higgins' role as a "research fellow" for the NATO-funded Atlantic Council "regime change" think tank.

Despite their claims of "independent journalism", Eliot Higgins and the team of disinformation operatives at Bellingcat depend on the Atlantic Council to promote their "online investigations".

The Atlantic Council donors list includes:

– US government and military entities: US State Department, US Air Force, US Army, US Marines.

– The NATO military alliance

– Large corporations and major military contractors: Chevron, Google, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, BP, ExxonMobil, General Electric, Northrup Grumman, SAIC, ConocoPhillips, and Dow Chemical

– Foreign governments: United Arab Emirates (UAE; which gives the think tank at least $1 million), Kingdom of Bahrain, City of London, Ministry of Defense of Finland, Embassy of Latvia, Estonian Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Defense of Georgia

– Other think tanks and think tankers: Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Nicolas Veron of Bruegel (formerly at PIIE), Anne-Marie Slaughter (head of New America Foundation), Michele Flournoy (head of Center for a New American Security), Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings Institution.

Higgins is a Research Associate of the Department of War Studies at King's College, and was principal co-author of the Atlantic Council "reports" on Ukraine and Syria.

Damon Wilson, Executive Vice President of Programs and Strategy at the Atlantic Council, a co-author with Higgins of the report, effusively praised Higgins' effort to bolster anti-Russian propaganda:

Wilson stated, "We make this case using only open source, all unclassified material. And none of it provided by government sources. And it's thanks to works, the work that's been pioneered by human rights defenders and our partner Eliot Higgins, uh, we've been able to use social media forensics and geolocation to back this up." (see Atlantic Council video presentation minutes 35:10-36:30)

However, the Atlantic Council claim that "none" of Higgins' material was provided by government sources is an obvious lie.

Higgins' primary "pieces of evidence" are a video depicting a Buk missile launcher and a set of geolocation coordinates that were supplied by the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) and the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior via the Facebook page of senior-level Ukrainian government official Arsen Avakov, the Minister of Internal Affairs.

Higgins and the Atlantic Council are working in support of the Pentagon and Western intelligence's "hybrid war" against Russia.

The laudatory bio of Higgins on the Kings College website specifically acknowledges his service to the Atlantic Council:

"an award winning investigative journalist and publishes the work of an international alliance of fellow investigators using freely available online information. He has helped inaugurate open-source and social media investigations by trawling through vast amounts of data uploaded constantly on to the web and social media sites. His inquiries have revealed extraordinary findings, including linking the Buk used to down flight MH17 to Russia, uncovering details about the August 21st 2013 Sarin attacks in Damascus, and evidencing the involvement of the Russian military in the Ukrainian conflict. Recently he has worked with the Atlantic Council on the report "Hiding in Plain Sight", which used open source information to detail Russia's military involvement in the crisis in Ukraine."

While it honors Higgins' enthusiastic "trawling", King's College curiously neglects to mention that Higgins' "findings" on the Syian sarin attacks were thoroughly debunked.

King's College also curiously neglects to mention the fact that Higgins, now listed as a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council's "Future Europe Initiative", was principal co-author of the April 2016 Atlantic Council "report" on Syria.

The report's other key author was John E. Herbst, United States Ambassador to Ukraine from September 2003 to May 2006 (the period that became known as the Orange Revolution) and Director of the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center.

Other report authors include Frederic C. Hof, who served as Special Adviser on Syrian political transition to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012. Hof was previously the Special Coordinator for Regional Affairs in the US Department of State's Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, where he advised Special Envoy George Mitchel. Hof had been a Resident Senior Fellow in the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East since November 2012, and assumed the position as Director in May 2016.

There is no daylight between the "online investigations" of Higgins and Bellingcat and the "regime change" efforts of the NATO-backed Atlantic Council.

Thanks to the Atlantic Council, Soros, and Google, it's a pretty well-funded gig for fake "citizen investigative journalist" Higgins.

[Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus

Highly recommended!
All signs of sophisticated false flag operation, which probably involved putting malware into DNC servers and then detecting and analyzing them
Notable quotes:
"... 6 May 2016 when CrowdStrike first detected what it assessed to be a Russian presence inside the DNC server. Follow me here. One week after realizing there had been a penetration, the DNC learns, courtesy of the computer security firm it hired, that the Russians are doing it. Okay. Does CrowdStrike shut down the penetration. Nope. The hacking apparently continues unabated. ..."
"... The Smoking Gun ..."
"... I introduce Seth Rich at this point because he represents an alternative hypothesis. Rich, who reportedly was a Bernie Sanders supporter, was in a position at the DNC that gave him access to the emails in question and the opportunity to download the emails and take them from the DNC headquarters. Worth noting that Julian Assange offered $20,000 for information leading to the arrest of Rich's killer or killers. 8. 22 July 2016. Wikileaks published the DNC emails starting on 22 July 2016. Bill Binney, a former senior official at NSA, insists that if such a hack and electronic transfer over the internet had occurred then the NSA has in it possession the intelligence data to prove that such activity had occurred. ..."
"... Notwithstanding the claim by CrowdStrike not a single piece of evidence has been provided to the public to support the conclusion that the emails were hacked and physically transferred to a server under the control of a Russian intelligence operative. ..."
"... Please do not try to post a comment stating that the "Intelligence Community" concluded as well that Russia was responsible. That claim is totally without one shred of actual forensic evidence. Also, Julian Assange insists that the emails did not come from a Russian source. ..."
"... Wikileaks, the protector of the accountability of the top, has announced a reward for finding the murderers of Seth Rich. In comparison, the DNC has not offered any reward to help the investigation of the murder of the DNC staffer, but the DNC found a well-connected lawyer to protect Imran Awan who is guilty (along with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz) in the greatest breach of national cybersecurity: http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/29/wasserman-schultz-seemingly-planned-to-pay-suspect-even-while-he-lived-in-pakistan/ ..."
"... I'm afraid you're behind the times. Wheeler is no longer relevant now that Sy Hersh has revealed an FBI report that explicitly says Rich was in contact with Wikileaks offering to sell them DNC documents. ..."
"... It's unfortunate for the Rich family, but now that the connection is pretty much confirmed, they're going to have to allow the truth to come out ..."
"... Mr. Dmitri Alperovitch, of Jewish descent (and an emigre from Russia), has been an "expert" at the Atlantic Council, the same organization that cherishes and provides for Mr. Eliot Higgins. These two gentlemen - and the directorate of Atlantic Council - are exhibit one of opportunism and intellectual dishonesty (though it is hard to think about Mr. Higgins in terms of "intellect"). ..."
"... Alperovitch is not just an incompetent "expert" in cybersecurity - he is a willing liar and war-mongering, for money. ..."
"... One could of course start earlier. What is the exact timeline of the larger cyberwar post 9/11, or at least the bits and pieces that surfaced for the nitwits among us, like: Stuxnet? ..."
"... Scott Ritter's article referenced in PT's post is terrific, covering a ton of issues related to CrowdStrike and the DNC hack. You need to read it, not just PT's timeline. In case you missed the link in PT's post: ..."
"... His article echoes and reinforces what Carr and others have said about the difficulty of attribution of infosec breaches. Namely that the basic problem of both intelligence and infosec operations is that there is too much obfuscation, manipulation, and misdirection involved to be sure of who or what is going on. ..."
"... The Seth Rich connection is pretty much a done deal, now that Sy Hersh has been caught on tape stating that he knows of an FBI report based on a forensic analysis of Rich's laptop that shows Rich was in direct contact with Wikileaks with an attempt to sell them DNC documents and that Wikileaks had access to Rich's DropBox account. Despite Hersh's subsequent denials - which everyone knows are his usual impatient deflections prior to putting out a sourced and organized article - it's pretty clear that Rich was at least one of the sources of the Wikileaks email dump and that there is zero connection to Russia. ..."
"... None of this proves that Russian intelligence - or Russians of some stripe - or for that matter hackers from literally anywhere - couldn't or didn't ALSO do a hack of the DNC. But it does prove that the iron-clad attribution of the source of Wikileaks email release to Russia is at best flawed, and at worst a deliberate cover up of a leak. ..."
Sep 05, 2017 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Notwithstanding the conventional wisdom that Russia hacked into the DNC computers, downloaded emails and a passed the stolen missives to Julian Assange's crew at Wikileaks, a careful examination of the timeline of events from 2016 shows that this story is simply not plausible.

Let me take you through the known facts:

1. 29 April 2016 , when the DNC became aware its servers had been penetrated (https://medium.com/homefront-rising/dumbstruck-how-crowdstrike-conned-america-on-the-hack-of-the-dnc-ecfa522ff44f). Note. They apparently did not know who was doing it. 2, 6 May 2016 when CrowdStrike first detected what it assessed to be a Russian presence inside the DNC server. Follow me here. One week after realizing there had been a penetration, the DNC learns, courtesy of the computer security firm it hired, that the Russians are doing it. Okay. Does CrowdStrike shut down the penetration. Nope. The hacking apparently continues unabated. 3. 25 May 2016. The messages published on Wikileaks from the DNC show that 26 May 2016 was the last date that emails were sent and received at the DNC. There are no emails in the public domain after that date. In other words, if the DNC emails were taken via a hacking operation, we can conclude from the fact that the last messages posted to Wikileaks show a date time group of 25 May 2016. Wikileaks has not reported nor posted any emails from the DNC after the 25th of May. I think it is reasonable to assume that was the day the dirty deed was done. 4. 12 June 2016, CrowdStrike purged the DNC server of all malware. Are you kidding me? 45 days after the DNC discovers that its serve has been penetrated the decision to purge the DNC server is finally made. What in the hell were they waiting for? But this also tells us that 18 days after the last email "taken" from the DNC, no additional emails were taken by this nasty malware. Here is what does not make sense to me. If the DNC emails were truly hacked and the malware was still in place on 11 June 2016 (it was not purged until the 12th) then why are there no emails from the DNC after 26 May 2016? an excellent analysis of Guccifer's role : Almost immediately after the one-two punch of the Washington Post article/CrowdStrike technical report went public, however, something totally unexpected happened -- someone came forward and took full responsibility for the DNC cyber attack. Moreover, this entity -- operating under the persona Guccifer 2.0 (ostensibly named after the original Guccifer , a Romanian hacker who stole the emails of a number of high-profile celebrities and who was arrested in 2014 and sentenced to 4 ˝ years of prison in May 2016) -- did something no state actor has ever done before, publishing documents stolen from the DNC server as proof of his claims.
Hi. This is Guccifer 2.0 and this is me who hacked Democratic National Committee.

With that simple email, sent to the on-line news magazine, The Smoking Gun , Guccifer 2.0 stole the limelight away from Alperovitch. Over the course of the next few days, through a series of emails, online posts and interviews , Guccifer 2.0 openly mocked CrowdStrike and its Russian attribution. Guccifer 2.0 released a number of documents, including a massive 200-plus-missive containing opposition research on Donald Trump.

Guccifer 2.0 also directly contradicted the efforts on the part of the DNC to minimize the extent of the hacking, releasing the very donor lists the DNC specifically stated had not been stolen. More chilling, Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be in possession of "about 100 Gb of data" which had been passed on to the online publisher, Wikileaks, who "will publish them soon." 7. Seth Rich died on 10 July 2016. I introduce Seth Rich at this point because he represents an alternative hypothesis. Rich, who reportedly was a Bernie Sanders supporter, was in a position at the DNC that gave him access to the emails in question and the opportunity to download the emails and take them from the DNC headquarters. Worth noting that Julian Assange offered $20,000 for information leading to the arrest of Rich's killer or killers. 8. 22 July 2016. Wikileaks published the DNC emails starting on 22 July 2016. Bill Binney, a former senior official at NSA, insists that if such a hack and electronic transfer over the internet had occurred then the NSA has in it possession the intelligence data to prove that such activity had occurred. Notwithstanding the claim by CrowdStrike not a single piece of evidence has been provided to the public to support the conclusion that the emails were hacked and physically transferred to a server under the control of a Russian intelligence operative. Please do not try to post a comment stating that the "Intelligence Community" concluded as well that Russia was responsible. That claim is totally without one shred of actual forensic evidence. Also, Julian Assange insists that the emails did not come from a Russian source.

Fool , 05 September 2017 at 09:01 AM

Where was it reported that Rich was a Sanders supporter?
Publius Tacitus -> Fool... , 05 September 2017 at 09:15 AM
This is one of the reports, http://heavy.com/news/2016/08/seth-rich-julian-assange-source-wikileaks-wiki-dnc-emails-death-murder-reward-video-interview-hillary-clinton-shawn-lucas/.
Anna -> Publius Tacitus ... , 05 September 2017 at 10:56 AM
Wikileaks, the protector of the accountability of the top, has announced a reward for finding the murderers of Seth Rich. In comparison, the DNC has not offered any reward to help the investigation of the murder of the DNC staffer, but the DNC found a well-connected lawyer to protect Imran Awan who is guilty (along with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz) in the greatest breach of national cybersecurity: http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/29/wasserman-schultz-seemingly-planned-to-pay-suspect-even-while-he-lived-in-pakistan/
Stephanie -> Publius Tacitus ... , 06 September 2017 at 12:12 PM
Seth Rich's family have pleaded, and continue to plead, that the conspiracy theorists leave the death of their son alone and have said that those who continue to flog this nonsense around the internet are only serving to increase their pain. I suggest respectfully that some here may wish to consider their feelings. (Also, this stuff is nuts, you know.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/were-seth-richs-parents-stop-politicizing-our-sons-murder/2017/05/23/164cf4dc-3fee-11e7-9869-bac8b446820a_story.html?utm_term=.b20208de48d3

"We also know that many people are angry at our government and want to see justice done in some way, somehow. We are asking you to please consider our feelings and words. There are people who are using our beloved Seth's memory and legacy for their own political goals, and they are using your outrage to perpetuate our nightmare."

http://www.businessinsider.com/seth-rich-family-response-lawsuit-rod-wheeler-2017-8

"Wheeler, a former Metropolitan Police Department officer, was a key figure in a series of debunked stories claiming that Rich had been in contact with Wikileaks before his death. Fox News, which reported the story online and on television, retracted it in June."

Richardstevenhack -> Stephanie... , 07 September 2017 at 07:43 PM
I'm afraid you're behind the times. Wheeler is no longer relevant now that Sy Hersh has revealed an FBI report that explicitly says Rich was in contact with Wikileaks offering to sell them DNC documents.

It's unfortunate for the Rich family, but now that the connection is pretty much confirmed, they're going to have to allow the truth to come out.

Anna , 05 September 2017 at 09:20 AM
Mr. Dmitri Alperovitch, of Jewish descent (and an emigre from Russia), has been an "expert" at the Atlantic Council, the same organization that cherishes and provides for Mr. Eliot Higgins. These two gentlemen - and the directorate of Atlantic Council - are exhibit one of opportunism and intellectual dishonesty (though it is hard to think about Mr. Higgins in terms of "intellect").

Here is an article by Alperovitch: http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russian-cyber-attacks-in-the-united-states-will-intensify

Take note how Alperovitch coded the names of the supposed hackers: "Russian intelligence services hacked the Democratic National Committee's computer network and accessed opposition research on Donald Trump, according to the Atlantic Council's Dmitri Alperovitch.

Two Russian groups ! codenamed FancyBear and CozyBear ! have been identified as spearheading the DNC breach." Alperovitch is not just an incompetent "expert" in cybersecurity - he is a willing liar and war-mongering, for money.

The DNC hacking story has never been about national security; Alperovitch (and his handlers) have no loyalty to the US.

LeaNder , 05 September 2017 at 09:59 AM
PT, I make a short exception. Actually decided to stop babbling for a while. But: Just finished something successfully.

And since I usually need distraction by something far more interesting then matters at hand. I was close to your line of thought yesters.

But really: Shouldn't the timeline start in 2015, since that's supposedly the time someone got into the DNC's system?

One could of course start earlier. What is the exact timeline of the larger cyberwar post 9/11, or at least the bits and pieces that surfaced for the nitwits among us, like: Stuxnet?

But nevermind. Don't forget developments and recent events around Eugene or Jewgeni Walentinowitsch Kasperski?

LondonBob , 05 September 2017 at 03:27 PM
The Russia thing certainly seems to have gone quiet.

Bannon's chum says the issue with pursuing the Clinton email thing is that you would end up having to indict almost all of the last administration, including Obama, unseemly certainly. Still there might be a fall guy, maybe Comey, and obviously it serves Trump's purposes to keep this a live issue through the good work of Grassley and the occasional tweet.

Would be amusing if Trump pardoned Obama. Still think Brennan should pay a price though, can't really be allowed to get away with it

Richardstevenhack , 05 September 2017 at 06:23 PM
Scott Ritter's article referenced in PT's post is terrific, covering a ton of issues related to CrowdStrike and the DNC hack. You need to read it, not just PT's timeline. In case you missed the link in PT's post:

Dumbstruck: How CrowdStrike Conned America on the Hack of the DNC https://medium.com/homefront-rising/dumbstruck-how-crowdstrike-conned-america-on-the-hack-of-the-dnc-ecfa522ff44f

The article by Jeffrey Carr on CrowdStrike referenced from back in 2012 is also worth reading: Where's the "Strike" in CrowdStrike? https://jeffreycarr.blogspot.com/2012/09/wheres-strike-in-crowdstrike.html

Also, the article Carr references is very important for understanding the limits of malware analysis and "attribution". Written by Michael Tanji, whose credentials appear impressive: "spent nearly 20 years in the US intelligence community. Trained in both SIGINT and HUMINT disciplines he has worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. At various points in his career he served as an expert in information warfare, computer network operations, computer forensics, and indications and warning. A veteran of the US Army, Michael has served in both strategic and tactical assignments in the Pacific Theater, the Balkans, and the Middle East."

Malware Analysis: The Danger of Connecting the Dots: https://www.oodaloop.com/technology/2012/09/11/malware-analysis-the-danger-of-connecting-the-dots/

His article echoes and reinforces what Carr and others have said about the difficulty of attribution of infosec breaches. Namely that the basic problem of both intelligence and infosec operations is that there is too much obfuscation, manipulation, and misdirection involved to be sure of who or what is going on.

The Seth Rich connection is pretty much a done deal, now that Sy Hersh has been caught on tape stating that he knows of an FBI report based on a forensic analysis of Rich's laptop that shows Rich was in direct contact with Wikileaks with an attempt to sell them DNC documents and that Wikileaks had access to Rich's DropBox account. Despite Hersh's subsequent denials - which everyone knows are his usual impatient deflections prior to putting out a sourced and organized article - it's pretty clear that Rich was at least one of the sources of the Wikileaks email dump and that there is zero connection to Russia.

None of this proves that Russian intelligence - or Russians of some stripe - or for that matter hackers from literally anywhere - couldn't or didn't ALSO do a hack of the DNC. But it does prove that the iron-clad attribution of the source of Wikileaks email release to Russia is at best flawed, and at worst a deliberate cover up of a leak.

And Russiagate depends primarily on BOTH alleged "facts" being true: 1) that Russia hacked the DNC, and 2) that Russia was the source of Wikileaks release. And if the latter is not true, then one has to question why Russia hacked the DNC in the first place, other than for "normal" espionage operations. "Influencing the election" then becomes a far less plausible theory.

The general takeaway from an infosec point of view is that attribution by means of target identification, tools used, and "indicators of compromise" is a fatally flawed means of identifying, and thus being able to counter, the adversaries encountered in today's Internet world, as Tanji proves. Only HUMINT offers a way around this, just as it is really the only valid option in countering terrorism.

[Sep 17, 2017] Empire Idiots by Linh Dinh

Highly recommended!
There are probably two factors here: The first is the real anger of Arab population against aggression by the USA and European states (mainly GB and Frnace). That what produces radicalized Muslims who can commit terrorist attacks.
The second factor is the desire of intelligence agencies to exploit those attacks for thier own purposes. For example, it is quite possible, that they are standing idle to the most stupid of them and disrupt others, more dangerous.
Notable quotes:
"... How many Muslims are needed to drive one suicide car? Five, of course. What's the best, most lethal vehicle for the purpose? The compact Audi A3, naturally. ..."
"... From 9/11, Charlie Hebdo, Paris' Bataclan Concert Hall, Berlin's Christmas Market to Barcelona, etc., Muslim mass murderers seem expert at leaving behind their identity papers. ..."
"... Classic examples of this type of "lost and found id" were Oswald's lost wallet and James Earl Ray's dropped bundle of documents (ML King) ..."
"... Arab folks are brimming with anger that is now being met by the anger of the natives. ..."
"... I think the author misses the role of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, who appear to be the main financiers of the work performed by the above American Israel Empire. ..."
"... Perhaps the term Petrodollar Empire would be more accurate? As a bonus, it also complies better to the rules of political correctness. ..."
"... I am always deeply skeptical of these false flag claims. We bomb and kill arabs daily, yet create magnificent conspiracy theories to explain how it is someone else blowing crap up in vengeance. ..."
"... Why would Israel need to frame Muslim bombers when so many are so willing to do the job themselves and avenge their dead? Israel certainly pulls our strings to conduct the bombardment and they control American politics – why would they need to fabricate murders of random faceless Spaniards? How does that keep American taxpayers footing the bill for Zionism? ..."
"... It's really pretty simple isn't it? Before we decided to throw in with England and help genocide the Palestinians we had few problems with arabs. Now we've expanded our mission to include Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, etc and our blowback is serious. The arabs are doing what I'd do if a foreign power bombed my family. I could not care less what happens to Israelis or arabs. We need to either nuke the entire Arab world or leave it the hell alone – none of them are worth a single American life. ..."
Sep 09, 2017 | www.unz.com

How many Muslims are needed to drive one suicide car? Five, of course. What's the best, most lethal vehicle for the purpose? The compact Audi A3, naturally. What's the best time to stage such an attack? 1:15AM, grasshopper, when there are almost nobody on the Paseo Maritimo. Finally, what should you wear for such a momentous and self-defining occasion? Fake suicide vests, stupid, because they serve no purpose besides giving cops an excuse to perforate you immediately.

... .. ...

Astonishingly moronic, the five Muslims in Cambrils made all the worst choices possible, but the rest of their "terrorist cell" weren't any smarter, it is said.

Eight hours earlier, a van had killed 14 people and injured 130+ more in Barcelona, and the purported driver of that van, 22-year-old Younes Aboyaaqoub, had rented the vehicle with his own credit card. Very stupid. He also left his IDs in a second van, meant as a get-away car.

From 9/11, Charlie Hebdo, Paris' Bataclan Concert Hall, Berlin's Christmas Market to Barcelona, etc., Muslim mass murderers seem expert at leaving behind their identity papers. Otherwise, the official narrative can't be broadcast immediately. Wait a week or a month for a proper investigation, and the public won't have any idea what you're talking about, fixated as they are on a Kardashian pumped up buttocks or Messi goal.

Brabantian, Website September 9, 2017 at 9:03 am GMT

List of Passport / ID documents found at terrorism attack scenes – at least 8, including those Linh Dinh mentions above

(1) – 11 Sep 2001 passport found in NYC towers rubble tho aeroplane had 'turned to vapour'
(2) – 7 Jul 2005 London bomboings – ID of '4th bomber' allegedly 'found by UK police'
(3) – 7 Jan 2015 Charlie Hebdo, passport in car in front of Paris Jewish deli where Mossad meets
(4) – 13 Nov 2015 Bataclan Paris passport flew from body 'after killer exploded his suicide vest'
(5) – 14 Jul 2016 Nice France lorry attack 'passport found'
(6) – 19 Dec 2016 Berlin Christmas market lorry attack 'ID found', after 24 hours of searching lorry cab
(7) – 22 May 2017 Manchester UK 'suicide bomber leaves ID' at scene amidst another 'terror on 22nd'
(8) – 17 Aug 2017 Barcelona deadly terror attack by white van, 'Spanish passport found in van'

Also related & of interest
'Mossad did the Barcelona attack' – Israel heavily involved with Barcelona police – from Aangirfan on her site

republic, September 9, 2017 at 11:43 am GMT

@Brabantian List of Passport / ID documents found at terrorism attack scenes - at least 8, including those Linh Dinh mentions above

(1) - 11 Sep 2001 passport found in NYC towers rubble tho aeroplane had 'turned to vapour'
(2) - 7 Jul 2005 London bomboings - ID of '4th bomber' allegedly 'found by UK police'
(3) - 7 Jan 2015 Charlie Hebdo, passport in car in front of Paris Jewish deli where Mossad meets
(4) - 13 Nov 2015 Bataclan Paris passport flew from body 'after killer exploded his suicide vest'
(5) - 14 Jul 2016 Nice France lorry attack 'passport found'
(6) - 19 Dec 2016 Berlin Christmas market lorry attack 'ID found', after 24 hours of searching lorry cab
(7) - 22 May 2017 Manchester UK 'suicide bomber leaves ID' at scene amidst another 'terror on 22nd'
(8) - 17 Aug 2017 Barcelona deadly terror attack by white van, 'Spanish passport found in van'

Also related & of interest
'Mossad did the Barcelona attack' - Israel heavily involved with Barcelona police - from Aangirfan on her site
http://aanirfan.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/mossad-did-barcelona-attack.html
http://aanirfan.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/barcelona-false-flag-part-3.html https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Lost_and_Found_ID

Classic examples of this type of "lost and found id" were Oswald's lost wallet and James Earl Ray's dropped bundle of documents (ML King)

Cranky, September 9, 2017 at 2:35 pm GMT

Dinh, you are a fool. The Spanish police until the last two decades were always a bit trigger happy. And then you forget the Guardia Civil. They were the people in charge of keeping Franco's Spain quiet, and it was quiet like the grave. The really funny part is the Arab folks are brimming with anger that is now being met by the anger of the natives. Read the Blood of Spain, and see the complicated relationship between Franco's Moros and how they ravaged parts of Spain during the Civil War. The really ironic part is these "radicalized" kids are simply fodder for the papers back home, and an excuse to begin the round ups and mass deportations.

Fascism is now returning to Europe because of the liberal insanity of open borders and mass immigration.

Go see this in Spain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valle_de_los_Ca%C3%ADdos

Built by the prisoners of France, and then ponder what it means when a people get tired of too much change.

Simpleguest, September 9, 2017 at 4:34 pm GMT

Nice read, indeed. Regarding the main idea of the article, that the:

" .. American Israel Empire is working nonstop to deform the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and, frankly, the rest of the world."

I think the author misses the role of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, who appear to be the main financiers of the work performed by the above American Israel Empire.

Perhaps the term Petrodollar Empire would be more accurate? As a bonus, it also complies better to the rules of political correctness.

DFH, September 9, 2017 at 8:34 pm GMT

Which seems more likely prima facie , Muslim terrorism or that the whole thing was faked? The whole premise of this article seems to be that it's simply ludicrous that a Muslim would ever do something like ram a car into a crowd of people.

jacques sheete, September 9, 2017 at 11:36 pm GMT

You're being played, in short.

For sure. Deja vu all over again and again. Another fine one, LD!

Dumbo, September 10, 2017 at 3:47 am GMT

It's like in the great movie by Kurosawa, Yojimbo, one guy playing both sides one against the other. Except Sanjuro was a good guy trying to kill a bunch of thugs and bring peace to the town, while our globo-masters prefer to see innocent people being murdered and the world in chaos.

Anon, Disclaimer September 10, 2017 at 6:11 pm GMT

@Linh Dinh "Barcelona Massacre, the testimony of Bruno Gulotta's father," delivered a day after his son's death:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbvhAwlYgfA

Linh, the Orlando video seems obviously fake. For those who look for those things, there are plenty of give-aways. But what's your point with the Barcelona video? I don't speak Spanish or Catalan, as the case may be, but he seems to be fairly dispassionate and therefore not bullshitting. I do hope there was a point you were making. There is enough in what you say, so that your linguistic showing off is a pointless irritation. I would like to make my point with a pointless Hindi quip, but my phone doesn't support the script.

Dumbo, September 10, 2017 at 8:32 pm GMT

@fish

What Merkel has done in Germany is incredible. She took in a million, a million and a half refugees, and there has been no major problem. It has been a great success, a miracle."
Yeah....good luck with that! By the time this all sorts out historically Merkel will rate lower than ol Schickelgruber.

Mutti.....Europes greatest "Crazy Cat Lady"!

"and there has been no major problem"

Except for a few stabbings, shootings and bombings as well as general malaise and waste of taxpayer's money, but what is that compared to the glory of diversity?
Well, I guess Germany had too few kebab shops

"By the time this all sorts out historically Merkel will rate lower than ol Schickelgruber."

The problem of politics and especially democracy is that politicians act for short term gains, but their decisions affect everybody else in the long term. By the time the Scheiße hits the fan Merkel and her friends will be happily retired in Switzerland or Monaco.

Andrew Nichos, September 11, 2017 at 3:30 am GMT

You'd have to be blind and stupid not have noticed this convenient habit of Muslim terrorists. I wonder why the IRA/ Baader Meinhof/Brigata Rossi or the westher,men didn't have the same habit?

NoseytheDuke, September 11, 2017 at 4:26 am GMT

You'd have to be blind and stupid not have noticed this convenient habit of pseudo moslem terrorists. I wonder why the IRA/ Baader Meinhof/Brigata Rossi or the Weathermen didn't have the same habit?

I fixed that for you, mate. The frequency of this seemingly ritual habit is amazing I agree. It is certainly one for the Coincidence Theorists out there.

Erebus, September 11, 2017 at 5:39 am GMT

@Intelligent Dasein From the banner of this website:

A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media
I am here reminded of Jerry Seinfeld's wise observation that "Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason."

I would advise Ron Unz to take this saying to heart and to spike the execrable Linh Dinh from these pages, and his butt-buddy Revusky, too.

I am here reminded of Jerry Seinfeld's wise observation that "Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason."

Seinfeld would have been wiser if he had said that it's always less travelled for a reason. That reason is invariably along the lines of it being less convenient, more arduous, and more challenging. It often takes you to uncomfortable places, and you have to leave your beloved baggage behind.
Most people naturally choose to walk the broad level path that's been thoughtfully laid out for them. It doesn't go anywhere at all, except maybe in a giant circle, so that it doesn't matter where they start or where they stop, but they get to keep and even accumulate baggage along the way and that's what travelling is all about, isn't it?

NoseytheDuke, September 11, 2017 at 11:42 am GMT

@utu Looks like Linh Dinh was turned by Revusky. Everything must be a hoax. This is their starting position: It is a hoax until proven otherwise.

And Revusky comes up with his cheap schtick about the "emotional register." As if he ever seen true reactions of real people who lost relatives? All his life like all the hoax mongering youtube yahoos he was exposed to movies with the overacted emotional displays by actors and this formed the baseline for the youtube yahoos and Revusky. So when he sees more measure reactions of real people he thinks it must be bad acting. Yes, if you haven't noticed, the real life is full of bad acting, you fool.

More interesting would be to read about how is the bromance evolving? Actually real life is usually quite authentic which is the 'real' part and since several big "terror"events have had some inexplicable aspects to them suggesting the involvement of trickery it would be wise to suspect that of other events too. If you've been mugged while walking in the street a couple of times it would be completely rational and indeed prudent if you crossed the street to avoid a stranger, or clutched a hidden weapon as a stranger approached. This is natural and the survival instinct at work.

As to the emotional register, most people have not studied acting yet they can spot poor acting on TV or in a movie very quickly because they have experienced human behaviour their entire lives. When the behaviour or physical action doesn't match the dialogue or situation it appears very odd to us. Some people are more observant than others, this is why professional actors like to study the traits and quirks of people.

Linh Dinh has written some really excellent articles as many commenters have approved and stated as much but if you don't like them why bother reading or commenting? Jonathan Revusky too has written some very worthwhile articles in my opinion but he doesn't seem to take criticism well and has made a few enemies here but again, if you don't like them why not spend your time reading the work of other people?

bb., September 11, 2017 at 12:36 pm GMT

i agree that the passports left behind all the time are a little bit weird. when some shit goes down, among friends, we jokingly ask if they found the passports yet? but it could also be that they want to leave them behind, as a martyr signature or something maybe. like now they recruited irma for their cause..saying god is on their side.
but then again..i am susceptible to consider weird shit. like the boston bombings for example. I saw a very strange video of a simulation of a bombing attack which looked very real, like tv footage, but maybe that's the point of a good simulation.
we live in weird times. information flow is corrupted and not to be trusted. stanislaw lem wrote about it 40years ago and I always think about it reading news.

escobar, September 11, 2017 at 1:05 pm GMT

Linh Dinh's and others' dark dreams:

The American Israel Empire, the Anglo Zionist Conspiracy, the Jew Bolshevik plot

How do the Jews have time for all that and make so much money, run their dentistry, legal, media, entertainment empires and lust after blond shiksa cheerleaders as well?
Maybe it's from those gefilte fish they eat, or from the chopped liver they do even better than this sample produced by Linh Dinh.

Joe Hide, September 11, 2017 at 1:16 pm GMT

Millions of us have been aware of the "Empire" for years now Linh. We just don't have access to the media expression as you do. We tend to be quiet about it until we sense a person or group is open to this Truth. Most people think inside the box because it's safe, comforting, and lacks unpleasant reactions. We who want the Truth value your articles, because we really do believe that "The Truth will set you free."

Santoculto, September 11, 2017 at 1:50 pm GMT

Francisco, a typical teacher of philosophy and never a real philosopher. Most of this "refugees" are permanent immigrants, that's why this "refugee crisis" is just a way to accelerate the capitulation of Europe. Real refugees came back to their countries when they have opportunity. In the end the most effective way to stop middle east conflicts must be done via exposition of real (((criminals))), the direct responsible for all this shit. Only the truth can solve any problem and (((problem))).

Teacher of history's philosophy, what most of this "philosophers" are. Real philosophers learn/or invent and teach real or valid philosophical methods of thinking/analytical-critical thinking and of course subsequent action/application.

anonymous, Disclaimer September 11, 2017 at 2:34 pm GMT

The author is claiming it's all fake because the participants were inept and stupid. They possibly were being monitored and followed all along. That doesn't make it a staged fake event. "Kosher Nostra"? What's that supposed to mean? Jews are scapegoated for what Muslims do and have been doing for close to fourteen hundred years? It took the Spanish hundreds of years of struggle to free themselves from Muslim overlordship and now they're just supposed to wash their brains of any historical memory? Those third worlders written about so lovingly add nothing to Spain besides just some food joints. The author doesn't live there anyway so why is he telling them how to live?"Drugged and inflamed" is not necessarily true of all of America. The author is probably an alcoholic and needs to stop hanging around craphole taverns with all those dysfunctional boozers.

Hairway To Steven, September 11, 2017 at 8:30 pm GMT

Conspiracy theories like those expressed in this article and in many of the comments are for those either lacking the good sense to appreciate that the world is complex or the intellectual patience to sort through that complexity.

In the absence of these qualities, conspiracy nuts come up with unified theories that "explain everything" (e.g., the Jews control the world).

Actually moving out of the basement of their mom's house, or even losing their virginity, might help, but most of these sweaty little pamphleteers are lost causes whose lives rarely extend beyond a circle of like-minded friends and the insular concerns expressed in their over-heated and under-read blogs.

Stan d Mute, September 11, 2017 at 10:34 pm GMT

@DFH Which seems more likely prima facie , Muslim terrorism or that the whole thing was faked?
The whole premise of this article seems to be that it's simply ludicrous that a Muslim would ever do something like ram a car into a crowd of people.

Which seems more likely prima facie, Muslim terrorism or that the whole thing was faked?
The whole premise of this article seems to be that it's simply ludicrous that a Muslim would ever do something like ram a car into a crowd of people.

I am always deeply skeptical of these false flag claims. We bomb and kill arabs daily, yet create magnificent conspiracy theories to explain how it is someone else blowing crap up in vengeance.

Why would Israel need to frame Muslim bombers when so many are so willing to do the job themselves and avenge their dead? Israel certainly pulls our strings to conduct the bombardment and they control American politics – why would they need to fabricate murders of random faceless Spaniards? How does that keep American taxpayers footing the bill for Zionism?

It's really pretty simple isn't it? Before we decided to throw in with England and help genocide the Palestinians we had few problems with arabs. Now we've expanded our mission to include Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, etc and our blowback is serious. The arabs are doing what I'd do if a foreign power bombed my family. I could not care less what happens to Israelis or arabs. We need to either nuke the entire Arab world or leave it the hell alone – none of them are worth a single American life.

Art, September 12, 2017 at 2:30 am GMT

How stupid must you be to not see that the American Israel Empire has rigged every aspect of your reality?

...The pattern of human nature that they use is called the Stockholm syndrome.

It has been documented that a group of people can be turned against themselves when they are captured and terrorized, and in the process, they are propagandized to believe that the terrorizers themselves are the true victims. The terrorists tell the those they captured, that they are doing this because they themselves are the real victims.

The syndrome is that the captured group begin to sympathize with their terrorists. They take to heart that the terrorists are indeed victims, and that they should be supported. .

... ... ...

Think Peace -- Art

Stan d Mute, September 12, 2017 at 2:50 am GMT

@ChuckOrloski "... none of them are worth an American life."

Stan d Mute,

The dangerous thing about your rather common conclusion (above) is the stinky fact that, for the sake of creating Greater Israel, Neoconservatives are in your "Amen Corner" and also would green light the "nuking" of Iran.

Thank you.

Neoconservatives are in your "Amen Corner" and also would green light the "nuking" of Iran.

Don't paint me with your misrepresentation. I wrote " nuke the entire Arab world " Your Iran reply is a strawman.

Few neocons would endorse my suggestion to either obliterate the Middle East (drill for oil through the glass) or abandon their first loyalty of Zionism and all resulting meddling and murdering in the region.

Tell it like it is, September 12, 2017 at 10:05 pm GMT

Cry me a river. No sympathy from me. This article is completely one sided. What kind of investigative reporting is this when the author didn't even interview the police and review the evidence, but simply hurl out accusations through hearsay from the average guys on the street.

... ... ...

denk, September 13, 2017 at 3:32 pm GMT

The terror factory

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34322.htm

It has already been exposed that 95% of domestic 'terror attacks' were FBI/CIA
false flags.

[Jul 29, 2017] Ray McGovern The Deep State Assault on Elected Government Must Be Stopped

Highly recommended!
Ray McGovern raise important fact: DNC hide evidence from FBI outsourcing everything to CrowdStrike. This is the most unexplainable fact in the whole story. One hypotheses that Ray advanced here that there was so many hacks into DNC that they wanted to hide.
Another important point is CIA role in elections, and specifically John O. Brennan behaviour. Brennan's 25 years with the CIA included work as a Near East and South Asia analyst and as station chief in Saudi Arabia.
McGovern thing that Brennon actually controlled Obama. And in his opinion Brennan was the main leaker of Trump surveillance information.
Notable quotes:
"... Do really think the Deep State cares about the environment. Trump is our only chance to damage Deep State. McGovern is wrong... DNC were from Seth Rich, inside DNC. Murdered for it. McGovern is wrong... i could go on and on but suffice it to say his confidence is way to high. He is wrong. ..."
Apr 2, 2017 | www.youtube.com

Greg Rhodes 3 months ago

I really like Ray... I watch and listen , he seems to use logic, reason and facts in his assessments.. I'm surprised CIA and the deep state allow him to operate ... stay safe Ray...
Robert Eargle 2 months ago

McGovern, you idiot. To try to put Trump on Hillary's level is complete stupidity. The war with Russia or nothing was avoided with a Trump victory. Remember the NATO build up on the Russian border preparing for a Hillary win? Plus, if Hillary won, justice and law in the USA would be over with forever. The Germans dont know sht about the USA to say their little cute phrase. Trump is a very calm mannered man and his hands on the nuke button is an issue only to those who watch the fake MSM. And no the NSA has not released anything either. Wrong on that point too.

Manley Nelson 2 months ago

The German expression of USA having a choice between cholera and plague is ignorant. McGovern is wrong ....everyone knew HRC was a criminal. McGovern is wrong... Jill Stein in not trustworthy. A vote for Jill Stein was a vote away from Trump. If Jill Stein or HRC were elected their would be no environment left to save. Do really think the Deep State cares about the environment. Trump is our only chance to damage Deep State. McGovern is wrong... DNC were from Seth Rich, inside DNC. Murdered for it. McGovern is wrong... i could go on and on but suffice it to say his confidence is way to high. He is wrong.

Rodger Asai 3 months ago

Another month or so and the DHS may offer a color-coding system to help the sheeple understand various levels of confidence. Green - Moderate Confidence Blue - High Confidence Yellow - Very High Confidence Orange - Extremely High Confidence Red - Based on Actual Fact

The last category may be one of the signs of the apocalypse.

KELLI2L2 3 months ago

As it turned out Jill Stein was a bad choice too... Recount debacle.

midnighfairy 1 month ago

I want Hilary to pay for her lies

[Jun 24, 2017] The Criminal Laws of Counterinsurgency by Todd E. Pierce

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Many "never-Trumpers" of both parties see the deep state's national security bureaucracy as their best hope to destroy Trump and thus defend constitutional government, but those hopes are misguided. ..."
"... As Michael Glennon, author of National Security and Double Government, pointed out in a June 2017 Harper's essay, if "the president maintains his attack, splintered and demoralized factions within the bureaucracy could actually support - not oppose - many potential Trump initiatives, such as stepped-up drone strikes, cyberattacks, covert action, immigration bans, and mass surveillance." ..."
"... Corraborative evidence of Valentine's thesis is, perhaps surprisingly, provided by the CIA's own website where a number of redacted historical documents have been published. Presumably, they are documents first revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. A few however are copies of news articles once available to the public but now archived by the CIA which has blacked-out portions of the articles. ..."
"... This led to an investigation by New Times in a day when there were still "investigative reporters," and not the government sycophants of today. Based on firsthand accounts, their investigation concluded that Operation Phoenix was the "only systematized kidnapping, torture and assassination program ever sponsored by the United States government. . . . Its victims were noncombatants." At least 40,000 were murdered, with "only" about 8,000 supposed Viet Cong political cadres targeted for execution, with the rest civilians (including women and children) killed and "later conveniently labeled VCI. Hundreds of thousands were jailed without trial, often after sadistic abuse." The article notes that Phoenix was conceived, financed, and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency ..."
"... But the article noted that one of the most persistent criticisms of Phoenix was that it resulted "in the arrest and imprisonment of many innocent civilians." These were called "Class C Communist offenders," some of whom may actually have been forced to commit such "belligerent acts" as digging trenches or carrying rice. It was those alleged as the "hard core, full-time cadre" who were deemed to make up the "shadow government" designated as Class A and B Viet Cong. ..."
"... Ironically, by the Bush administration's broad definition of "unlawful combatants," CIA officers and their support structure also would fit the category. But the American public is generally forgiving of its own war criminals though most self-righteous and hypocritical in judging foreign war criminals. But perhaps given sufficient evidence, the American public could begin to see both the immorality of this behavior and its counterproductive consequences. ..."
"... Talleyrand is credited with saying, "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing." Reportedly, that was borrowed from a 1796 letter by a French naval officer, which stated, in the original language: Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien appendre. In English: "Nobody has been corrected; no one has known to forget, nor yet to learn anything." That sums up the CIA leadership entirely. ..."
Jun 24, 2017 | original.antiwar.com

Douglas Valentine has once again added to the store of knowledge necessary for American citizens to understand how the U.S. government actually works today, in his most recent book entitled The CIA As Organized Crime . (Valentine previously wrote The Phoenix Program , which should be read with the current book.)

The US "deep state" – of which the CIA is an integral part – is an open secret now and the Phoenix Program (assassinations, death squads, torture, mass detentions, exploitation of information) has been its means of controlling populations. Consequently, knowing the deep state's methods is the only hope of building a democratic opposition to the deep state and to restore as much as possible the Constitutional system we had in previous centuries, as imperfect as it was.

Princeton University political theorist Sheldon Wolin described the US political system in place by 2003 as "inverted totalitarianism." He reaffirmed that in 2009 after seeing a year of the Obama administration. Correctly identifying the threat against constitutional governance is the first step to restore it, and as Wolin understood, substantive constitutional government ended long before Donald Trump campaigned. He's just taking unconstitutional governance to the next level in following the same path as his recent predecessors. However, even as some elements of the "deep state" seek to remove Trump, the President now has many "deep state" instruments in his own hands to be used at his unreviewable discretion.

Many "never-Trumpers" of both parties see the deep state's national security bureaucracy as their best hope to destroy Trump and thus defend constitutional government, but those hopes are misguided. After all, the deep state's bureaucratic leadership has worked arduously for decades to subvert constitutional order.

As Michael Glennon, author of National Security and Double Government, pointed out in a June 2017 Harper's essay, if "the president maintains his attack, splintered and demoralized factions within the bureaucracy could actually support - not oppose - many potential Trump initiatives, such as stepped-up drone strikes, cyberattacks, covert action, immigration bans, and mass surveillance."

Glennon noted that the propensity of "security managers" to back policies which ratchet up levels of security "will play into Trump's hands, so that if and when he finally does declare victory, a revamped security directorate could emerge more menacing than ever, with him its devoted new ally." Before that happens, it is incumbent for Americans to understand what Valentine explains in his book of CIA methods of "population control" as first fully developed in the Vietnam War's Phoenix Program.

Hating the US

There also must be the realization that our "national security" apparatchiks - principally but not solely the CIA - have served to exponentially increase the numbers of those people who hate the US.

Some of these people turn to terrorism as an expression of that hostility. Anyone who is at all familiar with the CIA and Al Qaeda knows that the CIA has been Al Qaeda's most important "combat multiplier" since 9/11, and the CIA can be said to have birthed ISIS as well with the mistreatment of incarcerated Iraqi men in US prisons in Iraq.

Indeed, by following the model of the Phoenix Program, the CIA must be seen in the Twenty-first Century as a combination of the ultimate "Murder, Inc.," when judged by the CIA's methods such as drone warfare and its victims; and the Keystone Kops, when the multiple failures of CIA policies are considered. This is not to make light of what the CIA does, but the CIA's misguided policies and practices have served to generate wrath, hatred and violence against Americans, which we see manifested in cities such as San Bernardino, Orlando, New York and Boston.

Pointing out the harm to Americans is not to dismiss the havoc that Americans under the influence of the CIA have perpetrated on foreign populations. But "morality" seems a lost virtue today in the US, which is under the influence of so much militaristic war propaganda that morality no longer enters into the equation in determining foreign policy.

In addition to the harm the CIA has caused to people around the world, the CIA works tirelessly at subverting its own government at home, as was most visible in the spying on and subversion of the torture investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The subversion of democracy also includes the role the CIA plays in developing and disseminating war propaganda as "information warfare," upon the American people. This is what the Rand Corporation under the editorship of Zalmay Khalilzad has described as "conditioning the battlefield," which begins with the minds of the American population.

Douglas Valentine discusses and documents the role of the CIA in disseminating pro-war propaganda and disinformation as complementary to the violent tactics of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Valentine explains that "before Phoenix was adopted as the model for policing the American empire, many US military commanders in Vietnam resisted the Phoenix strategy of targeting civilians with Einsatzgruppen-style 'special forces' and Gestapo-style secret police."

Military Commanders considered that type of program a flagrant violation of the Law of War. "Their main job is to zap the in-betweeners – you know, the people who aren't all the way with the government and aren't all the way with the Viet Cong either. They figure if you zap enough in-betweeners, people will begin to get the idea," according to one quote from The Phoenix Program referring to the unit tasked with much of the Phoenix operations.

Nazi Influences

Comparing the Phoenix Program and its operatives to "Einsatzgruppen-style 'special forces' and Gestapo-style secret police" is not a distortion of the strategic understanding of each. Both programs were extreme forms of repression operating under martial law principles where the slightest form of dissent was deemed to represent the work of the "enemy." Hitler's Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe by Philip W. Blood describes German "Security Warfare" as practiced in World War II, which can be seen as identical in form to the Phoenix Program as to how the enemy is defined as anyone who is "potentially" a threat, deemed either "partizans" or terrorists.

That the Germans included entire racial categories in that does not change the underlying logic, which was, anyone deemed an internal enemy in a territory in which their military operated had to be "neutralized" by any means necessary. The US military and the South Vietnamese military governments operated under the same principles but not based on race, rather the perception that certain areas and villages were loyal to the Viet Cong.

This repressive doctrine was also not unique to the Nazis in Europe and the US military in Vietnam. Similar though less sophisticated strategies were used against the American Indians and by the imperial powers of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, including by the US in its newly acquired territories of the Philippines and in the Caribbean. This "imperial policing," i.e., counterinsurgency, simply moved to more manipulative and, in ways, more violent levels.

That the US drew upon German counterinsurgency doctrine, as brutal as it was, is well documented. This is shown explicitly in a 2011 article published in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies entitled German Counterinsurgency Revisited by Charles D. Melson. He wrote that in 1942, Nazi commander Heinrich Himmler named a deputy for "anti-bandit warfare," (Bevollmachtigter fur die Bandenkampfung im Osten), SS-General von dem Bach, whose responsibilities expanded in 1943 to head all SS and police anti-bandit units and operations. He was one of the architects of the Einsatzguppen "concept of anti-partisan warfare," a German predecessor to the "Phoenix Program."

'Anti-Partisan' Lessons

It wasn't a coincidence that this "anti-partisan" warfare concept should be adopted by US forces in Vietnam and retained to the present day. Melson pointed out that a "post-war German special forces officer described hunter or ranger units as 'men who knew every possible ruse and tactic of guerrilla warfare. They had gone through the hell of combat against the crafty partisans in the endless swamps and forests of Russia.'"

Consequently, "The German special forces and reconnaissance school was a sought after posting for North Atlantic Treaty Organization special operations personnel," who presumably included members of the newly created US Army Special Forces soldiers, which was in part headquartered at Bad Tolz in Germany, as well as CIA paramilitary officers.

Just as with the later Phoenix Program to the present-day US global counterinsurgency, Melson wrote that the "attitude of the [local] population and the amount of assistance it was willing to give guerilla units was of great concern to the Germans. Different treatment was supposed to be accorded to affected populations, bandit supporters, and bandits, while so-called population and resource control measures for each were noted (but were in practice, treated apparently one and the same). 'Action against enemy agitation' was the psychological or information operations of the Nazi period. The Nazis believed that, 'Because of the close relationship of guerilla warfare and politics, actions against enemy agitation are a task that is just as important as interdiction and combat actions. All means must be used to ward off enemy influence and waken and maintain a clear political will.'"

This is typical of any totalitarian system – a movement or a government – whether the process is characterized as counterinsurgency or internal security. The idea of any civilian collaboration with the "enemy" is the basis for what the US government charges as "conspiracy" in the Guantanamo Military Commissions.

Valentine explains the Phoenix program as having been developed by the CIA in 1967 to combine "existing counterinsurgency programs in a concerted effort to 'neutralize' the Vietcong infrastructure (VCI)." He explained further that "neutralize" meant "to kill, capture, or make to defect." "Infrastructure" meant civilians suspected of supporting North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers. Central to the Phoenix program was that its targets were civilians, making the operation a violation of the Geneva Conventions which guaranteed protection to civilians in time of war.

"The Vietnam's War's Silver Lining: A Bureaucratic Model for Population Control Emerges" is the title of Chapter 3. Valentine writes that the "CIA's Phoenix program changed how America fights its wars and how the public views this new type of political and psychological warfare, in which civilian casualties are an explicit objective." The intent of the Phoenix program evolved from "neutralizing" enemy leaders into "a program of systematic repression for the political control of the South Vietnamese people. It sought to accomplish this through a highly bureaucratized system of disposing of people who could not be ideologically assimilated." The CIA claimed a legal basis for the program in "emergency decrees" and orders for "administrative detention."

Lauding Petraeus

Valentine refers to a paper by David Kilcullen entitled Countering Global Insurgency. Kilcullen is one of the so-called "counterinsurgency experts" whom General David Petraeus gathered together in a cell to promote and refine "counterinsurgency," or COIN, for the modern era. Fred Kaplan, who is considered a "liberal author and journalist" at Slate, wrote a panegyric to these cultists entitled, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War. The purpose of this cell was to change the practices of the US military into that of "imperial policing," or COIN, as they preferred to call it.

But Kilcullen argued in his paper that "The 'War on Terrorism'" is actually a campaign to counter a global insurgency. Therefore, Kilcullen argued, "we need a new paradigm, capable of addressing globalised insurgency." His "disaggregation strategy" called for "actions to target the insurgent infrastructure that would resemble the unfairly maligned (but highly effective) Vietnam-era Phoenix program."

He went on, "Contrary to popular mythology, this was largely a civilian aid and development program, supported by targeted military pacification operations and intelligence activity to disrupt the Viet Cong Infrastructure. A global Phoenix program (including the other key elements that formed part of the successful Vietnam CORDS system) would provide a useful start point to consider how Disaggregation would develop in practice."

It is readily apparent that, in fact, a Phoenix-type program is now US global policy and - just like in Vietnam - it is applying "death squad" strategies that eliminate not only active combatants but also civilians who simply find themselves in the same vicinity, thus creating antagonisms that expand the number of fighters.

Corraborative evidence of Valentine's thesis is, perhaps surprisingly, provided by the CIA's own website where a number of redacted historical documents have been published. Presumably, they are documents first revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. A few however are copies of news articles once available to the public but now archived by the CIA which has blacked-out portions of the articles.

The Bloody Reality

One "sanitized" article - approved for release in 2011 - is a partially redacted New Times article of Aug. 22, 1975, by Michael Drosnin. The article recounts a story of a US Army counterintelligence officer "who directed a small part of a secret war aimed not at the enemy's soldiers but at its civilian leaders." He describes how a CIA-directed Phoenix operative dumped a bag of "eleven bloody ears" as proof of six people killed.

The officer, who recalled this incident in 1971, said, "It made me sick. I couldn't go on with what I was doing in Vietnam. . . . It was an assassination campaign . . . my job was to identify and eliminate VCI, the Viet Cong 'infrastructure' – the communist's shadow government. I worked directly with two Vietnamese units, very tough guys who didn't wear uniforms . . . In the beginning they brought back about 10 percent alive. By the end they had stopped taking prisoners.

"How many VC they got I don't know. I saw a hell of a lot of dead bodies. We'd put a tag on saying VCI, but no one really knew – it was just some native in black pajamas with 16 bullet holes."

This led to an investigation by New Times in a day when there were still "investigative reporters," and not the government sycophants of today. Based on firsthand accounts, their investigation concluded that Operation Phoenix was the "only systematized kidnapping, torture and assassination program ever sponsored by the United States government. . . . Its victims were noncombatants." At least 40,000 were murdered, with "only" about 8,000 supposed Viet Cong political cadres targeted for execution, with the rest civilians (including women and children) killed and "later conveniently labeled VCI. Hundreds of thousands were jailed without trial, often after sadistic abuse." The article notes that Phoenix was conceived, financed, and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency, as Mr. Valentine writes.

A second article archived by the CIA was by the Christian Science Monitor, dated Jan. 5, 1971, describing how the Saigon government was "taking steps that could help eliminate one of the most glaring abuses of its controversial Phoenix program, which is aimed against the Viet Cong political and administrative apparatus." Note how the Monitor shifted blame away from the CIA and onto the South Vietnamese government.

But the article noted that one of the most persistent criticisms of Phoenix was that it resulted "in the arrest and imprisonment of many innocent civilians." These were called "Class C Communist offenders," some of whom may actually have been forced to commit such "belligerent acts" as digging trenches or carrying rice. It was those alleged as the "hard core, full-time cadre" who were deemed to make up the "shadow government" designated as Class A and B Viet Cong.

Yet "security committees" throughout South Vietnam, under the direction of the CIA, sentenced at least 10,000 "Class C civilians" to prison each year, far more than Class A and B combined. The article stated, "Thousands of these prisoners are never brought to court trial, and thousands of other have never been sentenced." The latter statement would mean they were just held in "indefinite detention," like the prisoners held at Guantanamo and other US detention centers with high levels of CIA involvement.

Not surprisingly to someone not affiliated with the CIA, the article found as well that "Individual case histories indicate that many who have gone to prison as active supporters of neither the government nor the Viet Cong come out as active backers of the Viet Cong and with an implacable hatred of the government." In other words, the CIA and the COIN enthusiasts are achieving the same results today with the prisons they set up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

CIA Crimes

Valentine broadly covers the illegalities of the CIA over the years, including its well-documented role in facilitating the drug trade over the years. But, in this reviewer's opinion, his most valuable contribution is his description of the CIA's participation going back at least to the Vietnam War in the treatment of what the US government today calls "unlawful combatants."

"Unlawful combatants" is a descriptive term made up by the Bush administration to remove people whom US officials alleged were "terrorists" from the legal protections of the Geneva Conventions and Human Rights Law and thus to justify their capture or killing in the so-called "Global War on Terror." Since the US government deems them "unlawful" – because they do not belong to an organized military structure and do not wear insignia – they are denied the "privilege" of belligerency that applies to traditional soldiers. But – unless they take a "direct part in hostilities" – they would still maintain their civilian status under the law of war and thus not lose the legal protection due to civilians even if they exhibit sympathy or support to one side in a conflict.

Ironically, by the Bush administration's broad definition of "unlawful combatants," CIA officers and their support structure also would fit the category. But the American public is generally forgiving of its own war criminals though most self-righteous and hypocritical in judging foreign war criminals. But perhaps given sufficient evidence, the American public could begin to see both the immorality of this behavior and its counterproductive consequences.

This is not to condemn all CIA officers, some of whom acted in good faith that they were actually defending the United States by acquiring information on a professed enemy in the tradition of Nathan Hale. But it is to harshly condemn those CIA officials and officers who betrayed the United States by subverting its Constitution, including waging secret wars against foreign countries without a declaration of war by Congress. And it decidedly condemns the CIA war criminals who acted as a law unto themselves in the torture and murder of foreign nationals, as Valentine's book describes.

Talleyrand is credited with saying, "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing." Reportedly, that was borrowed from a 1796 letter by a French naval officer, which stated, in the original language: Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien appendre. In English: "Nobody has been corrected; no one has known to forget, nor yet to learn anything." That sums up the CIA leadership entirely.

Douglas Valentine's book is a thorough documentation of that fact and it is essential reading for all Americans if we are to have any hope for salvaging a remnant of representative government.

Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the US Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. This originally appeared at ConsortiumNews.com .

Read more by Todd E. Pierce Inciting Wars the American Way – August 14th, 2016 Chicago Police Adopt Israeli Tactics – December 13th, 2015 US War Theories Target Dissenters – September 13th, 2015 Ron Paul and Lost Lessons of War – September 1st, 2015 Has the US Constitution Been Lost to Military Rule?– January 4th, 2015

[May 23, 2017] CIA, the cornerstone of the deep state has agenda that is different from the US national interest and reflect agenda of the special interest groups such as Wall Street bankers and MIC

Highly recommended!
CIA is actually a state within the state as Church commission revealed and it has an immanent tendency to seek control over "surface state" and media. In other words large intelligence apparatus might well be incompatible with the democratic governance.
Notable quotes:
"... The CIA has a track record of acting out of self interest since its inception and should not be believed. That being said, the public is almost completely unaware of the agency's misdeeds. ..."
May 23, 2017 | nakedcapitalism.com

"In the long run, the CIA can't deceive the Chinese government without also deceiving, in some way, the American public. This leaves us with an obvious problem: Should we believe anything the CIA says?" [RealClearWorld]. "It's a tough question for a democracy to answer. Trust is built on the tacit agreement that the "bad things" an agency does are good for the country.

If the public believes that that is no longer the case – if it believes the agency is acting out of self-interest and not national interest – then the agreement is broken. The intelligence agency is seen as an impediment of the right to national self-determination, a means for the ends of the few."

Huey Long <

RE: Hall of Mirrors/Believing the CIA

The CIA has a track record of acting out of self interest since its inception and should not be believed. That being said, the public is almost completely unaware of the agency's misdeeds.

I think the reason folks like Manning, Snowden and Assange are so reviled by the agency is because they are a threat to the CIA's reputation more than anything else.

[Feb 19, 2017] The deep state is running scared!

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... ..."Multiple reports show that my former colleagues in the intelligence community have decided that they must leak or withhold classified information due to unsettling connections between President Trump and the Russian Government... ..."
"... The deep state is running scared! I never+ attribute to coincidence that which is the FBI trampling the bill of rights. It is coincidence the deep state (fbi, nsa, various CIA and DoD spooks) tapped Russia spies who talk to private citizens who have no opportunity at espionage. Then the innuendo is leaked to the Clinton media! ..."
"... Worse on Trump for calling them out for leaking rather than as a civil liberty trampling Gestapo. Ben Franklin was right, give the democrat run spooks the power to protect you and you lose liberty and protection! ..."
Feb 19, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
im1dc : February 18, 2017 at 05:32 PM
This is running now on FoxNews.com, total fabrication especially the last sentence but Trumpers believe this Fake News. I think this is where ilsm gets his intell insights from, phoney former intell officers, they sound exactly like him - check it out for yourself

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/02/18/im-democrat-and-ex-cia-but-spies-plotting-against-trump-are-out-control.html

"I'm a Democrat (and ex-CIA) but the spies plotting against Trump are out of control"

By Bryan Dean Wright...February 18, 2017...Foxnews.com

..."Multiple reports show that my former colleagues in the intelligence community have decided that they must leak or withhold classified information due to unsettling connections between President Trump and the Russian Government...

Days ago, they delivered their verdict. According to one intelligence official, the president "will die in jail."..."

ilsm -> im1dc... , February 18, 2017 at 06:08 PM
The deep state is running scared! I never+ attribute to coincidence that which is the FBI trampling the bill of rights. It is coincidence the deep state (fbi, nsa, various CIA and DoD spooks) tapped Russia spies who talk to private citizens who have no opportunity at espionage. Then the innuendo is leaked to the Clinton media!

Worse on Trump for calling them out for leaking rather than as a civil liberty trampling Gestapo. Ben Franklin was right, give the democrat run spooks the power to protect you and you lose liberty and protection!

+40 years around the puzzlers.

[Oct 12, 2016] NSA whistleblower says DNC hack was not done by Russia, but by US intelligence

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Stated Binney: "Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those emails." ..."
"... "Yes," he responded. "That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get them right there." ..."
"... And the other point is that Hillary, according to an article published by the Observer in March of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma material. Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And so there were a number of NSA officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise of the most sensitive material at the NSA. So she's got a real problem there. So there are many people who have problems with what she has done in the past. So I don't necessarily look at the Russians as the only one(s) who got into those emails. ..."
"... GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). ..."
Oct 12, 2016 | theduran.com
Binney also proclaimed that the NSA has all of Clinton's deleted emails, and the FBI could gain access to them if they so wished. No need for Trump to ask the Russians for those emails, he can just call on the FBI or NSA to hand them over.

Breitbart reports further

Binney referenced testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in which Meuller spoke of the FBI's ability to access various secretive databases "to track down known and suspected terrorists."

Stated Binney: "Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those emails."

"So if the FBI really wanted them they can go into that database and get them right now," he stated of Clinton's emails as well as DNC emails.

Asked point blank if he believed the NSA has copies of "all" of Clinton's emails, including the deleted correspondence, Binney replied in the affirmative.

"Yes," he responded. "That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get them right there."

Binney surmised that the hack of the DNC could have been coordinated by someone inside the U.S. intelligence community angry over Clinton's compromise of national security data with her email use.

And the other point is that Hillary, according to an article published by the Observer in March of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma material. Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And so there were a number of NSA officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise of the most sensitive material at the NSA. So she's got a real problem there. So there are many people who have problems with what she has done in the past. So I don't necessarily look at the Russians as the only one(s) who got into those emails.

The Observer defined the GAMMA classification:

GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was).

Zerohedge has some background on Binney , who is about as rock solid a security analyst as you could get.

Over a year before Edward Snowden shocked the world in the summer of 2013 with revelations that have since changed everything from domestic to foreign US policy but most of all, provided everyone a glimpse into just what the NSA truly does on a daily basis, a former NSA staffer, and now famous whistleblower, William Binney, gave excruciating detail to Wired magazine about all that Snowden would substantiate the following summer.

We covered it in a 2012 post titled " We Are This Far From A Turnkey Totalitarian State" – Big Brother Goes Live September 2013." Not surprisingly, Binney received little attention in 2012 – his suggestions at the time were seen as preposterous and ridiculously conspiratorial. Only after the fact, did it become obvious that he was right. More importantly, in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, what Binney has to say has become gospel.

Binney was an architect of the NSA's surveillance program. He became a famed whistleblower when he resigned on October 31, 2001, after spending more than 30 years with the agency. He referenced testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in which Meuller spoke of the FBI's ability to access various secretive databases "to track down known and suspected terrorists."

Continued

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[Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

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[Oct 12, 2016] NSA whistleblower says DNC hack was not done by Russia, but by US intelligence

[Dec 28, 2019] Senior OPCW Official Busted Leaked Email Exposes Orders To Delete All Traces Of Dissent On Douma

[Dec 22, 2019] So US intelligence tipped off the DNC that their emails were about to be leaked to Wikileaks. That's when the stratagem of attributing the impending Wikileaks release to a Russian hack was born -- distracting from the incriminating content of the emails, while vilifying the Deep State's favorite enemies, Assange and Russia, all in one neat scam

[Dec 21, 2019] If the plan was to sabotage Trump's second-term campaign, it seems to have backfired spectacularly

[Dec 21, 2019] Time to Terminate Washington's Defense Welfare

[Dec 21, 2019] The ruthless neo-colonialists of 21st century

[Dec 20, 2019] Did John Brennan's CIA Create Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks by Larry C Johnson

[Dec 20, 2019] Intelligence community has become a self licking ice cream cone

[Dec 20, 2019] Letter from President Donald J. Trump to the Speaker of the House of Representatives

[Dec 20, 2019] Sen. Mitch McConnell great speech in which he slams Dem impeachment on Senate floor

[Dec 19, 2019] A the core of color revolution against Trump is Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine

[Dec 19, 2019] A joint French-Ukrainian journalistic investigation into a huge money laundering scheme using various shadow banking organizations in Austria and Switzerland, benefiting Clinton friendly Ukrainian oligarchs and of course the Clinton Foundation.

[Dec 19, 2019] Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny.

[Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars

[Dec 17, 2019] Judge Denies Flynn's Requests For Exculpatory Information, Case Dismissal by Peter Svab

[Dec 17, 2019] History Doesn t Repeat, But It Often Rhymes: Wilson in UK was subjected to the similar attack by rogue elements in MI5 as Trump in the USA

[Dec 20, 2019] Intelligence community has become a self licking ice cream cone

[Dec 14, 2019] Full Interview: Barr Criticizes Inspector General Report On The Russia Investigation

[Dec 14, 2019] A Determined Effort to Undermine Russia

[Dec 12, 2019] Threat Inflation Poisons Our Foreign Policy by Daniel Larison

[Dec 12, 2019] The FBI - Pushed By John Brennan - Lied To The Court Seven Times To Spy On The Trump Campaign

[Dec 10, 2019] The level of Neo-McCarthyism and the number of lunitics this NYT forums is just astonishing: When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected.

[Dec 07, 2019] Impeachment does not require a crime.

[Dec 06, 2019] Who Is Making US Foreign Policy by Stephen F. Cohen

[Dec 04, 2019] The central question of Ukrainegate is whether CrowdStrike actions on DNC leak were a false flag operation designed to open Russiagate and what was the level of participation of Poroshenko government and Ukrainian Security services in this false flag operation by Factotum

[Dec 04, 2019] Responding to Lt. Col. Vindman about my Ukraine columns with the facts John Solomon Reports

[Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea

[Dec 04, 2019] Common Funding Themes Link 'Whistleblower' Complaint and CrowdStrike Firm Certifying DNC Russia 'Hack' by Aaron Klein

[Dec 04, 2019] DNC Russian Hackers Found! You Won't Believe Who They Really Work For by the Anonymous Patriots

[Dec 04, 2019] June 4th, 2017 Crowdstrike Was at the DNC Six Weeks by George Webb

[Dec 04, 2019] Cyberanalyst George Eliason Claims that the "Fancy Bear" Who Hacked the DNC Server is Ukrainian Intelligence – In League with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike

[Dec 04, 2019] Fancy Bear - Conservapedia

[Dec 04, 2019] June 2nd, 2018 Alperovich's DNC Cover Stories Soon To Match With His Hacking Teams by George Webb

[Dec 04, 2019] America's War Exceptionalism Is Killing the Planet by William Astore

[Dec 04, 2019] Atkinson role in Ukrainegate

[Dec 02, 2019] A Think Tank Dedicated to Peace and Restraint

[Dec 01, 2019] Academic Conformism is the road to 1984. - Sic Semper Tyrannis

[Nov 30, 2019] CrowdStrike: a Conspiracy Wrapped in a Conspiracy Inside a Conspiracy by Oleg Atbashian

[Nov 27, 2019] Could your county use some extra money?

[Nov 26, 2019] John Solomon Everything Changes In The Ukraine Scandal If Trump Releases These Documents

[Nov 24, 2019] When you consider military assistance as the way to pressure the country, the first thing to discuss is whether this military assistance serves the USA national interests or not. This was not done

[Nov 23, 2019] In Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy Must Tread Carefully or May End up Facing Another Maidan Uprising by Stefan Wolff and Tatyana Malyarenko

[Nov 22, 2019] CROWDSTRIKE's role in the Democrat impeachment smokescreen needs to keep moving forward because, it is not going away.

[Nov 22, 2019] Impeachment is DemoRats election strategy, because then have nothing better to offer their voters

[Nov 09, 2019] Donald Trump s Only Crime Is Defending Himself by Daniel McCarthy

[Nov 03, 2019] Growing Indicators of Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force by Larry C Johnson - Sic Semper Tyrannis

[Nov 02, 2019] WATCH Udo Ulfkotte – Bought Journalists by Terje Maloy

[Nov 01, 2019] Viable Opposition The Legal Connection Between Washington and Kiev

[Nov 01, 2019] Color revolution is a method of using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for (undefined) democracy, which leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform, in favor of a secret coterie run by intelligence againces

[Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone

[Oct 26, 2019] The Plundering of Ukraine by Corrupt American Democrats by Israel Shamir

[Oct 25, 2019] Trump-Haters, Not Trump, Are The Ones Wrecking America s Institutions, WSJ s Strassel Says

[Oct 24, 2019] Empire Interventionism Versus Republic Noninterventionism by Jacob Hornberger

[Oct 23, 2019] The treason of the intellectuals The Undoing of Thought by Roger Kimball

[Oct 20, 2019] Adam Schiff now the face of the neoliberal Dems for 2020.

[Oct 19, 2019] Kunstler One Big Reason Why America Is Driving Itself Bat$hit Crazy

[Oct 10, 2019] Trump, Impeachment Forgetting What Brought Him to the White House by Andrew J. Bacevich

[Oct 09, 2019] Ukrainegate as the textbook example of how the neoliberal elite manipulates the MSM and the narrative for purposes of misdirecting attention and perception of their true intentions and objectives -- distracting the electorate from real issues

[Oct 08, 2019] Parade of whistleblowers: a second whistleblower is now considering filing a complaint about President Donald Trump's conduct regarding Ukraine

[Oct 02, 2019] The Self-Set Impeachment Trap naked capitalism

[Sep 30, 2019] In Trump impeachment, "no one is above the law" could backfire on Democrats by Byron York

[Sep 30, 2019] Stephen Miller calls whistleblower a 'partisan hit job' in fiery interview

[Sep 29, 2019] This Man Stopped a Runaway Impeachment by Barbara Boland

[Sep 26, 2019] Did Nancy Pelosi Just Make One Of The Biggest Political Mistakes In History

[Sep 22, 2019] More Americans Questioning Official 9-11 Story As New Evidence Contradicts Official Narrative by Whitney Webb

[Sep 22, 2019] The Snowden Conundrum by Yvonne Lorenzo

[Sep 17, 2019] The Spy Who Failed by Scott Ritter

[Sep 15, 2019] How the UK Security Services neutralised the country s leading liberal newspaper by Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis

[Sep 11, 2019] John Brennan's and Jim Clappers' Last Gasp by Larry C Johnson

[Sep 11, 2019] Video Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 The Bamboozle Has Captured Us

[Sep 10, 2019] How Deep Is the Rot in America s Institutions by Charles Hugh Smith

[Aug 23, 2019] Spygate The Inside Story Behind the Alleged Plot to Take Down Trump by Jeff Carlson

[Aug 16, 2019] Lapdogs for the Government and intelligence agencies by Greg Maybury

[Jul 29, 2019] Peace in Ukraine by Stephen F. Cohen

[Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians

[Jul 27, 2019] Understanding the Roots of the Obama Coup Against Trump by Larry C Johnson

[Jul 23, 2019] John Helmer MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia – FBI Attempt To Seize Black Boxes; Dutch Cover-Up of Forged Telephon

[Jul 09, 2019] Epstein and the conversion of politicians into "corrupt and vulnerable" brand

[Jul 09, 2019] Ex-FBI, CIA Officials Draw Withering Fire on Russiagate by Ray McGovern

[Jun 30, 2019] Orwell s 1984 No Longer Reads Like Fiction It s The Reality Of Our Times by Robert Bridge

[Jun 27, 2019] Western News Agencies Mistranslate Iran's President Speech - It Is Not The First Time Such 'Error' Happens

[Jun 26, 2019] Opinion - NY Times admits it sends stories to US government for approval before publication

[Jun 19, 2019] Bias bias the inclination to accuse people of bias by James Thompson

[Jun 03, 2020] Rule of law in Murrika is kaput

[Jun 11, 2019] The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell s 1984 Is No Longer Fiction by John W. Whitehead

[Jun 05, 2019] Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping its privileges then controllers.

[Jun 05, 2019] Do Spies Run the World by Israel Shamir

[Jun 04, 2019] Attkisson 10 Questions I d Ask Robert Mueller (If I Were Allowed)

[Jun 02, 2019] Somer highlights of Snowden spreach at Dalhousie University

[May 30, 2019] Whatever you may think of Trump, the people who set out to 'get him' are the scum of the Earth

[May 30, 2019] Everyone here at moa is saying much the same: the CIA is running the usa at this point.. Mueller is ex CIA... So, basically the mueller investigation a cover up and BS for the lemmings... It seems to have worked to a limited degree..

[May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity

[May 16, 2019] The Disinformationists by C.J. Hopkins

[May 14, 2019] The Propaganda Multiplier How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics

[May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi

[May 11, 2019] Whitney Judgment Day Looms For John Brennan

[May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus

[May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross

[May 10, 2019] Mueller Report - Expensive Estimations And Elusive Evidence by Adam Carter

[May 10, 2019] Obama administration raced to obtain FICA warrant on Carter Page before Rogers investigation closes on them and that was definitely an obstruction of justice and interference with the ongoing investigation

[May 10, 2019] What was the meaning of the term "insurance policy" in Stzok messages to Lisa Page

[May 10, 2019] The Battle Between Rosenstein and McCabe

[May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson

[May 05, 2019] Did Mueller substituted Russia for Israel in his report

[May 03, 2019] Former high-ranking FBI officials on Andrew McCabe's alarming admissions

[May 03, 2019] Andrew McCabe played the key role in the appointment of the special prosecutor

[May 02, 2019] Neoliberalism and the Globalization of War. America s Hegemonic Project by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

[Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté

[Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed

[Apr 28, 2019] Tit For Tat: Why Did Mueller Let Trump Off the Hook by Mike Whitney

[Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda

[Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany

[Apr 21, 2019] Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender

[Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

[Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares

[Apr 21, 2019] Special Counsel Mueller -- Disingenuous and Dishonest by Larry C Johnson

[Apr 17, 2019] Haspel is not the "underling". Trump is the underling. Sure, being that he is also an oligarch makes Trump's role in the show complicated, but Presidents are installed in order to serve the oligarchy, and the CIA are top level strategists/enforcers for the oligarchy.

[Apr 17, 2019] Six US Agencies Conspired ...

[Apr 17, 2019] Deep State and the FBI Federal Blackmail Investigation

[Apr 17, 2019] Did CIA Director William Casey really say, We ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false

[Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump

[Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

[Apr 12, 2019] Putin was KGB agent crowd forgets that Bush Sr was long time senior CIA operative and the director of CIA

[Apr 07, 2019] Nunes The Russian Collusion Hoax Meets An Unbelievbable End

[Apr 04, 2019] Was John Brennan The Russia Lie Ringleader

[Mar 25, 2019] Spygate The True Story of Collusion (plus Infographic) by Jeff Carlson

[Mar 25, 2019] Another SIGINT compromise ...

[Mar 24, 2019] The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian.

[Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report

[Mar 24, 2019] "Russia Gate" investigation was a color revolution agaist Trump. But a strnge side effect was that Clintons have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug to the status of some kind of martyr.

[Mar 24, 2019] With RussiaGate Over Where's Hillary

[Mar 24, 2019] One could wish that DOJ IG Horowitz could investigate and sanction British Intelligence for its use of official and non-official officials in starting this debacle.

[Mar 23, 2019] Brennan pipe dream obliterated. The color revolution against Trump failed

[Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies

[Mar 18, 2019] Doublethink and Newspeak Do We Have a Choice by Greg Guma

[Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq?

[Mar 17, 2019] Mueller uses the same old false flag scams, just different packaging of his forensics-free findings

[Mar 17, 2019] VIPS- Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings

[Mar 11, 2019] Bruce Ohr, Liar or Moron by Larry C Johnson

[Mar 07, 2019] Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you by Dylan Curran

[Mar 05, 2019] The Shadow Governments Destruction Of Democracy

[Feb 16, 2019] Death Of Russiagate: Mueller Team Tied To Mifsud s Network

[Feb 08, 2019] To understand Steele and the five eyes involvement in the Russia hoax you need to go to the library

[Jan 29, 2019] Guardian became Deep State Guardian

[Jan 26, 2019] Can the current US neoliberal/neoconservative elite be considered suicidal?

[Jan 13, 2019] As FBI Ramped Up Witch Hunt When Trump Fired Comey, Strzok Admitted Collusion Investigation A Joke

[Jan 04, 2019] Veteran NBC-MSNBC Journalist Blasts Network in Resignation

[Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo

[Dec 22, 2018] We can be actually confident not just that the journalists in the MSM are on the payroll but that the invoices and accounts for their bribes are carefully preserved.

[Dec 22, 2018] British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft by Craig Murray

[Dec 14, 2018] MI6, along with elements of the CIA, was behind the Steele Dossier. Representatives of John Brennan met in London to discus before the go ahead was given

[Dec 10, 2018] One thing that has puzzled me about Trump methods is his constant tweeting of witch hunt with respect to Mueller but his unwillingness to actually disclose what Brennan, Clapper, Comey, et al actually did

[Dec 02, 2018] Muller investigation has all the appearance of an investigation looking for a crime

[Oct 21, 2020] This Is Not A Russian Hoax 'Nonpublic Information' Debunks Letter From '50 Former Intel Officials'

[Oct 20, 2020] Glenn Greenwald- Media and Intel Community Working Together To Manipulate The American People - Video - RealClearPolitics

[Oct 01, 2020] 'Clueless' former FBI Director James Comey admits the agency's Trump-Russia probe was a ball of bungled confusion by David Haggith

[Sep 28, 2020] No wonder Pompey and his friend Jeffries won't give up on Syria! No wonder

[Sep 23, 2020] How fake media actually works: reporter are given the narrative and they should rehash their stories to fit it

[Sep 23, 2020] Another sign of the crisis of legitimacy of neoliberal elite: FBI Agent Who Discovered Hillary's Emails On Weiner Laptop Claims He Was Told To Erase Computer

[Sep 21, 2020] Stephen F. Cohen- The Ukrainian Crisis - It s not All Putin s Fault

[Sep 21, 2020] Stephen Cohen at the AJC 2017 Forum, about Russia and Terrorism

[Sep 20, 2020] Darren Beattie Tucker Carlson Discuss Color Revolutions The Plot To Oust President Trump

[Sep 20, 2020] Norm Eisen And The Colour Revolution Playbook!

[Sep 20, 2020] THE TAKE-DOWN OF TRUMP ALA THE "COLOR REVOLUTION"- NORM EISEN'S REVOLUTIONARY PLAYBOOK A Deeply Embedded (Demster) Lawfare Operative; Regime Change Professionals More. What's Going On- Conservative Firing Line

[Sep 17, 2020] Why the Blob Needs an Enemy by ARTA MOEINI

[Sep 09, 2020] Proof of collusion at last! - IRRUSSIANALITY

[Aug 23, 2020] Catapulting Russian-Meddling Propaganda by Ray McGovern

[Aug 17, 2020] Who's Afraid of QAnon- by Gregory Hood

[Aug 16, 2020] CIA Behind Guccifer Russiagate A Plausible Scenario

[Aug 08, 2020] Russia Hoax- Are We All Being Played- Put Up Or Shut Up! - Zero Hedge

[Aug 02, 2020] Russiagate, Nazis, and the CIA by ROB URIE

[Jul 21, 2020] This Skripal thing smelled to high heaven from day 1. My opinion is that Sergei Skripal was involved (to what degree is open to speculation) with the Steele dossier.

[Jul 20, 2020] The Real 'Russian Playbook' Is Written in English -- Strategic Culture

[Jul 19, 2020] What the MSM cliche According to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter actually means

[Jul 13, 2020] George Washington Tried To Warn Americans About Foreign Policy Today by Doug Bandow

[Jul 08, 2020] Boomerang returns and hits NYT presstitutes hard (but money do not smell): CENTCOM Chief Is Latest To Deny NY Times Russian Bounties -- Bombshell

[Jul 07, 2020] Mutiny on the Bounties by RAY McGOVERN

[Jul 06, 2020] US claim of 'Russian Bounty' plot in Afghanistan is dubious and dangerous - The Grayzone

[Jul 03, 2020] I don't think we can assume that even now Trump actually has control of the FBI; it is still in hands of Obama faction

[Jul 01, 2020] Russiagate's Last Gasp by Ray McGovern

[Jul 01, 2020] Three Glaring Problems with the Russian Taliban Bounty Story by Barbara Boland

[Jun 28, 2020] Russian position for Start talks: "We don't believe the US in its current shape is a counterpart that is reliable, so we have no confidence, no trust whatsoever".

[Jun 16, 2020] Meet Wikipedia's Ayn Rand-loving founder and Wikimedia Foundation's regime-change operative CEO by Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal

[Jun 15, 2020] Do Deep State Elements Operate within the Protest Movement? by Mike Whitney

[Jun 15, 2020] Full Special Investigation - Donald Trump vs The Deep State

[Jun 14, 2020] Jeane J. Kirkpatrick 30 Years Unheeded

[Jun 13, 2020] How False Flag Operations are Carried Out Today by Philip M. Giraldi

[Jun 03, 2020] Rule of law in Murrika is kaput

[Jun 03, 2020] Requiem to Russiagate: this was the largest and the most successful attempt to gaslight the whole US population ever attempted by CIA and Clinton wing of Dems by CJ Hopkins

[May 24, 2020] Guccifer 2.0 was always John Brennan 1.0

[May 22, 2020] Time to Break up the FBI by William S. Smith

[May 20, 2020] Phone Calls Between Biden And Ukraine's Poroshenko Leaked; Details $1 Billion Quid Pro Quo To Fire Burisma Prosecutor Zero

[May 19, 2020] Russophobia in the Age of Donald Trump

[May 18, 2020] FBI under Comey as an uncontrolled political police operating without any oversight from Justice Department

[May 16, 2020] Tucker Adam Schiff should resign

[May 13, 2020] From RussiaGate To ObamaGate The End Of Boomerville by Tom Luongo

[May 10, 2020] Did the FBI target Michael Flynn to protect Obama's policies, not national security by Kevin R. Brock

[May 10, 2020] Does Obama now feels his potential liability for staging coup d' tat and gaslighting the whole nation?

[May 07, 2020] Angry Bear " "cannot remember a single International Crisis in which the United States had no global presence at all"

[Apr 17, 2020] Declassified Horowitz Footnotes Show Obama Officials Knew Steele Dossier Was Russian Disinfo Designed To Target Trump Zero He

[Apr 17, 2020] Barr just said the Russia collusion probe was a travesty, had no basis and was intended to sabotage Trump.

[Apr 16, 2020] Why would the CIA want blackmail material on top scientists and "experts"? Well, I guess that even though scientists will naturally feel obligation to their benefactors' empire, their tendency to prioritize truth might at times be inconvenient

[Apr 14, 2020] The media has been largely taken over by a criminal gang (Operation Mockingbird), and the same gang has taken over the Democrat party

[Mar 21, 2020] When reading any article concerning current events (ie. Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, or Coronavirus) consider how the The Seven Principles of Propaganda may apply

[Mar 12, 2020] Did Joe Biden's Former IT Guy Masquerade as Guccifer 2.0 by Larry C Johnson

[Mar 04, 2020] Russiagate should be viewed as classic, textbook case of gaslighting and projecting election interference

[Mar 03, 2020] Whacking Rich is a reminder to Sanders what the party establishmen is capable of

[Feb 29, 2020] Secret Wars, Forgotten Betrayals, Global Tyranny. Who s Really In Charge Of The US Military by Cynthia Chung

[Feb 29, 2020] A very interesting and though provoking presentation by Ambassador Chas Freeman "America in Distress: The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change"

[Feb 28, 2020] Media s Deafening Silence On Latest WikiLeaks Drops Is Its Own Scandal by Caitlin Johnstone

[Feb 28, 2020] Chas Freeman America in Distress The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change

[Feb 22, 2020] The Red Thread A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy by Diana West

[Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi

[Feb 16, 2020] Understanding the Ukraine Story by Joe Lauria

[Feb 15, 2020] How does one say Adam Schiff without laughing? by title="View user profile." href="https://caucus99percent.com/users/alligator-ed">Alligator Ed

[Feb 03, 2020] White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War

[Feb 02, 2020] The most interesting issue is the role of NSC in this impeachment story

[Jan 23, 2020] An incredible level of naivety of people who still think that a single individual, or even two, can change the direction of murderous US policies that are widely supported throughout the bureaucracy?

[Jan 17, 2020] Ukraine is a deeply sick patient. The destiny of ordinary Ukrainians is deeply tragic. Diaspora is greedy and want a piece of cake immediately

[Jan 14, 2020] Impeachment Of President Trump An Imperial War Game by By Barbara Boyd

[Jan 08, 2020] If we assume that Pompeo persuaded Trump to order to kill a diplomatic envoy, Trump is now a dead man walking as after Iran responce Pelosi impeachment gambit now have legs

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Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

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Classic books:

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